![]() ![]() So what preceded money? Another old concept-debt. There has been barter of course, but as Graeber explains, most of the time this was in the context of people who were already familiar with the concept of money, or had low systems of trust. The first thing David Graeber does in his phenomenal 2011 book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is show how there’s absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. ![]() So over time we created this clever thing called a “medium of exchange” to make barter more efficient and avoid the double coincidence of wants-thus, money was born. ![]() In other words, we ran into the “double coincidence of wants” phenomenon, where we just happened to have something to bring to market that somebody else wanted, and vice versa-without which, we couldn’t trade. Once upon a time, people had desires, and in order to get the things we wanted, we had to barter. Chances are if you’ve taken an economics class, you’ve heard this story. ![]()
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