"The Myth of the Barter Economy"

"This historical world of barter sounds quite inconvenient. It also may be completely made up.

The man who arguably founded modern economic theory, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, popularized the idea that barter was a precursor to money. In The Wealth of Nations, he describes an imaginary scenario in which a baker living before the invention of money wanted a butcher’s meat but had nothing the butcher wanted.“No exchange can, in this case, be made between them,” Smith wrote...

various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe...

the harm may go deeper than a mistaken view of human psychology. According to Graeber, once one assigns specific values to objects, as one does in a money-based economy, it becomes all too easy to assign value to people, perhaps not creating but at least enabling institutions such as slavery (in which people can be bought) and imperialism (which is made possible by a system that can feed and pay soldiers fighting far from their homes)...

So if money is a choice, are there alternatives worth considering? Is a gift economy—which wouldn’t put people into debt, which relies on communal responsibility and trust—preferable to a system based on money? Or would people just take advantage of their neighbors?

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Interesting.

Also, ugh the Atlantic. I'm trying not to read it right now (I feel like it just fuels the kinds of never-solved division-y controversies that are really unproductive, like safe space vs. free speech). But this magazine writes such good headlines and pulls you in... And then kinda disappoints with its final analysis.