David Graeber has argued persuasively that there is little real anthropological evidence to support the notion that money arose from the ‘inefficiency of barter’. [1—3]

1. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-on-the.... 2. https://newrepublic.com/article/159227/david-graeber-changed... 3. Graeber D. 2011. ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years'. Melville House, NY

This just shows that economists are poor historians. It doesn't change how money enables more efficient and sophisticated forms of commerce than than barter or a credit social credit system.

> This just shows that economists are poor historians

F*ck me, if that's the only thing you take away from this thread I'll have done my job. The problem is they keep taking that poor history and using it to spin tales about humans as greed-stricken robots who'd sell their grandmas if it would generate a dollar more value than whatever you want to price a plate of fresh-baked cookies at, and the bigger problem is we've built an entire society and economy off their collective delusions.

I didn't read the book, but from the summaries I don't find Graeber's thesis any more convincing. It's not like people who lived in pre-money societies sang Kumbaya all day. They pillaged each other all the same. Sure, money was able to finance armies that did this with more efficiency, but you can say the advances in metallurgy were made with nefarious motivations. That doesn't make the advancement bad in itself.

But that has cause and effect backwards. Nobody is claiming that money does not do that, but that it did not arise because of the inefficiency of barter.

i havent read the book yet, but i am surmising that the claim is that money originally arose in order to service debts, not because (at that time) it was more efficient?

No - the claim is that money fundamentally arose for taxation (either to the government or to the priests), and may also have been useful for long distance trade between partners with no expected long term relationships.

i see, thanks for the clarification!

> Could you elaborate on how "'inventing money because barter is inefficient' doesn't seem to exist in the real world"? The idea that barter's inefficiency drives demand for money seems to me to be self-evidently true, so I'd be interested to hear a different perspective.

Others point out Debt below, and that's the canonical argument here. Effectively, the kinds of small societies that most people lived in for most of human history manage exchange based on personal relationships and reciprocal exchange, not abstract or closed monetary transactions. Money arises in the context of either long-range trade, in which sustained relationships aren't guaranteed, or in the context of large states which actually require some form of bookkeeping to track things like taxes and tribute.

The "self-evident" nature of the "barter becomes money" story is the origin myth of Economics - it absolutely sounds like a way things could have happened and feels deeply plausible, but there's no evidence it did.

GP may be referring to anthropologist David's Graeber's book: "Debt", which refutes that idea: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt