One of the historical tropes that we we are taught is that money developed after barter societies became unmanagable.<\/p>\n
It turns out that there there is no evidence that suggests that a barter society ever existed<\/a>:<\/p>\n In the beginning, there was barter. Then, and forever after, there was money <\/span> various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe. \u201cNo example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,\u201d wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. \u201cAll available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.\u201d<\/span> Instead, what mainstream economics offers starting with Smith, and continues to offer studies today, is a story about the mythical\u2014not real, historical\u2014origins of capitalism.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It does put the entire academic endeavor of economics in a different light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the historical tropes that we we are taught is that money developed after barter societies became unmanagable. It turns out that there there is no evidence that suggests that a barter society ever existed: In the beginning, there was barter. Then, and forever after, there was money That\u2019s the myth every student of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[991,973,1011],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-economy","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span> That\u2019s the myth every student of economics learns, that money grows out of barter. The idea is that monetary exchange solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants\u2014that a person who is interested in trading needs to find someone who wants what they have and has what they want. Money makes trade much easier, so the story goes, and thus becomes a remarkable example of both human ingenuity and economic progress. The fact is, as Ilana E. Strauss<\/a> [ht: ja] explains, the story is false. Human beings did not invent money to solve the difficulties of barter exchange. Barter turns out to be a historical myth. <\/span><\/p>\n
<\/span> Humphrey isn\u2019t alone. Other academics, including the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, and the Cambridge political economist Geoffrey Ingham have long espoused similar arguments.<\/span>
<\/span> When barter has appeared, it wasn\u2019t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn\u2019t emerge from it\u2014rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to. \u201cIn most of the cases we know about, [barter] takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don\u2019t have a lot of it around,\u201d explains David Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span> And there are many other examples in the historical and anthropological record of forms of exchange that precluded money\u2014centralization and redistribution, gifts, potlatch, trade at the edges of and between non-monetary societies, and so on. But there was no original barter economy, which was then surpassed by the use of money.And there are many other examples in the historical and anthropological record of forms of exchange that precluded money\u2014centralization and redistribution, gifts, potlatch, trade at the edges of and between non-monetary societies, and so on. But there was no original barter economy, which was then surpassed by the use of money.<\/span>
<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n