Ah, the economist's greatest threat, anthropology.

I can't believe that I never realised money/barter is only required for strangers. I already do things with family along the "it'll all even out in the end" principle

You're basically describing friend groups, in the first description of how insular communities actually work, to be honest. Sometimes one friend gets lunch, sometimes another. One friend throws great parties or gives great gifts. Another friend is always there as a shoulder to cry on. There isn't a running tab, there isn't a precise remunerartion, but we feel the equilibrium, and if someone takes too much without giving, we instinctively feel that too. It's amazing how innate this is.

My family moved from a suburban area to a rural area last year. My dad let our neighbors grow hay on our land we aren't using, and we get a cut of that to feed our cows. In return, my dad is a handyman and my mom is an EMT. The Amish avoid hospitals when they can, so whenever they have a health issue, they call my mom to see if western medicine is warranted. As a result, our neighbors helped us rebuild our 150 year old barn that anyone else would have torn down.

Back when college exams where not online and taken in bluebooks, I used to remind my students to make sure to bring a bluebook on exam day. Every exam day, some students would come to me before class, panicked, because they forgot their bluebooks. I said, don't worry, just wait. As an anti-cheating measure we would turn in all the bluebooks and then redistributed them. There were always enough bluebooks, and often extras left over. A handful of students, would always bring extras, on their own volition and hand them in for those that forgot. These were classes of 200-400 people. The students would never meet their benefactors, and the students who brought extra never got any accolades. It just happened.

Love this. As a farmer who frequents a local market, I have to attest to the fact that almost all of the individuals who work that market engage in a consistent trade of items without use of currency. A lot is simply given away with no regard for an equal exchange.

I remember during the height of the lockdown in our country where nearly all stores have closed, people resorted to bartering what they have at home for other stuff. My uncle traded his old laptop for a mountain bike and we traded our rice for laundry detergent. It was actually fun and I know that money is still useful, but going back to a time where money didn't yet exist fascinated me. There were actual restaurant owners willing to trade their raw ingredients such as wagyu beef for a jug of alcohol and facemasks. The bartering lasted for months into the strictest time of the lockdown, to which the commerce department of our country started complaining as bartering doesn't circulate money and can't be taxed. I remember nearly everyone I knew scoffed at that statement and saying that at a time like that is just plain insensitive.

I have been saying for many years now that the oversimplified, bare-bones version of things that we learn in school is often more damaging than someone not knowing anything about the subject at all

I actually had these types of questions back when I was learning about bartering in elementary. The answer to what happened if no one with what you needed wanted to trade with you, and the answer was, apparently, "You just died. Survival of the fittest. Thankfully we have money now and don't have to worry about that." That answer didn't quite work when I knew of a family member that had died because she couldn't make enough money to pay for her heart medication regularly. Were people like her really so much better off in a world obsessed with money?

When I was a kid, I lived in a rural area. We had a few neighbors and knew them all by name. The neighbors at the end of the road had a large farm. Every year they'd share some of their harvest with us. Stop by just to say hi, bringing gifts of produce. We would exchange some of ours sometimes. But it was never a necessity. Kindness and generosity are excellent foundations of community. I do miss those days

This man *giving us all the gift* of a well-researched, well-produced and thought-provoking history lesson without the expectation of a direct or equivalent exchange. Nice.

I realize this happens a lot in food courts in malls. I used to work at an icecream place, and every now and then we would trade icecream for meals with a bibimbap place. Was never an equivalent value trade, but that was never really something we thought about. We were just helping eachother out so we all had variety in the foods we could eat!

It's crazy to think how many unspoken cultural assumptions you just take for granted until someone like this comes along and very easily points out how that doesn't actually make sense.

My late grandfather was a farmer and he would often gift neighbors with any excess bakery, dairy, or poultry items they had. My mom said it wasn't uncommon for neighbors to show up with pork and beef later in the year when they were the one's with surplus. It just sounds like a way better model for living!

I think it’s important to remember that, even in early village economies like the ones described here, it wasn’t all peaceful, let’s love and take care of everyone. Giving goods was often used as a method of societal control. People frequently wouldn’t give as much to those violating social norms. Also, even in small, tightly knit communities, violence was often used to force others to give goods and services.

I had a delivery job for a pharmacy. When pharmacies ran low on something, they would trade with each other; and medium of exchange was a particular brand of pills for hot flashes.😅

I always took the idea of barter being a universal historic norm at face-value. I'm glad this opened my eyes to that not being the case.

If Johnny had two apples...

As someone who got their Bachelor’s in Anthropology, thank you! The field is so often dismissed. I think often because certain systems benefit from pretending things have always been a certain way.

After moving to Vermont a few years ago, my FIL has befriended neighbors and we have given them baked goods and veggies in thanks for letting us borrow a tractor. The cycle has continued, and honestly I kind of love it. Experiencing people with different abilities and resources care for each other is so different from my experiences growing up in suburbs and living in Brooklyn, I can't even quantify it. The social relationships are the biggest thing, and I love that you did this video. I can't wait to see what else you're doing!

I feel like a micro version of this still happens in small/ countryside towns. Growing up, my parents had an avocado tree and my mum would give away bags and bags of extra avos to her friends and neighbours 💁‍♀️ my dad would sometimes offer to help someone by fixing their plumbing problem etc. It's like a tiny community economy.

My granddad, who was my grandmother’s second husband after becoming widowed early, was an excellent avid farmer. He gave most of it away. He just literally loved farming and being outdoors all day most days. It was the ordinary large kitchen garden too not the monocrops of today. He knew all the ways to get stubborn plants to grow prolifically with the aid of a companion planting. Planting on mini-hills. He seemed to love the challenge in it. All summer long the neighbors visited to see what he could harvest that day. He would also replant and grow more when plants gave out and was so proud of getting more planting per season. He lived to 97. An amazingly skilled guy. We adored him. Everybody did. He did not sell any of it. Andrew, I absolutely love your channel.

I think the biggest problem is that most of us don't live in tight nit communities where we know everyone and gives gifts to each other.

“In a barter system, value is determined by negotiation and mutual agreement, not market price” That's the definition of market price though

To people unfamiliar with _proximate_ communities, where families and individuals both work and live near each other I think it would be hard to tell if you're correct. But to those of us familiar with how such communities exist and function, I believe what you posit seems much closer to historical reality.

When I was little and was taught about this, I always thought it didn’t make sense because as long as everyone got what they wanted and what they needed, who cared about the perceived “value” of the items? It’s almost like wealth is a concept, and the most important thing is that everyone in a community is well-cared for, hmmm 🤔

Y'know, ever since I was taught about "bartering systems", the idea has always rubbed me in the wrong way but I never examined it that closely. Thank you for helping me understand why it didn't seem quite right all this time!

My old krew operated under a system we called "endless cycle of debt" where basically if any of us needed money to make moves anyone could be expected to foot the bill with the expectation that when we needed it somebody would have our backs in the future

This explains why we feel wounded when our gifts are refused. It's a way of expressing the avoidance of connection and future history with one. Very much like saying one is a lesser being not worthy of presence. Yet it has become so, where gifting is a power exchange from one of wealth to one of poverty only, or part of obligated occasions like holidays or personal events. No longer the joyous sharing of bounty.

That trade wasn't equal. I don't trust a goat that oinks.

The Chinese culture still does this on a smaller scale, as far as I know. I visited a friend of mine and found a bag of food hanging on the doorknob at the front of the house. When I pointed this out, my friend said, "oh, that's probably Annie, she called to say she was leaving that." I asked my friend why Annie would just leave food, and he kinda shrugged and said that she and the neighbors do that sort of thing all the time. It's a mix between graciousness and social expectation -- sometimes food came and my friend would grouse about having to return the favor (in order to save face) -- so in practice it doesn't quite become the capitalism-killer that you think it'd be. But it is nice to build relationships.

The thing about both barter and money is that they facilitate trade with a much lower requirement of trust compared to a more communal system. Of the two money is better in many ways but I think the obsession with barter among economists comes from wanting to believe that the current state of things is an upwards move rather than a lateral one. Of course, there are good reasons for money like the way it allows complex economies with too many participants to have any realistic hope of building relationships, but it also has drawbacks due to the fact that people don't always need to be trustworthy or beneficial to society to make money if they're clever and/or lucky.

Thanks for this, genuinely. I can't say i had ever even questioned it, but as soon as you started talking about the fact that most transactions were happening with our neighbors i realized that my understanding of bartering had missed one key point: People care about each other. By and large, nobody was going to let their neighbor and probably good friend die of starvation just because they didn't have crops to harvest in the winter.

I found the idea of the separate spheres of importance in human interactions to be very interesting. I'm surprised how casually he mentions this and moves on; there are a lot of implications to a system like this, especially considering it persists throughout the world. You see it all the time when someone brings something they think is of value into a conversation of a different topic. We say it cheapens the value of X to give it a $ value or we complain that someone only thinks about $. As he discusses later, people are more interested in the social relationships they need to maintain than they are in abstract numbers. We have trained ourselves to value these number over our relationship to our neighbors. If your neighbor loses a family member, we commonly bring food and offer to talk. It would feel crass to just hand them money and walk away.

yep, I also remember some sort of such moneyless relations in a village my grandparents lives. Grandpa every year gave some honey to differend friends/relatives, some other families gave them cow milk regulary, etc. In early post-soviet country with inflation it worked much better than real money so sometimes it was even a real barter where bags of sugar were 'the money' for instance

Your examination of gift economies and non-monetary societies is insightful and thought-provoking. It's true that many societies have functioned effectively without money as we understand it today, and those examples challenge our understanding of economic systems. Nonetheless, it's important to remember that the kind of exchange and social structures you described tend to work best in relatively small, closely-knit societies. In such groups, people have ongoing relationships and understandings that create trust and facilitate cooperation. As societies scale up and become more complex, it's increasingly difficult to maintain such systems. Money, in the form of a universally accepted medium of exchange, simplifies transactions and enables large-scale, complex economies to function effectively. With it, people can transact with others whom they may never meet or even know about. It also provides a common measure of value that facilitates economic planning and decision-making. I agree that the emergence of money and market economies has led to inequalities and social issues. It's true that in a capitalistic system, people are often required to sell their labor to meet their basic needs. However, capitalism also has been the most successful system in history for raising living standards and reducing poverty. I do not believe that money inherently leads to institutions such as slavery or imperialism; those institutions have existed in various forms throughout human history, often in societies without money. These are societal problems that need to be addressed by the principles and norms of the society, rather than being inherently linked to a particular economic system. Furthermore, it is important to differentiate between voluntary trade and exploitation. In a free market, transactions are voluntary. Both parties participate because they believe they will benefit. This is different from situations where individuals or groups are coerced into unfavorable conditions, which is a violation of their rights. The assertion that the barter myth narrows our vision of our economic and social possibilities is thought-provoking. It's certainly possible to envision alternative systems. However, any viable system must be able to handle the challenges of coordinating the economic activities of large numbers of people, many of whom are strangers to one another. So far, market economies using some form of money have been the most successful at achieving this. That said, your comments highlight the importance of not overlooking the social aspects of economic transactions. We should strive for systems that facilitate not just efficient transactions but also fairness and social cohesion. This is a complex and ongoing challenge.

I'm tickled by the phrase "cows or cows equivalent in silver." It reminds me of the term "spherical cows in a vacuum," which is a punchline from an old physics joke.

Keeping a social-credit score of your neighbours was probably the main-limit on the size of groups in our deep past. Modern humans can manage about 150. Even before complex language, we evoleved a feeling for 'fairness' in relation to not only exchange of tangible goods, but labour, standing-up-for someone, all human interactions were unconsciously tabulated and translated into how much you would trust, like, or be willing to help any one individual, or their closest kin. Even in my parents' time (small farmers) there was monetary exchange with 'outsiders', but still reciprocal giving within the community. If you had a cow to milk in winter, you gave your neighbours milk and butter. When you pick your apples, a child would be sent with a sack of them to each neighbour. Increased mobility eroded thiese systems. You would be pretty careful to not end up, considered as a miser, or even worse cheat in a small community where you were destined to remain till death, but if you could rack up 'debts' and just move on, the system failed.

Speaking as someone who interfaces with the world most often as a means of generating ideas for stories... This is very inspiring. The understanding of an economy that functions less off financial mathematics, and more off the softer, more malleable and deeper obligations of mutual gifts and social obligation, is eye-opening. I imagine a hamlet at the base of a mountain. People who fish, people who grow crops at the mouth of a river coming off the mountain, people who gather gold flakes from the stream, people who hunt and clean and process local predators, people who work tools from wood and leather and bone and process more of the same. Each one is an individual, but all are bent toward the same goal - helping the hamlet survive. They help each other survive, not just because each person has specialized skill, but because each person is special to each other. Henriette the gardener is lively and feisty and defends her garden like a den mother, so she has a lot of love for Lonais the fisherman, who's so gentle around the small and delicate plants, so when he says he likes one of the flowers, she promises some of its seeds next bloom. Later, Lonais gives her a few of the smaller fish he catches, as thanks for her promise.

Not sure how this showed up in my feed, but subscribed and going to binge some more videos. Great stuff, man.

i feel a bit uncomfortable realizing that i just kind of accepted barter as a natural thing that just was despite knowing nearly half of all the points you made in this video plus a few more that you didnt bring up. i =really= should have realized the fallacy of it given i had the information to see it. eesh. i need to work harder to challenge and explore my core beliefs more

Money was invented so that people don't have to look each other in the eye.

This works really well with my thoughts on economics! Basically, I think of an economy in terms of numeric and non-numeric currencies, with things like "trust" and "good will" as non numeric currencies which follow different rules than countable resources such as goods and money. Essentially, I came up with the idea as an explanation for how certain organizations can fail while having tremendous amounts of countable resources by squandering the uncountable resources in exchange for the countable resources.

This is why when you play minecraft with your friends you share everything, but as soon as that one person tries to implement a currency system or barter system the game instantly becomes unfun

Barter being a universal precursor to monetary economies isn't a conclusion based on history, it's concluded because it follows from the pre-existing conclusion that capitalist-style market competition is fundamental to humanity. So in the face of the "barter leads to money leads to credit leads to universal cutthroat competition for wealth and status, and this is good" fable not being based on reality, its true believers either insist that this is how it *should* have happened, or just that all societies who don't fit their model "did it wrong" -- because the story isn't based on history and reality, and instead history, communities and individual people are judged based on how well they fit the market fable.

I just now made the connection that this myth - and how absurdly pervasive it is, even among anti-capitalists - is a prime example of capitalist realism. Crazy how ingrained it is

Between family, friends, and small communities this sort of thing still exists. Particularly with things like produce, where you often aren't able to eat everything yourself anyway.

Enlightening, I had never considered how damaging it might be to misrepresent how our earliest ancestors lived in community with one another

Very good video I think it should be noted, that the suppression of "honor"-based blood-feuds is quite an important concept of modern legal systems. Obviously there is a lot of nonsense in the law, but the foundation amounts to getting an impartial third party to work out a deal that satisfies the injured party enough to avoid such long lasting feuds. And if that's the context for where money came from, that kinda makes sense. What would be an alternative to this legal system that slowly grew, starting with direct retribution (eye for eye, tooth for tooth) and grew more abstract and, arguably, more reasonable (no longer death for death - death is considered wrong regardless of the crime... If you live in a country without death penalty anyways - something something state sponsored violence is still violence) with time?

The other thing with the gift economy is lots of things would spoil if just not shared or sit unused (as well things were repaired and maintained) so it just makes sense to share. The loss of those circle of circles means every one is strangers and we need to "win" every interaction

Your voice and cadence is amazing and I really appreciate how you slow down when you're discussing the more complex stuff!

"Narrow range of our ranger of possibilities" Yeah it's called sticking wit the most effective.

I appreciate these history lessons so much. Good to know how exactly these myths were made up to keep us locked here & now.

This does make a lot of sense, especially since a community lived or died based on how well individuals fared in the community. One always wanted to help out members of their community because it was always in their best interest to do that, plus the more one helps out the more people in their community will help them.

Great video. You capture really well how alienating money can be versus the more community-oriented transactions that have existed for most of our history. Also, I think the idea of money orgiginating "from" barter is already a value judgement, as it implies that any non-monetary system is inferior or primative.

Excellent video! Thank you for all your hard work. Excited to see more!

I recently had a conversation with a guy who is unsheltered. I was asking him how things work on the street. It was very related to 4:18 . Basically, cash is treated like gold, drugs are used as currency, but people usually trade items. He also told me that people will gift each other small things when they see someone having a bad time (example, half of their sandwich if the person is really hungry). But on the other side of the coin, they also steal from each other so trust is very low between most of them which probably limits what they are willing to gift to each other.

This actually happens a lot in survival video games if you are on a team. If you are all specializing, and someone is specializing in certain crafting or gained resources faster than another, through luck, it makes sense to give your team mates your items and they give back food/ whatever they have crafted and created. Its not equivalent nor is always immediate but its the best interest of the group if everyone fully fed and equipped.

This makes perfect sense but it seems like it's only viable in small communities. Take a look at the monkeysphere theory. Outside of a fairly limited number of people, everyone else would only be strangers or close enough that the difference is minute meaning that they are or you are in a position to take advantage without negative emotional consequences. Expand that just a touch to account for interlocking monkeyspheres of those important to you and you (or they) could take advantage without any negative consequences.

I read an article talking about this a long time ago - that money proceeds barter. Great work putting this info into an easy to understand video.

thank you for this video. i was trying to get through david graeber’s debt but got paused around chapter three for a while. this video motivated me to get back on it - perfect timing!

Farmers markets are a great place to observe bartering exchanges. Vendors often trade or give each other excess items or sometimes even prep small gifts to give other vendors. Kristie, who owns a coffee stand, trades me beans and gives us drink mess-ups, especially appreciated when I don’t get a chance to leave my stand on a hot day.

Thank you for your mind provoking video. You have intrigued me and compelled me too put you on my mind too see and explore more of your content

excellent presentation of this concept!! I have had trouble explaining this to people in the past, gonna send this vid to a few people!!

i feel like playing minecraft in groups exemplifies this in a way, sure in bigger servers theres usually an item used specifically as currency, but usually when its just a group of friends playing together, players tend help each other out and only do proper trade negotiations for large transactions like rare items, large amounts, etc (yes this is a thought i gravitated towards because of thought slime's video)

This is a good lesson in critical thinking for all of us. A lot of things written in textbooks that we take at face value (especially concerning ancient history) are completely wrong.

Wow, great work on this video. I’ve never heard any of this before. Thank you

Brilliant - you put it so clearly! Just subscribed, and I look foirward to seeing your other videos.

The barter myth is a sneaky way to assert an individualist baseline assumption about human existence. It’s also funny, because the argument of the double coincidence of wants as the shortcoming of bartering ignores how often modern monetary economies result in resources not going where they are needed for want of “adequate compensation.”

Reminds me when I watched this play the character, who was really into banjos, explained about barn raising parties. In which, people in the area gather with their tools, building supplies, food and drink and cooking wares, and instruments to play music. Pooling their labor: during the day, they build a barn, and prepare food for a big party once it's done. Then they all eat well together, play music and dance. It was expected in the community that everyone repeat all the above for each other whenever simple building projects needed doing. It's so communal and multi-faceted, that it's hard to even call it an exchange in a traditional sense.

Beautiful video essay! Thank you for this.

It seems to me money is the natural extension of keeping track of what is owed and given between dissimilar peoples, tribes, villages, kingdoms and cultures. The more we travel and bump into others, the more handy money becomes.

I also made a video called "The Origins of Money" that debunked the barter myth. How we understand the history of money heavily impacts the possibilities we can envision for human organization. Good on you for making this.

“I don’t trust the govt with my stuff, that’s why I prefer this govt backed currency that rapidly fluctuates in value”

I live in the suburbs and many people in our neighborhood, including my family, grow their own food to some degree, whether it would be chickens, veggies, herbs, fruit trees, etc. and we all just give the excess stuff away to each other every once in a while. Many of us also have kids or little siblings who run around playing in different parents’ houses and yards. We all look out for each other and compensate each other for the goods and services we provide, but usually not immediately. It’s just accepted that we give out food and watch the kids when we can and if we can. There is no expectation that a dozen eggs = 1 lbs of avocados or 2 hours of babysitting. We just do things. We still have primary jobs and go grocery shopping, but our lives and community are definitely better because this kind of opportunistic trade alleviates some of the pressures of life and overall enhances it.

The skit at 8 really made me want to hear more, thank you for this!

There's actually still a sort of gift economy when you look at clothing in much of the world. Obviously, in England and America (the spaces I'm most familiar with) this emerges in the habit of giving clothing as gifts or the way certain items gain sentimental value because of who they belonged to before you, but from what I've read this is much more present in a number of other cultures. From what I've read, the colonialist pushin in Igbo regions of Nigeria to integrate the population into a clothing market and encourage women to make their own clothing (which was pretty obviously trying to fold European domestic roles over the existing ones and was part of a wider project of disassembling support networks to try and manifest nuclear family relations) was actually seen as one of the most insulting elements, because of the way clothing manifests the social relations a person is embroiled in around them. So wearing an item of clothing was/is (depending on which culture we're talking about as obviously not all of them maintained these traditions) a statement about your connection to the people who gave you or made you that clothing, making wearing clothing purchased or made for oneself, akin to a statement of not valuing the people around you. Source for that one is Adeline Masquelier's Dirt, Undress and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Bodies Surface.

I remember learning about a Pacific Island economy described by Europeans, where the tribes' people would give away their possessions until everyone would go broke in a boom to bust cycle. It didn't make sense in the context they described and always confused me but applying the economic principles of non-systematic "credit" you laid out in this video; it really makes a lot of sense. Great video, well done!

A really well done, insightful, and thought provoking piece of work. Thank you

Brilliant , watched a few of your videos before really felt like I was able to follow and understand your ideas.. good stuff appreciate you !!

This reminds me what I read in Silvia Federici's book "Caliban and the Witch". She describes how country peasants (the vast majority of the population in the middle ages) where systematically pushed to poverty when tax payment switched from country goods and work days in our lord's lands, to money. Before, we somehow managed to scam our mighty lords, who asked for an always abusive proportion of our goods but always got less. We were also known to work slowly and half-heartedly when we made our work hours on the lord's land. Funnily enough, those peasants that weren't even registered anywhere as they were percieved as irrelevant, worked less weekly hours than people in modern capitalism. For those interested, the author's focus is actually on how capitalism in Europe began with the war on women that marked the end of the High Middle Ages, after oligarchs realised the bubonic plague's killing a third of the population had benefitted greatly the surviving peasants, whose now scarcer labour had become more valuable. Witch hunts that erradicated our healers and avortionists, government-funded brothels to demobilize the medieval revolutionaries whe've come to know as heretic movements, laws that made the rape of any potential witch legal in France and Italy, total anti-abortion where there previously was some nuance towards the poor... all in the name of cheapening our labour.

I’m currently working at a bakery, it’s the best job I’ve ever had in no small part because of all the stuff I get to give away. I get two loaves of free bread a week so that often for me is an excuse to go check out another local store and give the employees one of my loaves. I’ve learned things like the local spiritual shop needs challah bread for a pagan Shabbat they do, guy at the bike shops favorite pastry is our jam biscuits etc etc. really has proven to me that you can make so many connections by just extending kindness, and asking people about their needs. Half the block is giving each other employee discounts and little services because we make each others weeks better without expecting anything in return, I don’t give people cookies I know they like because it gets me something free off their shelf, I do it because it’ll make their day better

One thing that I often think about, and which your little cartoon highlights, is how, while yes we're trained to think of “primitive” societies as barter-based, we don't often think of corresponding *individuals* as barterers when the mental “story” is framed that way. Whether it's ancient people, modern/recent natives, or gangster stories, (with the exception of games maybe), we don't really expect our character to be trading spears for bread, or X kilos of cocaine for an assassination. When we're thinking on this level, we usually default to a fear, honor, or guanxi system, or sometimes to personal debt. Our imaginary caveman can just take food from the stocks, assuming they're in good social standing. Our thug will happily kill their target because they want to stay in the Don's good graces.

God I love history like this so much. For my Society and Culture project, I looked at how things like the Agricultural Revolution affected social issues today, and that’s just one aspect of our complicated history. Keep doin what you’re doin man

the anarchist in me is baking bread for people. No reason, no ask, no tell, just surprise bread for the family.

Why would you raise more avocados than you needed if no one you could trade with wanted avocados, regardless of whether or not your plan was to barter them, sell them, or share them communally at the church pot luck?

Rare that I actually learn something I didn't know before on KZfaq. Thank you! Great content!

In our community bartering for certain goods was common practice. A fisherman in spring would go from house to house to ask if anyone would want his surplus fish and in return he would get an agreed amount of the harvest. This works well as long as people are honest and remember what was agreed (sometimes we would write it on the calendar), but occasionally there would a rift. I imagine money could develop as a token, I Owe You, of the agreement, with different ways of showing a quantity. For example, I agree to give two boxes of my apples for the boots you made for me. I don't have any apples now, so I give two white shells. At harvest, you bring me the two shells and I give you two boxes of apples. I also give you a sack of grain for which you give me a spear head, which I will return to you for an exchange of furs for making a coat... I would still call this bartering even though the exchange of goods is not instant. I can see this getting complicated if each party have their own tokens, meaning different things... It doesn't do away of helping neighbours to build their house and getting help in return when someone else needs help with labour. (When the villagers helped us with building our house, we provided them the food.) This latter example is about social cohesion. . I lived in a village of around 3-4 thousand people, in a first world country: this kind of bartering has been going of for thousands of years, and it is still alive in many countries, not just mine, existing along modern monetary system and social cohesion. There was an experiment of organised online bartering system, in the 80s, where people could advertise their services and goods for free in return for the same or for credits, according to an agreement between individuals, but the last I heard of it was people abusing the system and arguing themselves, including who should run the website and how much they should get "paid", if actual money should be allowed etc.

I'm just about halfway through "Debt: The first 5000 years", and I gotta say, I wish I could sum ideas like this up as effectively and succinctly as you can. Another great video! The skit was fun too :)

I decided to watch this because it complements the "is capitalism really human nature" video by second thought 💭🤔 I think a lightbulb went off in my head, also I really like & appreciate this title card for grabbing my attention 💀

Man I’m so glad you used debt the first 5000 years for this. Such a good book and I’m glad more people are utilizing it! Great video!

Amazing perspective, thank you brother

It's crazy that I would never have known this without taking an Anthropology GE course at my university. Thank you for doing your part to spread the truth more widely.

This seems to be no more than a simple credit system. These tend to work well in small communities as you can easily keep track of who owes what to who. People who return favors develop good reputations and those who have bad reputations will be excluded from trade and gifting. The problem is that this doesn’t work for a large society as you have no way of determining whether you’ll ever see another person you’re transacting with again and could not tell what their reputation is. Barter was certainly necessary for larger economies as it was often necessary to transact with strangers. Edit: Typo

I really like this video. I think it does a very good job not just of explaining the context, but also of justifying the title claim. hope you are doing well!

This describes perfectly the inner working of a D&D party. Helpful spells are expended freely, with the expectation the same will be done in return as needed. An even better example is dividing up treasure. 1000 gold pieces get split evenly, but what about the magical item noone could afford to buy? That sort of treasure is usually handed to the character who can use it best. The expectation is, it will all wash out in the end.

This is something I've had a hunch about but could never put it into such eloquent words. When learning about early economies, it's always stated as fact that people are looking to trade much like we do in the current day. That they care about exact value and are always looking for compensation for anything they give. But yet if you look back to those early villages, they were small, tight knit, and pretty different from our current idea of society. Did your neighbor's roof collapse in during a storm? Are you really gonna go, "Hmm idk man. I'll help ya but you're gonna have to give me 3 sacks of flour in return."? No! You're gonna help them out because _they're your neighbor_ .They're the people you grew up with, the people you associate with on a daily basis. You're not just going to leave them literally out in the cold like that! Sometimes people just did things for eachother because they were nice things to do. Not because they necessarily expected anything in return. It would be nice to receive something back but it's more so about community building and wellbeing rather than pure accounting. A little thing called empathy you know? Something that many an economist could probably benefit from honestly. Thanks for tackling this, it's always been bugging me whenever early history is talked about. It always comes in with the presumption that capitalism is just the natural state of affairs and so whatever came before needed to follow similar logic.

Please do another one on spheres of exchange. All the status competition involved basically useless stuff like shell necklaces. Useful things like food were just shared within the group.

Excellent, well thought out presentation. One of the most credible premises of monetary exchange and equivalencies I have ever heard.

This is tremendously good. Well thought out and well expressed.