On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > 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: > > 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).
I think this is exactly what the paper is trying to argue and I don't buy it at all. Why should barter be the "natural" outcome when a bunch of strangers are brought together? > 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. This is, I think is by far the most important factor in that study. I haven't seen any studies showing something similar happening at Japanese PoW camps. -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
