3 ms·

There may not be historical evidence, but first principles tell me that most people prefer cash to trading pelts for groceries every week.

• jrochkind1 4y ago
  "first principles tell me" is a pretty poor way of knowing what happened in actual history. In this case, it's just you wild guessing about the desires of people thousands of years ago whose lives were nothing like yours. I mean, we don't need any kind of science or history if we could just be like "this story makes sense to me, so it must be true." I guess it's appropriate for our post-fact world.
  • davemp 4y ago
    > I mean, we don't need any kind of science or history if we could just be like "this story makes sense to me, so it must be true." We don't have any historical record of people explicitly writing that they started using bronze tools to deal with the undesirable aspects of stone tools afaik. We just happen to know from scientific first principles that bronze tools are much more efficient than stone and we also know that societies switched from using stone to bronze. So we assume that they switched due to bronze being better. That's how the study of history has always worked. > I guess it's appropriate for our post-fact world. If you want to imply a conspiracy of control through currency I would say that would require more facts to back it up than the simpler alternative. Historically, we know that those in power in the past had no trouble controlling / levying tribute with simple violence.
• gruez 4y ago
  > There may not be historical evidence, but first principles tell me that most people prefer cash to trading pelts for groceries every week. That might be true, but your prior comment says > State-backed central currencies emerged because people in informal economies were bartering to exchange goods and services, which is less efficient than having a standardized medium of exchange, so central authorities issued currency in order to increase the efficiency of the economy. Which is a much stronger claim and doesn't necessarily follow from the fact that "people prefer cash to trading pelts for groceries". If you check the wikipedia article on the history of money[1], the first forms of currency wasn't issued by the state. They were informal credit systems, or standardized unit of account (eg. grain, or receipt for grain stored at a granary and later precious metals). State backed versions of the latter came later. Even in the US, prior to the federal reserve, "currency" was IOUs for gold issued by various private banks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money