As others have pointed out, this is not wrong. It can be argued, and I (currently) believe it to be true, that industrial societies only happened because of money. The scale at which humans operate seems to be related to the scalability of their monetary system.

Reputation/social karma as a currency is hyper-localized and isn't able to cover all your needs; without modern technology, it doesn't even scale beyond Dunbar number-sized villages. Barter is O(n!) with respect to amount of things you might need, so it doesn't scale well with progress of technology. The abstraction of money was the (in retrospect) obvious solution.