This is actually apocryphal, I think from Adam Smith & before him Aristotle, pull quote from 1985 anthropology professor “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money"
This article isn’t super convincing to me. It seems like the author had a preconceived goal and didn’t try hard to falsify it. For example, what about the “gimwali” exchange? That’s clearly a barter system. I believe Mesopotamia also had some barter-type systems (eg cuneiform tablets show exchanges of one good for another).
And realistically we just don’t have records going back to the time that we would expect most barter systems to have existed. It doesn’t really prove they didn’t.
Sure, gift economies were also prominent, perhaps more than barter. But it’s hard to believe that you would use them on outsiders.
Gift economies were the norm, but they were always smaller. They work well when you can expect to get your gift back in the future. However as the economy gets larger eventually you can't trust to get the value of your gift back, which is okay in small amounts, but if your gift is a signification percentage of your production when times are good you have to get it back when times are bad for you.
Money of some sort allows larger economies to become the norm. Sure there was always a little trade, but in a gift economy it wasn't significant to most people.
zeroonetwothree|1 year ago
And realistically we just don’t have records going back to the time that we would expect most barter systems to have existed. It doesn’t really prove they didn’t.
Sure, gift economies were also prominent, perhaps more than barter. But it’s hard to believe that you would use them on outsiders.
magicstefanos|1 year ago
bluGill|1 year ago
Money of some sort allows larger economies to become the norm. Sure there was always a little trade, but in a gift economy it wasn't significant to most people.