raghu wrote: > 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:
I haven't seen any critiques at all. But if I remember correctly, like Robinson Crusoe himself all the folks in the POW camp had participated in a market economy (specifically, capitalism) and thus brought their attitudes with them. Further, and perhaps more importantly, they were all captured separately (and if they were captured in groups they were separated by their captors) and so had no shared society beyond the military in general. That made reciprocity and redistribution hard to organize, so that barter is the "natural" result. Then, of course, for any regular exchange to occur, barter had to be replaced with the use of money (cigarettes). -- 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
