Menger's theory of the origin of money
It is really just an elaboration of the first two pages of chapter 4 of The Wealth of Nations, isn't it?
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Graeber thinks he blew up both of them, so perhaps so.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: Graeber reports the findings of over 100 years of anthropology and history, which show that the Mengerian theory is not a universal theory of the origin of money, and that money can emerge by other processes.
DeleteIf people bothered to read Graeber's book, right on p. 75 he acknowledges that barter between strangers, especially, in long distance trade, probably produced the cacao money of Mesoamerica and the salt money of Ethiopia, basically as the Mengerian theory predicts.
But plenty of other societies seem to have developed money by other means, e.g., ancient Mesopotamian temples developed a silver unit of account based on its role as a weight measure and assigning a certain silver weight a value equal to the monthly grain ration paid to temple workers.