Yeah, me too. This Reddit post actually does a pretty bang-up job of explaining how barter, currency-as-marker-for-something-else, and modern fiat money all work.
Miscellaneous Heathen
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
“Debt: The First 5000 Years” makes a compelling case, IMHO, that the common conception of how money came into being—as a more efficient replacement for barter, as this post suggests—is almost certainly wrong.
It starts with the observation that there are no actual documented instances of the “barter economy” that every economics text posits as preceding money, and works from there.
So, while the post on Reddit is a lucid explanation of basic macro ideas, the notion of how it came into being is probably crap.
I guess I wonder what other explanation there might be. Must not commerce have sprung initially from the exchange of goods and services for other goods and services?
That book gets lots of press, but I have no idea where it falls on the “insightful to contrarian” scale.