Debunking the barter myth
29 Nov, 2024 at 10:00 | Posted in Economics | 4 Comments
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Even in the most advanced industrial economies, if we strip exchange down to its barest essentials and peel off the obscuring layer of money, we find that trade between individuals and nations largely boils down to barter.
Paul Samuelson
You will find similar nonsense stories told in almost all mainstream textbooks today. And the truth, as so often when it comes to economics fairytales, is quite another:
No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.
Caroline Humphrey
