On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 5:27 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
What about that modern version of Robinson Crusoe, the famous article about a market system spontaneously evolving in a POW camp, and where indeed barter is an earlier stage to the eventual currency-based market system? Do you know of any good critiques of this paper: http://www.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp.pdf -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
