you would actually need to contribute to receive, and you couldnt just move money around contributing nothing
The prominent anthropologist Dave Graeber studied this extensively and concluded (most accessibly in his book Debt) that the kind of barter economy that we were taught about in elementary school probably never really existed like that, and that there have always been means of exchange (like money). So even if there was a societal collapse, you might barter individual things with neighbors once in a while, but even in a modestly sized group or one they regularly trades with others you’d almost immediately implement a better system.
Yeah Debt is a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone curious about it
I’m just going to spam this fact in this thread, but there is no evidence that bartering has ever been a stepping stone to a currency-based economy in any culture. Bartering only arises in cultures that are accustomed to money, but run into issues with currency supply (deflation, hyperinflation, etx).
Maybe bartering as the primary system, but there are definitely historically and currently many examples of “real” bartering (like in-kind work, or even the nonsense going on with trading out datacenter capacity right now, I’d argue)
This post is definitely about bartering in a primary sense though
I haven’t read his book but my understanding is that while there were means of exchange in many societies, the foundation of most pre-historic economies was the gift economy.
Unless you are counting that as a form of exchange? It was typically reciprocal in many ways.
A passage from the book:
What all such cases of trade through barter have in common is that they are meetings with strangers who will, likely as not, never meet again, and with whom one certainly will not enter into any ongoing relations. This is why a direct one-on-one exchange is appropriate: each side makes their trade and walks away. It’s all made possible by laying down an initial mantle of sociability, in the form of shared pleasures, music and dance—the usual base of conviviality on which trade must always be built. Then comes the actual trading, where both sides make a great display of the latent hostility that necessarily exists in any exchange of material goods between strangers—where neither party has no particular reason not to take advantage of the other—by playful mock aggression, though in the Nambikwara case, where the mantle of sociability is extremely thin, mock aggression is in constant danger of slipping over into the real thing. The Gunwinggu, with their more relaxed attitude toward sexuality, have quite ingeniously managed to make the shared pleasures and aggression into exactly the same thing.
Recall here the language of the economics textbooks: “Imagine a society without money.” “Imagine a barter economy.” One thing these examples make abundantly clear is just how limited the imaginative powers of most economists turn out to be. 21
Why? The simplest answer would be: for there to even be a discipline called “economics,” a discipline that concerns itself first and foremost with how individuals seek the most advantageous arrangement for the exchange of shoes for potatoes, or cloth for spears, it must assume that the exchange of such goods need have nothing to do with war, passion, adventure, mystery, sex, or death. Economics assumes a division between different spheres of human behavior that, among people like the Gunwinngu and the Nambikwara, simply does not exist. These divisions in turn are made possible by very specific institutional arrangements: the existence of lawyers, prisons, and police, to ensure that even people who don’t like each other very much, who have no interest in developing any kind of ongoing relationship, but are simplyinterested in getting their hands on as much of the others’ possessions as possible, will nonetheless refrain from the most obvious expedient (theft). This in turn allows us to assume that life is neatly divided between the marketplace, where we do our shopping, and the “sphere of consumption,” where we concern ourselves with music, feasts, and seduction. In other words, the vision of the world that forms the basis of the economics textbooks, which Adam Smith played so large a part in promulgating, has by now become so much a part of our common sense that we find it hard to imagine any other possible arrangement.
From these examples, it begins to be clear why there are no societies based on barter. Such a society could only be one in which everybody was an inch away from everybody else’s throat; but nonetheless hovering there, poised to strike but never actually striking, forever.
The basic idea is that our modern economic system has had the humanity stripped out of it in order to be an engineerable system at all. The natural way for things to work is for personal relationships and cultural conventions to come first, to the point where the way to make impersonal trade work was to make it more personal; for instance the text right before the quoted passage describes a culture whose barter meets were also swingers parties. The book has lots more examples of the ways material relations have fundamentally contradicted the idea that the natural way is to appraise things down to a numerical value and play an optimization game, for instance cultural practices of certain types of goods only being used for specific types of things like blood and marriage debts, and cultures which have strong taboos against ever refusing to give a person food.
The problems OP is talking about are specific to capitalist society and the way people in it are conditioned to think. You don’t need a “system” that takes that way of thinking as its core assumption and constrains people thinking that way to act pro-socially, the much simpler solution would be to permit and enable the entanglement of personal and economic relations that naturally happens.
A gift-based economy does feature reciprocity, but it is very different from one based on bartering. In a gift economy it is implicit that those that lack the ability to contribute as much are also not expected to reciprocate to the same degree.
Yeah I’m not saying it’s barter, but OP’s comment didn’t mention it at all so I thought it was important to talk about.
Yep, I have a dramatic oversimplification problem. But it’s hard to describe 50,000+ years of economic proclivities in a tweet :)
Money’s okay as long as usury is illegal.
I think the distinction your looking for isn’t currency vs. barter, it’s the real economy vs. Stock/Bond/Derivatives markets where money is accumulated by gambling without producing anything useful.
I think I’m fine with the bond market at the moment. Bonds have predetermined interest rates and maturation periods. They’re just loans, a decent way to build capital without surrendering ownership.
Agreed on the stocks, and especially derivatives. The stock market should be abolished and totally replaced with bonds. The derivatives market simply should not exist.
Do you mean Fiat vs commodity money?
Bartering won’t really work well for an economy with a high degree of specialization, since the complexity of required exchanges will increase with the degree of specialization.
Of course you could get around that problem by introducing a new specialization, that of a broker who warehouses goods and give trades based on what people have on hand but that is just a more complicated version of money.
Yeah, it worked fine for agrarian societies, but Industrialization killed it.
For real. Let’s say I make parts for nuclear reactor, and I want to acquire a scented candle. There is no one who deals in candles that has any interested in acquiring nuclear reactors. And even if you put in a massive amount of searching and somehow found some crazy fringe overlap of a person interested in exchanging those things, the value of my nuclear reactor is a trillion times greater than the value of the candle that I’m looking to acquire.
Nah, the peak economic system is potlatch.
There’s a reason that pretty much every complex society moved away from it: it doesn’t scale. It works fine enough for a small tribe that produces basic things like food and clothing. It doesn’t work for an industrialized society of millions of people where production of things like electronics requires hundreds of different resources and production steps.
I’m just going to spam this fact in this thread, but there is no evidence that bartering has ever been a stepping stone to a currency-based economy in any culture. Bartering only arises in cultures that are accustomed to money, but run into issues with currency supply (deflation, hyperinflation, etc).
So no cultures have moved away from bartering to currency, they’ve moved back to currency.
Amongst a small trusted group of friends, I find it better to exchange things relative to the cost of “IOU a sandwich”. Its just easier to handle if everyone isnon the same money transfer app or carrying cash to just say “lunch is on me”.
Any more people than that and its difficult for people to be understanding or on the same page.
No. Regression to a bartering system would still be regression. Imagine a better world, not a previous world.
Yes, unless you don’t like broad beans. Because that’s all I’ve got to trade.
they are still food, so they have value, and who doesnt like beans?
But wouldn’t be convenient if I had some kind of chit that represents the value of my beans, so I could trade it with people who don’t necessarily want beans?
“Here’s a place to live and some land. I just need 10 sacks of grain every harvest”
Isn’t that also bartering?
I’d argue that’s a debt-based transaction. You get the land now, but the payment is deferred to a later time when you have the means to pay it.
but the builder takes only 50 grain sacks to build me my house and since you cant stop him with overwhelming beaurocracy, were building affordable housing
Barter really doesn’t have anything to do with zoning or building code.
Seems like a major hassle for the builder to have to lug home 50 sacks of grain, which they’ll then have to try and barter for something else. If only we had an abstract representation of value that’s portable and universally accepted…
Currency should just be tied to a useful physical good. Like barley, that can be used to make beer.
You, I like the way you think.
Koharka for our new Barley Beer Bank president!
Money is not the problem if it stays a representation of work. money being you used as a commodity that can be traded is the problem. That’s how you get parasites that exploit and feed off others labor.
Bartering is just the stock market trying to get what you have to what you need. Making multiple trades to get what you want and your not going to bring all those things for each trade. Then you are going to bring a representation of the trade and we are right back to money again.
