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> The villagers are tired of bartering Come on… It's been known for more than a century that bartering has never been the default mean of exchange among humans
by stymaar 6d ago
> The villagers are tired of bartering
Come on… It's been known for more than a century that bartering has never been the default mean of exchange among humans, can we kill this myth eventually?!
- compiler-guy 6d agoThis is obviously not an attempt at anything remotely resembling documentary history. It’s more of a just so story explaining what problem each step solved. Unless of course one thinks that smooth gray stones from a riverbed two miles away reflects some historically significant point in money’s evolution.
- jubilanti 6d agoI'm not going to explain David Graeber's Debt to you, but yes, this exact 18th century fantasy of the emergence of money in caveman times contains the same kind of misunderstandings that also leads to most people having an incredibly misguided view of how the contemporary global financial system operates.
- compiler-guy 6d agoI certainly don't think anything like this actually happened. And the linked article doesn't really do so either. I do think it can be a useful illustration of what problem each technology solves. In another thread you talk about how the internet really is a series of tubes. We all know that "tubes" can be a useful analogy for understanding certain things about circuits and things built upon them. But we also don't think that tubes are more than a very basic analogy. Tubes don't really do packet switching.
- __MatrixMan__ 5d agoBy leading with the improvement-order-barter story, the article announces a bias that borders on propaganda. It's maybe worth objecting to even if the goal isn't to be historically accurate. The problem that was actually being solved when money was invented was how to get recently conquered villagers to support the soldiers that recently conquered them. (Demand taxes in the coinage that you pay your solders with, then they can live off the local economy and you don't have to feed them directly, which might be hard if they're very far away--tax collectors can take years to show up, but the demand for the new currency is instant, so your soldiers get fed right away). The system of interpersonal debt that predated money likely outperformed money in a variety of ways from the perspective of the users. It was only for the conquerors that the invention of money solved any problem at all. It's hard to keep reading the article when it starts with the story that is used to distract from this.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5d agoThe problem is the story is wrong, and that leads to misunderstandings of what money is and how economic institutions arose in fact vs mythology. For starters, debt records came before money basically everywhere we have evidence for the invention of money. i would very strongly suggest reading David Graeber. It completely revolutionized my understanding of how human social and economic institutions emerge and evolve in actual fact vs imagined myth. We can just tell the real story, it's far more interesting and useful than the myth.
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- compiler-guy 5d agoYou are arguing a point I didn’t make.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5d agoNo, what I and the other commenter are saying is you don't understand why the article is misleading because you don't know the actual scholarly knowledge here. In your other comment you use wording along the lines of "still useful to show what problem each technology solved" but the part you're missing is the explanations are largely wrong, not just in the sense of not telling actual history but you will come alway with mistaken conclusions because the imagined/example history is fundamentally wrong. So, consider if you're getting this from multiple people, perhaps you're missing something on the topic.
- compiler-guy 5d agoThere are two commenting critics. So "multiple" is true, I suppose, but only quite weakly so. And there are more than 4x that many upvotes on the top-level comment. So I don't think it is as simple as "everyone is saying you are wrong."
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- zahrevsky 6d agoNot only bartering has never been the default mean of exchange, but also the idea that money were created to optimize the trading process is also wrong. For an item to become currency in a society, it must already be something people value independently of its use as money, and people must expect others to accept it as well. Say the villagers live near the sea and find some beautiful shiny stones that everyone wants. Those stones can then become currency. A good example of this is tobacco in colonial America. It came to be used as currency because it was already widely traded and valued.
- lolakutty 5d agoSo a systems using money is just barter system where one commodity is overwhelmingly involved?
- stymaar 5d agoIt's not “just” that, because monetary systems don't work like that at all. The point of GP is that while the myth says “in the beginning there was barter, and barter is inefficient so we created money to allow trading more efficiently” the reality is more “In the beginning there was trade, and some traded goods became money because they had the correct properties”.
- lolakutty 5d agoIsn't that what I just said?
- modo_mario 5d agoSalt was similarly used as a currency. It didn't expire, could be weighed, had inherent value in it's role for food preservation, etc