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Towards heterotopia - the prerequisite cultural and technological substrate for a return to a world of scale-free credit money

pluranimity.org · 6,107 words · saved by 1 readers

Recently, I’ve been reading some anthropology. The economic canon postulates a primitive economy of barter, where at some point money emerged to solve the problem of double-coincidence-of-wants. This assumption is taken for granted in many places (including, to some degree, in the original Anoma vision paper), but when you consult the historical record, as David Graeber does, it is clearly bunk. Early societies - and small societies today - didn’t swap cows for chickens, at least not most of the time, and they didn’t invent coins to solve double-coincidence-of-wants because they didn’t need to. Rather, they used credit. Credit solves double-coincidence-of-wants in a beautifully elegant way: by integrating over time. If I’m the butcher, and you’re the baker, I may not need bread right now, but I’ll definitely need some in the future. If we live in the same town, and I expect you to be around for awhile, we can simply keep track of who gave who what when, and settle accounts periodically

Recently, I’ve been reading some anthropology. The economic canon postulates a primitive economy of barter, where at some point money emerged to solve the problem of double-coincidence-of-wants. This assumption is taken for granted in many places (including, to some degree, in the original Anoma vision paper ), but when you consult the historical record, as David Graeber does , it is clearly bunk. Early societies - and small societies today - didn’t swap cows for chickens, at least not most of the time, and they didn’t invent coins to solve double-coincidence-of-wants because they didn’t need

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