BARRY SCHWARTZ wrote: > The invention of money went a long way toward reducing the friction, the > inefficiency, in financial transactions. No longer did the farmer have to > bring sacks of potatoes to the marketplace to trade for eggs and milk. Money > was a medium of exchange that greatly reduced what some have called the > financial coefficient of drag. <
Gar Lipow wrote: > And as the David Graeber anthropological history that Shag and others > have posted shows, that is at least historically inaccurate. The prevalence of barter in any economic system is a myth. Graeber is right that it was _credit_ (or what Karl Polanyi called "reciprocity") that preceded money, not barter. But from either a market or a capitalist point of view, this kind of credit (embedded in the seamless web of non-market social relationships) represents an unwanted "friction" just as much as barter does. Markets (organized and regularized exchange) work poorly both with barter and with reciprocity. Preferred is the "disembodied market" that Polanyi wrote about, with no societal checks on its operation; only the centralized state is supposed to play a role, enforcing contracts (including modern credit) and property rights. Then, the point of the marketeers and capitalists is to make sure that the state doesn't succumb to democracy. -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
