You know, I’ve heard that the barter system, as a foundation of economics, is essentially made up. Like, obviously people barter, but the idea that it was a universal precursor to money was essentially invented by capitalists in the industrial era, who never could have dreamed of the myriad interesting ways thar people distributed wealth!
Apparently one of the more common ones was a sort of “gifting” system, where people just gave each other what they needed. 🤷 But of course this wasn’t universal either.
You know, I’ve heard that the barter system, as a foundation of economics, is essentially made up. Like, obviously people barter, but the idea that it was a universal precursor to money was essentially invented by capitalists in the industrial era, who never could have dreamed of the myriad interesting ways thar people distributed wealth!
Apparently one of the more common ones was a sort of “gifting” system, where people just gave each other what they needed. 🤷 But of course this wasn’t universal either.