me: >> 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).
raghu: > 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 put the word "natural" in quotes deliberately. I don't think that one-on-one exchanges and markets arise full-grown from the head of Nature but are instead created by people. I don't think the article was arguing that the use of money replaced reciprocity. Orthodox economists don't pay attention to non-market connections between people. But I'll have to read the article again; it's been almost 40 years since I read it the first time. -- 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
