How The Barter Myth Harms Us

[@fish.e]

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.

[@GhostOnTheHalfShell]

the first currency is reciprocity, but even here it seems too calculating a word. simple generosity means everyone is better off.

[@rennnnn914]

I've observed, and participated, in markets and agree. If you can't find a suitable exchange, a lot of stuff is just given. Everyone comes away happy no matter the 'value' of the goods.

[@jeffengel2607]

@@GhostOnTheHalfShell You can think of generosity as reciprocity with very little interest in enforcing the equality, certainty, or promptness of return. All of that represents costs in bother and social friction, and whatever excess stuff you have is very plausibly not worth that.

[@GhostOnTheHalfShell]

@@jeffengel2607 The characteristic of reciprocity is that there is no tit for tat, in fact 'prompt return' is inimical to its definition and would be an insult to expect or in response. I was reaching for the sense that giving is pleasurable to people. One could argue it is the basic impulse that drives reciprocity but is itself not reciprocity as a whole.

[@jeffengel2607]

@@GhostOnTheHalfShell My understanding of 'reciprocity' - which tracks with a little look into its use in anthropology and sociology - is precisely that of an expectation of tit for tat, that some return in similar kind IS expected, potentially but not necessarily immediately or promptly. We may not be successfully communicating around the term.

[@shadowmaster1313]

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

[@tormunnvii3317]

Yeah, David Graeber called that “Baseline Communism”, the basic foundation of all known human societies :). R.I.P David…

[@yoeyyoey8937]

Yeah but thats kinda barter because you are assuming a condition

[@magnesiafrost1863]

@@yoeyyoey8937 That's not barter. It's a credit system based on trust.

[@EroticInferno]

I tell anyone that’ll listen that communism is just what you do in your family and with your friends…. But with everyone

[@EroticInferno]

@@yoeyyoey8937nah we will still do things for family members when they can longer “give back something equal.” Just as parents take care of children, we should take care of those in need of extra help: elderly, disabled, etc

[@MMumbles]

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.

[@KingPhilipsRideshare]

The Amish medical tradition still falls inside “western medicine”

[@HyenaBlank]

Only just started this video, but I do recall once coming across another video that mention that's much more what bartering was like. More like a system of favors in a way.

[@lessimcdowell9897]

It’s called intracommunalism, it’s a very unscientific and non democratic form of communism. Before agrarian society, everyone in a pact hunted and gathered together yet some were faster and stayed in front of the chase and some were slow, the slow were not fed the scraps, but it isn’t altogether out of the ordinary to think that some of the fast hunters favorite body parts like eyes were reserved for them. Agrarian societies are where everyone had different jobs and people stopped being trained to do all things and only mastered one trade. A milk rancher may serve the horse ranch every week with milk while the horse rancher may not serve the milk rancher but every 30 years when they need a new horse broken in. If a storm wipes out the village, it’s very simple, you don’t wait for insurance companies to pay you just start creating new shelter materials from the land and rebuilding

[@jeremy5602]

You make it sound as if the Amish are anti-Western medicine nut jobs

[@Rynewulf]

@@lessimcdowell9897why is it inherently unscientific and undemocratic? Isnt a community making its own decisions purely democratic? And why would fast hunters let the slower ones starve? We have evidence from before homo sapiens of injured, disabled and elderly humans being cared for and kept alive and trying to recover. Its fascist nonsense to assume hunter gatherers or farmers would deliberately starve out physically less able people,

[@cosmasindico]

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.

[@bluexephosfan970]

Literally the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000. As long as everyone trusts that there will be enough, there will be enough.

[@meltedWax169]

I wouldnt be surprised if they had their own personal experiences or are just kind hearted people

[@CrizzyEyes]

Clearly we should use this example as the basis of an economy at scale. What could possibly go wrong?

[@Alias_Anybody]

@@bluexephosfan970 It's not completely selfless in practice. Imagine a stone age hunter able to consistently hunt 4x the amount he himself consumed for redistribution, while the average for a hunter was let's say 2x. He'd have been an asset for the group, everyone's darling, a true Gigachad. Guy would have gotten the most respect from everyone and gotten laid like no other. Sure, he was "gifting" stuff and not getting "rich", but he clearly got a return.

[@raylopez99]

Elinor Ostrom got a Nobel Prize in Economics for insights along these lines.

[@thedreamchasers7252]

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

[@PlasmaFuzer]

I had similar experiences. There is a difference however between sharing excess production, and sharing that which is necessary to sustain.

[@tommihorttana860]

@@PlasmaFuzer Yes. Sharing during tough times is what gets you the most status and respect, to put it in these cold terms.

[@allensacharov5424]

this is the true basis of need and want. I experienced it beautifully at Burning Man

[@Mookle123]

The cumulative longing of those who remember generosity between neighbors will one day cause its revival!

[@str4wb3rrymilk27]

@@allensacharov5424would love to hear more

[@tellmeaboutyourgame314]

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.

[@billbadson7598]

_”You're basically describing friend groups”_ FAMILY groups, since most of the attachment between these people is literal biological relation. We didn’t always have airplanes and automobiles. For the vast majority of the existence of the human race, most of your neighbors were your siblings and cousins.

[@javierchamorro8988]

Then again, there's an impetus to remove this characteristicts of friend groups in pro of the hyperindividualistic isolation pursued by neoliberalism. Way too many times I've heard the phrase "cuentas claras mantienen la amistad" (clear tabs maintain a healthy friendship). To that I say "if you're keeping tabs, that ain't no friendship".

[@bobbirdsong6825]

@@billbadson7598 you're splitting hairs especially because in the modern day this understanding is arguably more common among close groups of friends.

[@billbadson7598]

@@bobbirdsong6825 I don't have a single friend who matters more to me than my siblings and their children

[@bobbirdsong6825]

@@billbadson7598 not all families are close and many are not healthy

[@user-xsn5ozskwg]

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.

[@mikeciul8599]

I learned so many lies in my 7th grade social studies class.

[@lorenzomizushal3980]

​@@mikeciul8599how do you know THIS isn't another lie. you probably didn't think it was a lie the first time either lol

[@theguythatcoment]

@@lorenzomizushal3980 You need evidence to prove that something is true, you don't need evidence to prove that something is false. There's no evidence of barter taking place in ancient civilizations thus barter didn't existed. Simple as that boy. The only reason why it was written in history books was because it made sense, just as much sense as being the center of the universe, as much sense as humorism and as much sense as religion. what we think make sense and what is true are two different things that almost never correlate with each other.

[@qube3634]

@@lorenzomizushal3980 You can just look up how tribal cultures actually do (and did) things. It's not a lie because it is based on observation... not imagination.

[@yippieskippy2971]

IKR.🖖

[@Kay-kg6ny]

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.

[@The_SOB_II]

And those lies are the basis for modern culture. Stuff like white supremacy and capitalism being good for innovation

[@shimrrashai-rc8fq]

And given the overwhelming dominance of one form of culture, how it can make the potential for radical new alternatives seem like a complete, utopian pipe dream ... because you just can't fundamentally imagine how it could be any different.

[@dwaneanderson8039]

It's not just an unspoken assumption. We are taught that barter predated money in school and other media. I don't know how many times I have heard this and took it for granted that it was true.

[@yoeyyoey8937]

If this guy understood what he was taking about then he wouldn’t have made this video. He just straw manned barter

[@the.SteamingVegan]

​@@The_SOB_II well put

[@jacobjolson]

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.

[@TheWarpGhost]

A very important caveat

[@BillHallProductions]

So you're saying it was an economy

[@nickshaw3619]

That's not vastly different from what happens today, just ask anyone convicted of tax evasion.

[@johnrad9512]

@@nickshaw3619I believe that is kinda the point of his comment. That it wasn’t all that different.

[@rained649]

Right, but now with the benefit of hindsight we can take only the good parts and leave the bad parts. And the point of this video is to argue against the idea that markets and monetary systems, as they exist today, have come about and persisted because they are simply part of human nature.

[@fatcat1414]

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?

[@yoeyyoey8937]

Well the real problem is that the people who taught it to you don’t understand economics. You don’t barter with random items that nobody needs. You know what people need so you barter with those things

[@iamnohere]

I: Condolences; not being able to afford medication is a horrifying way to go 😔

[@liam3284]

"you died" such a strange answer. Agricultural settlements had a high demand for labour at some time of year, so you thatch roofs or harvest grain, or whatever, and stick around for dinner. Then someone will ask what is going on and try to get the problem sorted out. Having people die preventable deaths is a bad idea.

[@solsystem1342]

​@@liam3284 Well, early agricultural settlements weren't exactly great places to live (for many reasons, poor diet among them) but you are certainly correct that most people wouldn't abandon people to die haphazardly.

[@kaufmanat1]

​@@solsystem1342are you high? Of course they abandoned people to die. If you were sick or "unclean", unless you had a close family member to take care of you, no one was going to help you. Lol Spartans would throw weak babies off of cliffs. You really think ancient societies were wasting time going around treating the sick people in neighboring tribes? Why do people think those ancient tribal people were such kind, generous, loving people? There were head hunters and cannibals. About 25 percent of hunter gatherers died from murder. Lol, you guys are nuts if you think ancient people were some pie in the sky utopian society where everyone shared everything and loved everyone. They were animals back then. If you grew up in a civilized society, you cannot relate to ancient tribal peoples.

[@XOguitargurlOX]

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!

[@SusCalvin]

A lot of these early gift economies are small and you personally know everyone involved. If my household has the largest flock of hens but always manages to be "out of eggs" rumours would spread that we are misers and outcasts. Sometimes it seems like status is tied to gifts. If your household can gift produced stuff and many rely on you, you have high status in the village. If your farm is the one that keeps hosting travellers, it's a proof that you are the most successful guys.

[@neoqwerty]

@@SusCalvin We literally didn't know our farmer neighbor when we moved to Bumfuck Nowhere, Canada, when I was a teen. We had a field right behind our house that went unused for two years, and then one day this stranger rolled up with a tractor, knocked on our front door, and asked if we minded if he harvested the wild grass in the back for his cows. Then after the grass was cut he asked if we used that field (no) and if we had anything planned for it (no), then he asked if we minded if he planted some feed for his cows there (wheat, I think?) since we didn't use it. We said yes and that was how we basically got to meet the neighbor we had not known before, and how we ended up sharing extra jars of chokeberry jam (his wife was a darling and brought the mason jars back all pre-washed) and once we started on chickens, extra egg cartons. And in turn we got their extra cucumbers and some fresh cream, on top of not having to manage the field at all. So I dunno, three city randos apparently got roped into the local gift economy because that farmer couldn't bear to see a field not get used lmao

[@gmanplaysgames256]

@@neoqwerty and over those interactions he got to know you and confirmed you could be trusted to reciprocate his kindness. had your family declined or been ungracious or outright hostile that would have been the end of the relationship. he got to know you and you both benefited. so SusCalvin is still correct. I recently moved to Montana and got involved in a local Church and the people here have been more than welcoming and kind to me, if I had not reciprocated they would have ceased said welcoming activities.

[@SusCalvin]

@@neoqwerty We dump leftover products from our food industry on some farmer as feed because we thought it was just a damn hassle to try selling it. What else would we do, throw it in the garbage and end up paying a guy to remove it? Sometimes there is a cash exchange. The dude with a tractor who doubles as a plough is hired because the time he spends is like a part-time job and he racks up a fuel cost to run the thing. There's still an understanding that we're not going to start exploiting eachother. It's down to who you know. You know the dude from a club who does a thing and just bypass any pretense of a formal meritocracy. In a town of several thousand you don't know everyone personally but you will still often know a bloke who knows a bloke, or have some kind of forum to find the right bloke at. Same church group, same union club, same gardening group etc.

[@SoMuchFacepalm]

I mean, it's a great way to get to know your neighbours, but you aren't going to get anything complicated out of it. Insulin, for example.

[@GSBarlev]

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.

[@andrasbeke3012]

Except the whole video fails to understand the theory of barter economies. He falsely implied that there is supposed to be a numerical value ti each item in the trade, which he himself debunked when he made the example of the trader not valueing the goat. He also falsely claimed that gift economies are different from barter economies. A gift economy is a more realistic example of HOW trades were made. Notably with social credit and favors. He just seems mad that the basic explanation of barter economy didn't go in depth enough and immediately declared it false, instead of studying it further.

[@aone9050]

​@@andrasbeke3012commies gotta comm

[@mgntstr]

with the exception of presuming the audience swallowed the barter myth in school

[@atropa6053]

@@andrasbeke3012 i was dumb enough for it to make me fully realize how community is important to survive and how this world broke most of that. Good enough.

[@ArtBear88]

@@andrasbeke3012 "theory of barter economies" Except there isnt any evidence of an economy based on bartering existing unless you have any to share. "He falsely implied that there is supposed to be a numerical value ti each item in the trade" He didnt imply that at all, he was giving an example in practice of pre capitalist, early agricultural societies having no use for a rationalized system of exchange that was mediated by commodities to themselves, in opposition to theories which was put forward by classical political economists like Smith. "He also falsely claimed that gift economies are different from barter economies" Again, which barter economy? By who? Wheres the evidence? "He just seems mad that the basic explanation of barter economy..." Pure projection.

[@KwizzyDaAwesome]

Ah, the economist's greatest threat, anthropology.

[@MirrorSurfer]

Shhhhh! You tryina end up on a watch list!?

[@andrewgodly5739]

The economist is the modern priest that prays to the capitalist god and guides their "flock." Reality is their greatest threat

[@kevincrady2831]

Physics and ecology aren't exactly friendly with economists either... 😉

[@whythelongface64]

Political economy is the economist's grim reaper

[@revwroth3698]

Not the Austrian Economists, they defend themselves with praxeology! Because science obviously must conform to shit that morons made up with zero evidence obviously.

[@727Phoenix]

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.

[@janthran]

even my church as a kid operated like this. anyone who needed work done would just tell my dad, who was in charge of printing the weekly bulletin, and then on whatever day there would be 40 people there ready to do yard work or help move or whatever. it's incredible going through adult life without that and knowing what i'm missing, but i wouldn't know how to find such a community that accepts trans people

[@727Phoenix]

I'm also familiar with how a real community works, having been raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Once I found out through research that no religion founded on a literal understanding of the Bible could possibly be "The Truth" I left and joined a Unitarian Universalist church where even atheists like myself can be members. Plus they're very welcoming to LGBTQ+ so maybe try there?

[@bonemarrow3439]

Exactly! Coming from Rural India, this is exactly how things work

[@amoureux6502]

​@@janthranmy transfemme friend that needed help moving made a Grinder account to find queer people who could help her! Sounds ridiculous but it worked

[@janthran]

@@amoureux6502 i tried that but too many of the local queers want to smoke meth with me and i'm hella uninterested in it

[@SarahHeartfrost1]

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!

[@LeviathanLP]

I heard about a Cinnabon manager who used to always take a couple leftover rolls to the mall security guards after closing. Just wanted company, I guess. That was all. Good man.

[@lieeeleeee]

⁠yeah this happens a lot with different shops in a close vicinity. I worked in a deli that also sold baked goods in a little square and we would take the bakery items that weren’t sold and that we weren’t going to take home to the butchers two shops down

[@jeseAudio]

This is hard to tax. Money transactions are easy to tax.

[@o0shivashakti0o]

I had a similar experience working in food service. Sometimes you want ice cream and you can bet the kids working there don’t want ice cream for lunch every day. We also traded for movies at the theatre next door. No accounting system just free tickets whenever you walked up. Was a great way to be a poor kid starting out in the city.

[@KaiInMotion]

When I worked at Bath and Body Works the David's Tea people from across the hall would occasionally bring us cups of hot tea to try. Retail workers gotta take care of each other. 💚

[@xMissPegasusx]

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.

[@huveja9799]

Would she still give away the avocados if tomorrow a company comes and offers to buy all she can produce at a very good price?

[@yeetyeet7070]

@@huveja9799 probably not, but what's your point?

[@prestonfisher2632]

​@huveja9799 I too would like to know your point

[@huveja9799]

@@yeetyeet7070, @prestonfisher2632 The point is very simple, that kind of anecdotal examples of an idyllic world does not prove anything, the only thing that can be deduced from them, is that those beautiful examples, because they are definitely beautiful, are the product of fortunate circumstances (for example that nobody offered her money to buy the avocados, or that she had her needs sufficiently covered so that instead of eating them herself, she could give them away). But trying to extrapolate from these examples a way to manage a complex society in a scalable way is not only naive, but also dangerous ..

[@tlou2sprettygood547]

@@huveja9799 i have a few qualms with this take. 1. a normal family garden could easily produce too many avocadoes for them to comfortably consume, yet still not be a number high enough to be able to sell for a price that would give them a decent margin at a market, and they definitely cant compete with industrial production and the low prices of that. So selling often makes zero sense. 2. Even if their needs werent covered, you cant live off of just avocados, so there would still be a need for her to get rid of them and maybe get something else in exchange or even just to prevent food waste. Your take is reductive and misses the point entirely. The two commenters above you weren't even talking about equal value bartering, they were just talking about giving shit away, which is a basic part of communities. You'd know that if A. you actually engaged with your community instead of being chronically online and B. would take the fat cock of capitalism out of your mouth cause its back there so deep it seems to be the only thing you can think about.

[@portpebble]

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 🤔

[@anatineduo4289]

Profound. I now have things I never dreamed of having as a youth, a youth who occasionally ate out of dumpsters and garbage cans... yet do not feel well cared for, also I don't feel like I do enough for my community (actually I don't even know who my community is), and I feel like governments and corporations rob me of the "wealth" that I trade my life for...

[@yoeyyoey8937]

That _is_ the value, the perceived need. It doesn’t make sense for small communities that are all doing the same thing to survive, but it makes sense when you bring in other communities or expanded societies into the picture

[@everfluctuating]

the most important thing in a community is the community, and its hard to have a community when people keep dying of exposure bc they dont have enough stuff to trade.

[@inuhundchien6041]

Of course the perceived value is the most important thing, because it's a real value. However much you try your basket of weed will never be as valuable as a palm sized meat. If you have nothing valuable to give why would anyone give anything valuable to you?

[@gmanplaysgames256]

"wealth is a concept" is not a profound statement, everything that doesn't have a precise physical manifestation is a concept, I could just as easily say "community is a concept" it means nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. what Andrewism describes here is the "pay it forward" mentality you often see among tight-knit families and small communities, like "hey man I'll buy lunch for us today, you buy next time" or "thanks for the help I owe you a solid", or how my parents give me beef they raise on thier small ranch and I help them out with whatever I can when I can. money is just a way of quantifying these sorts of exchanges when dealing with strangers and/or larger networks of people that have no reason to place trust in one another (because they don't know each other) so instead the trust is placed in the money and price is just a simple means of scaling how much someone wants something versus how much the person selling it is willing to let it go. if your neighbor gives you some of his extra apples he can reasonably assume you'll do him a favor at some point in the future and not worry too much, but you can't do that with a stranger or someone that lives on the other side of a continent.

[@cutecheerfreak1]

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.

[@dougmasters4561]

I am not an athropologist, but I had always assumed anthropology was a well respected field, and profound disciplined. ONe day i mentioned it in a conversation as an example, in a manner only slightly related to the topic, and was surprised how many people snickered at it. Now, these were random randos, but I was still curious, so I had over the years worked it into conversation more here and there and was further blown away by how many people truly dismiss it or consider it outright silly.....

[@rikusauske]

Almost as if the only way to convince people to support an obviously broken system is to convince them that there is no other option

[@MYNAMACHEF]

@@dougmasters4561 anyone who finds the study of human beings, our culture, and the systems we live in as laughable is an ignorant clown that doesnt deserve the time of day

[@elfsongtavern]

As someone who just got their bachelor’s in history, we are in this together. Someday we’ll change the world (I hope)

[@mggardiner4066]

@dougmasters4561 some of it has to do with the history sometimes, 1) it was founded to promote colonialism and racism, even more explicitly than most academic disciplines which have that lurking around. 2) early anthropologists weren’t always the most ethical (see 1) and would do a host of scientifically shaky things and no no’s, but also were often a bit too credulous or prone to opinion over science. The secret is that a lot of other sciences are this way too, but it’s just to lesser degree usually. Thankfully discipline has improved but it often has that stigma

[@katherandefy]

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.

[@lilbear19601]

A man that lived life fully. Respect

[@bumblebee4280]

My grandparents had some acreage and when they stopped growing coffee on it, it was all food crops. Various kinds with mango trees, avocado trees and macademia. I don't think they would ever sell any of the fruit from their fruit trees to their neighbours. The macadamias could be taken to a factory and sold there, but the neighbour kids would come and ask my grandma if they could pluck some. Selling to them would be ridiculous. I agree that farming neighbours don't sell to each other. They just share. Especially if it's not a cashcrop they sell. Sometimes you're on their property to draw water from their well and they gift you something to take home.

[@gunstorm05]

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.

[@Viranical]

in fairness to you, in today's world it's easy to forget people care about eachother

[@azurplex]

Back when, your neighbor was probably a family member. Most weren’t going to let family starve. When one has plenty it’s easy to share, the goods have less value (to you) because of the excess. But it has high value to the recipient, who is likely to reciprocate when they have plenty if something.

[@CRneu]

@@Viranical it's because we focus too much on the negative and not enough on the positive. we also don't know our neighbors like we used to. We're inundated with negative news about people being horrible that we have malformed views of the world. That's why people constantly think we live in the most dangerous time to be alive despite overwhelming evidence that we live in the safest period in human history.

[@MrMarinus18]

I also think it's worth observing what happens when money loses it's value. We can see this ironically with billionares and dictators. If everyone has more money than they know what to do with money stops being a useful thing to run an economy on. What we see develop however is not a peer to peer barter system but a system of favors, threats and dominate and submissive elements which can be quite fluid as usually the dominant one is also to some extent at the mercy of the subordinate ones. Of course peer to peer barter does happen but it's the exception, not the norm. It's far more likely to give someone a yacht for their birthday without any explicit or immediate returns than someone offering to exchange their yacht for someone else's mansion.

[@asjaosaline5987]

Problem is not money based economy, but world where money has no value and money as institutions is on centralized control. Few hundread yesrs ago even kings didnt have ability to print money. Worst thing they could do is melt uo gold coins and add cheaper metals on it. But in market there was people who decided how much money is worth. In roman empire while it was collapsing there was in circulation 28 different coins that had different % of gold in it. And merchants never accepted some diluted coins for they goods. Only people who didnt have any choice were soldiers who were paid wages from state. Today world Money dosent have value of itself since gold standard was remove money is based on faith and as we seen money gets cheaper and cheaper. 1 dollar century ago would be worth 140 dollars today. But even today people have coice they can establish they own currencys. In spain there is close to 10 alternative community money. In Germany there is hundreads of them about 30 is most used and accepted.

[@AnthonyStJames-yn8nr]

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.

[@jasondashney]

Governments around the world are moving away from cash because they can't get a cut from every transaction. It's so transparent.

[@technopoptart]

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

[@martinthemarine920]

worlds most based commenter. I wish more people felt this way when confronted with something that shakes something they believe.

[@MalkuthEmperor]

​@@martinthemarine920I aguree with you. Uncomfortable when confronted with new information should be taken as "hey I suppose in need to challenge what I believe ", instead of having some defensive stance as if we are just meant to learn something once, and then it has been deemed so, and nothing can altar it, no matter how useful. Usually I see this kind of defensiveness when it comes to something which is treated like a personal identity. For example national hystory. It encourages fighting for what we already have learned, instead of challenging our views in order to discover what is and what could be and how does it relate to current reality. I don't think there is a straight answer here, since a lot of people take nationality as a sence of pride, but, one answer for me is , critical thinking. With a framework of critical thinking I think we can overcome this urge to latch on to superficial characteristics of group identity, and in fact look at things more curiously, like we would a puzzle. To look at facts not as " set in stone" but as " set in contexts which are interdependent and never fully within our conscous grasp" . I'm not exempt from this of course, tho I try. To me it's a manner of cultural conditioning to contradictory ideas and realities which causes this kind of strange bias towards old ideas. If I percieve myself as a constant beeing which seeks only cirtainty, then I'm enevitably conditioned to be less flexible, to be less curious and more afraid to find out something which could shatter my beliefs if I dared look.. even if shattering my beliefs is enevitably positive , especiay when viewed from the lense of "I'm learning and I can't be cirtain, so I'll live with what I have untill I know better, at which point the process stats all over again" Have a good day,

[@MalkuthEmperor]

It's funny how such every day things that we would hardly think to question, are the corner stones of why something that we don't like keeps happening.

[@yoeyyoey8937]

What isn’t natural about it? Our current economy is just an advanced form of that for the most part

[@technopoptart]

@@yoeyyoey8937 watch the video. it is explained in detailed what is not natural about it

[@a.p.2356]

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.

[@peterbenoni1470]

The ones we assume are hollow and filled with milk? (For math, of course?)

[@davidwuhrer6704]

​@@peterbenoni1470A spherical cow of uniform density in a vacuum on a frictionless surface. It makes the maths a lot easier if you can ignore details that don't significantly affect the outcome, but it sounds very absurd.

[@peterbenoni1470]

@@davidwuhrer6704 Ah, yes, that's the cow.

[@a.p.2356]

@@peterbenoni1470 the joke was that a dairy farm was struggling to produce enough milk, so the farmer approached a local university to ask for help from academia. The school responded that while they didn't have an agricultural department, they did have some grad students in the physics department who were looking for a research project. Over the next several weeks, the farm was swarmed by bespectacled grad students in lab coats, taking measurements with complex instruments and having animated discussions in front of equation-covered chalkboards. Eventually, the physicists announced that they'd arrived at a solution and invited the farmer to attend a presentation of their findings. The farmer was excited; calling the university had been a long shot, but it seemed it had paid off. The lead physicist cleared their throat and started the presentation: "first, we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum..." The term "spherical cow" is used as humorous shorthand for a model which is simplified so much that the results of the model are useless. If a solution only works with spherical cow of a uniform density in a vacuum on a frictionless plane, then it doesn't really work.

[@afrikasmith1049]

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.

[@JayVal90]

The destruction of the community causes the ascension of materialistic consumerism. Economic theories don’t mean shit.

[@directedbyMax]

or a community at all now a days

[@ultrcombraun1559]

This also doesn't account for trade and reaource exchange across language and cultural barriers, or the exchange of things of higher tech generation, like computer parts, or train construction. It's an infantile and overly idealistic perspective

[@dravenwag]

​@@ultrcombraun1559why would it even need to mention cultural and language barriers? How did people 2,000 years ago trade from people halfway across the world? People have constantly come into contact with new and strange people who they can't understand, and found ways around the barriers.

[@AdamOwenBrowning]

@@dravenwag It'd be good to mention barriers of language and culture because they exist and we need to work around them? people in the past didn't work around them by ignoring their existence. It's telling that this is the only part of that person's comment you zeroed in on. Just a strange sore spot for you that a culture's history strongly affects varying attitudes in trade - it's not that scary that people are all a little different! If anything it's history's most sure guarantee. I'm mixed race and would not expect my English family to give/expect gifts for example in the same way that my Gujarati family do. This is something to consider, so that when we interact with people from different cultures, we aren't inadvertently rude to them because we didn't consider their cultural outlook.

[@michaeljames5936]

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.

[@MadsterV]

ding ding! it's scale. Goodwill does NOT scale. You can't know every inhabitant in a large city or expect a specialty store to give you something thinking they can walk by your place and get something some other day. You'll probably never see each other ever again and you're kilometers (or elbows or whatever) away anyway. It's too much. Trading comes in, and your society grows some more. Then specialization comes, and some goods are only made by a few or some are much more expensive than anything else (let's assume rightly so: don't smash my window brah). Then, you can't trade your bread for that water pump OR the jeweler wouldn't know what to do with so much fruit you'd have to offer him for a single gem. This is when money.

[@davidwuhrer6704]

Dunbar's number is 147 for modern humans, most contemporary humans manage a lot less because that space is taken up by fictional characters, celebrities, and cars. Most monkeys form kinship groups about the size of Dunbar's number, for example chimpanzees manage about 50. That's how the number was derived in the first place. In contrast, there is evidence that human settlements in the neolithic period numbered in the thousands, and traded with other settlements. Some things, like the house chicken, found their way all around the world. There was also technology transfer from Neanderthal settlements to modern human settlements. But the Amish tend to form settlements which split when their number goes beyond around 150.

[@StephenGillie]

Our monetary system IS a kind of social credit score. We get more for doing what other people like, and we can spend it to get stuff from others. But we can't request more goodwill from others than we've provided ourselves. The problem with this system is keeping it fair, but every system has problems, and the efficiency of not needing a centralized system - just trade paper or coins with another person - can't be matched by any central plan.

[@jesarablack1661]

And even in non-monetary systems, there was normally Some good (dry grain being a common one) that served a similar purpose where even if you didn't Need more grain, Almost everyone would accept the grain because it could store well and had intrinsic value (food), so it was easy to make trades with.

[@davidwuhrer6704]

@@jesarablack1661 Requiring a medium of exchange for trade makes it a monetary system. The fundamental difference between a money-based economy and a non-monetary economy is that in the latter there is no reason to withhold surplus for the sake of getting a better deal.

[@othelliusmaximus]

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

[@ValerietheLovelyDeadlyItalian]

Lmao i just noticed that

[@monsieurdorgat6864]

Actually, that's a unique goat. By the law of supply and demand it must be the most valuable goat of all! 🤣

[@a.p.2356]

@@monsieurdorgat6864 This is a limited edition collector goat. It's not any better at being a goat than the average goat, but its scarcity makes it much more valuable.

[@RexxyRobin]

Do not trust goats. Period.

[@VObyGlynnis]

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!

[@cl5470]

Would they also share with a black muslim family that moved to town? Prejudice is one of the main reasons commerce exists. The "haves" of society need money to convince them to share what they have, unfortunately.

[@VObyGlynnis]

@@cl5470 One of the neighboring families is Black in fact, but I don't know their religious affiliation. They have a catering business and they're super nice.

[@IVIRnathanreilly]

​@@cl5470do you know why money was minted in precious metals?

[@AleksandarBell]

@@cl5470Not necessarily? I’m white and one of my university friends is black and I struggle with math while she struggles with essay writing, so I trade her math lessons for revision/help with essays. As long as you’re not racist or prejudice it works fine

[@1st1anarkissed]

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.

[@AlexArthur94]

In these cases, I think people are usually afraid of losing their right to refuse to give or do something in the future, and so they'd rather not receive the gift or favor. Clearly, we don't have the level of trust that people had back then.

[@M_M_ODonnell]

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.

[@andrewgodly5739]

Those that propagate the fable are the last to actually believe in it

[@lorenzomizushal3980]

Ironically Marx's Das Kapital propagates this "myth." If his whole critique of capitalist society rests on the myth of the barter system then Marx was quite wrong. Damn.

[@andrewgodly5739]

@lorenzomizushal3980 he was always right in his observations and critique of how capitalism fundamentally functions. But maybe only that.

[@lorenzomizushal3980]

@@andrewgodly5739 yeah, maybe but he stands on the shoulders of giants like Adam Smith and all.

[@Duiker36]

Barter: the original sin.

[@NathanSmutz]

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.😅

[@Andrewism]

If Johnny had two apples...

[@LillyAnarkitty]

He would give one to his neighbor who had none, and then she would help him tend his apple tree

[@GhostOnTheHalfShell]

It’s kinda funny but the Inca empire didn’t have writing or money, but they did have alternatives.

[@GhostOnTheHalfShell]

Trade in pre history spanned the Pacific and others hundreds or thousands miles, including from the Australian coast to its interior for 50k years. And Göbekli Tepe is one of many sites destroying the idea of the “stages” of civilization. They prolly traded. Same in S America.

[@GhostOnTheHalfShell]

And potlatch has also been characterized as competitive gift giving. If only we could convince billionaires to do this.

[@iiNgONYaMa]

You funny huh? Scottish like. Montisorre

[@user-sl6gn1ss8p]

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

[@yoeyyoey8937]

You should make other connections to get the full picture

[@TARINunit9]

It's so pervasive I didn't even realize what this video was going for until the very end. I thought it was going to be clarifying money predates barter, when in fact it's a condemnation of money entirely.

[@Newnodrogbob]

@@TARINunit9of course it’s a condemnation of money. I knew that as soon as I clicked on it. It’s all just a bunch of dipshit communists missing the forest for the trees. The condemnation of capitalism is the objective. Nitpicking the history of barter is just how they are doing it this time.

[@sirknight4981]

This myth is widely ingrained in economics because economists are not actually scientists. But don't conflate capitalism with monetary, debt-based economic systems in general; such systems predate "capitalism" itself. The myth is simply due to a fallacy of reasoning: theoreticians attempt to construct a primitive economic system capable of solving conventional, modern economic problems but as the author of the video explains, such problems (as usually require 1:1 value spot transactions to resolve) were simply not common in everyday life in actual primitive societies where people lived in small, tight-knit communities which advantaged more trust-based and less strictly debt-based systems. Such systems only really work in primitive or small societies or at a local level and would simply be inadequate to serve the needs of modern societies. It's why even Aristotle made the same mistake even though he antedates "modern capitalism".

[@yoeyyoey8937]

@@sirknight4981 how is a gift giving culture not the same as a credit system?

[@joebykaeby]

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

[@Liliphant_]

Biology... They teach a super simplified essentialized version in school and the majority of people don't go on to learn the nuances.

[@NathanaelTak]

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.

[@Kram1032]

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?

[@bluexephosfan970]

I remember reading some Greek play giving the mythologized version of the founding of Athens legal system in school, and it was entirely focused on preventing blood feuds, to the point where it was surprisingly less individualistic than we (the students) were expecting it to be, given our cultural conception of the legal system and of ancient Greece.

[@Kram1032]

@@bluexephosfan970 in some places, blood feuds are an issue to this day, and typically, they are places with a weaker/less established judicial system. I think there are both individualistic and collectivist ways to read that though. Like, for me as an individual it's good that I don't have to expect to be murdered over a minor accidental affront to somebody else. And for society as a whole, it's also a huge benefit that many more people get to live for significant timespans, collecting experience and being able to help each other etc.

[@bluexephosfan970]

@Kram1032 oh yeah I am absolutely pro justice system, I think a healthy system of lawyers and judges is necessary for a safe society, even the most anarchic of societies need judges and lawyers, and I think not having those things is what causes the rise of blood feuds, just weird to think about what would've been going through the heads of the first people in a society to say "fuck family honor, we need something more structural than this"

[@AlexArthur94]

@@bluexephosfan970 I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that when a leader of a group found out that two of their sub-groups were feuding, both of whom they were responsible for, they would immediately want to devise a method of justice that could bring an end to that feud, because it would endanger the group from within. I'm guessing that would've been the most common cause. Secondarily, if two separate but friendly groups ended up having a feud between some of the members of each group, then the leadership might have met to find a solution to that before it got out of hand.

[@SmallGreenPlanetoid]

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.

[@AleksandarBell]

My neighborhood does something similar, we provide food when people are dealing with something that would make cooking hard like illness, death, or a new baby. We could demand money or a favor in exchange but we generally to it because we want people to feel happy and provided for during this issue. It makes their life better and we hope they’d do the same for us, but they don’t have to

[@SmallGreenPlanetoid]

@@AleksandarBell Yes, I've heard of this too. I only singled out the Chinese culture because the offers of food from my friend's community were regular, and linked to relatively minor events (think "picking my kid up from school," or "helping me choose a television"), if anything at all.

[@Muzikman127]

Interesting comment, I don't really understand your last point there when you said "~so it's not the capitalism killer you think it'd be" though. What does a gift economy with social obligations have to do with capitalism?

[@SmallGreenPlanetoid]

@@Muzikman127 It stems from Drew's skit and point in the video at around 7:50 that the barter myth is that bartering is imperfect, and thus the reason many economists justify the use of currency. Obviously the historical and continued existence of gift economies downplayed the dominance of a single, currency-only economy. I might have overreacted when I suggested that it's a "capitalism-killer," as gift economies can clearly coexist alongside other economies. I simply also wanted to point out that the gift economy can also breed feelings of social resentment just like other systems: in my friend's case, he really didn't feel like returning the favor of food, but would do it to keep up appearances.

[@grimjoker5572]

Ah yes, good old social credit; not a new concept.

[@final_catalyst]

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

[@neoqwerty]

Case in point, grocery stores and their insane food wastes that they try to deliberately ruin so no one will eat it without paying, like fuck, donate it to a soup kitchen you assholes.

[@H.G.Halberd]

and now, under capitalism, we actually DO let things sit around until they spoil so nobody gets anything for free, how civilised and not petty of us!

[@thomaswoitekaitis8977]

​@@H.G.Halberdcapitalism has been captured, not following laws put in place for corruption. We do not have capitalism we have crony capitalism and vulture capitalism. Reign in the corruption and things go back to better for everyone.

[@jcomden]

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.

[@hamnchee]

A community of addicts is probably an unworthy pool of subjects to observe for insights into historical bartering.

[@Leadvest]

@@hamnchee What do you mean?

[@MadsterV]

is unsheltered a new euphemism for homeless?

[@blackpowderkun]

@@hamnchee Ancients probably did marijuana, mushrooms, wild tobacco etc.

[@rikusauske]

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

[@jcdenton7261]

Sounds like there would be one guy who borrowed alot more than anyone

[@Jet-ij9zc]

This just punishes those who manage their money well

[@tigrisfilms]

You know a lot of people (I think it was mostly Asian or Muslim ppl) do this! They pool together resources to help ppl start businesses and then the person pays them back later.

[@SinclairSound]

You actually are using money! Congratulations you have created your own money, a scriptural money, denoting credits and debts! This is a point left out of this video, money is created in different forms, for different reasons in different places and time. Most money throughout history (and today) is simply scriptural money, this is why monetarism does not work. Money is created endogenously through the extension of credit!

[@fiona9891]

​@@Jet-ij9zc if you think of helping people you care about as a punishment then that's on you

[@cronsola1357]

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!

[@AleksandarBell]

Yeah I always wondered what would happen if somebody had a load of something they didn’t want and nobody else wanted

[@HesderOleh]

@@AleksandarBell why would they have gathered all that if they didn't want it and no one else wanted it?

[@HesderOleh]

The alternative explanation provided in this video is just as full of holes though.

[@alliedatheistalliance6776]

Capitalism is all about inventing problems that never existed to justify its own existence

[@pinkliongaming8769]

​@@AleksandarBellIf nobody wants something it's not worth anything, you couldn't trade anyone for a pile of dirt anymore than you can sell air. Most things have some amount of value, Mangoes can be eaten so someone will always want them

[@1Dimee]

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.

[@elzearcontelly2651]

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

[@donovanberserk4993]

🤫 no need for logic here

[@Ethan13371]

Market price *can* differ from a fair, negotiated, and mutual agreement. For instance: monopoly and monopsony. (An example would be a company store situation)

[@abdallahhakeem5185]

@@Ethan13371 But then that would still just be the determination of value by negotiation and mutual agreement. It would be fair but unfortunate because there is no alternative that the buyer/seller is willing or able to divert to, away from the goods or services provided by the monopoly/monopsony. Both in a barter system and in a market, the 'price' would be the highest value anyone can offer to the mono-trader to a given extent determined by their need for funds, and a mono-trader is similarly considered a bad situation in both.

[@Thaelyn1312]

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

[@feliciavale4279]

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.

[@3nertia]

"History is written by the victor" heh

[@PlasmaFuzer]

@@3nertia A wise axiom to consider in light of the recommendations of this video's author. Perhaps there is a good reason we don't organize our economy around the act of giving away the products of our labor to strangers.

[@3nertia]

@@PlasmaFuzer That is because capitalism was the victor and has been for millennia, since before it was even called that ;)

[@TitaniumDragon]

His video is also flat-out wrong, though. For instance, slavery predates money, and was frequently practiced in societies which did not have money. Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans both practiced slavery without money; indeed, the only societies which are known to have not practiced it are societies with money which abolished slavery. Likewise, the reason why money proliferated was precisely because the previous vague systems of debt which existed were very prone to inequity and exploitation, and disputes over these things would frequently escalate into violence; tribal societies had extremely high homicide rates relative to modern day societies, and it is precisely because the rules were much more vague that this happened. Creating more hard and fast rules led to a decline in these sorts of disputes. This is why money has replaced other economic systems - because money is just better for dealing with stuff like this. Indeed, modern-day society is oriented around dealing with strangers precisely because stuff is so complicated you can't have a small local social group do everything without being extremely poor. Friends circles and families will still often practice gift-giving and favor trading. Money has replaced barter for dealing with larger groups because it is just much better at it, and leads to far fewer conflicts.

[@3nertia]

@@TitaniumDragon Ah, the fallacy ... Slavery was never abolished, it was just extended to include everyone and money is a tool for that - you can't truly be this naive? For millennia, the privileged and educated have ruled over the poor and uneducated. You know what 'capitalism' was before it was called that? Colonialism! Before that? Feudalism! Keep eating the shit they shovel in the form of propaganda though and keep regurgitating those same tired, nonsensical, capitalist arguments ROFLMEYERWIENER Ironic that people believe that we "need" money but allow the over 2000 billionaires on this planet to hoard more wealth than any reasonable human could spend in 100 lifetimes lmao Who's paying mother earth for the resources we steal, I wonder ... It's not complicated, bureaucrats just make it so because that complexity benefits them and their shady dealings ;)

[@stevenneiman1554]

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.

[@kardlonockardonis708]

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.

[@krinkrin5982]

Interestingly, when I play multiplayer with friends, this is combined with stockpiling resources. For example if a certain piece of armor costs X metal, we stockpile metal till we have enough to produce that piece of armor for everyone at the same time. This way no-one feels left behind.

[@PersephoneDarling28]

nah, I always go to maximize my profit in those games

[@tj-co9go]

Yeah but current video games are also based on current society and its institutions, eg capitalism and imperialism

[@krinkrin5982]

@@tj-co9go A lot of them are, but there are also a lot that are not, or give you an option to proceed however you want. Survival games usually don't have this association. In Long Dark you are scavenging for materials to survive. Minecraft can be played as an exploitative colonizer, a raider, a helpful stranger, or a total hermit. You can stripmine everything, or gather only the stuff you need. In Terraria your goal is actually defending the scattered population from monsters and multiple invasions. In Ori you are always rebuilding and revitalizing the forest. Valheim doesn't have capitalism nor imperialism, since everyone besides you and a single merchant (now two) is dead and/or hostile on sight. You can also trade only precious stones and jewelry you can't make yourself.

[@JazzerciseJustice]

​@persephonenightshade1500 there are no profits in survival games what do you mean?

[@lows000]

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!

[@raysmith984]

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.

[@lot110]

bullshit

[@PraniGopu]

Thank you for your wonderfully articulate and rational comment. I have a lot of respect for the medium of money, which allows us to exchange our efforts for the best works (be they material, intellectual, artistic, etc.) that humankind has to offer. Of course, it cannot and doesn't need to substitute every model of human cooperation, but as you explained, it has an important and well-deserved place in human life. Also, as you indicated, money is not inherently good or bad but a tool that can used for either good or bad; that depends on us as individuals and as a society. Something I'd add is that every bit of money is a promise of value that must be upheld by the producers, which means that the value of money (especially in the long-range) both feeds into and is fed by the productivity, honesty, creativity, long-range vision and discipline of the people in the society (overall). So, in my understanding, a society that truly values money promotes at least these virtues.

[@austincde]

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 💀

[@lv1543]

I would say yes.

[@Soulsphere001]

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.

[@ZealotOfSteal]

Those that don't help out get punished and in extreme cases, they get exiled.

[@HesderOleh]

@@ZealotOfSteal the "money" is your social capital. You can go into debt and you can be in surplus. The ledger is in the communal mind.

[@ZealotOfSteal]

@@HesderOleh Money wasn't mentioned in my comment, though you're not wrong. I was simply saying what happens with people who don't contribute.

[@HesderOleh]

@@ZealotOfSteal I wonder why the video assumes that money has to be precise and not an approximation, besides the impulse to insert a myth that before money everyone was cooperating in harmony.

[@TwilightSun32]

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

[@marcriba7581]

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.

[@LoopsyLopsy]

I’ve been interested in reading Caliban and the Witch. From your description, it sounds extremely fascinating!

[@talitanaka]

Ah yes, ignoring our history and being doomed to repeat it.

[@revwroth3698]

Damn medieval peasants and their quiet quitting... Lmao

[@Theballonist]

I’ve heard of this book before too, will have to read it soon.

[@RaunienTheFirst]

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

[@AlexTheLizard]

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.”

[@runakovacs4759]

Humans are individuals. Some try to enforce conformity, and they succeed. But money has liberated us. Money means I can buy food, have shelter, obtain medicine and spiritual fulfilment even if I worship the wrong god. If not for money, I'd have died to exposure or hunger with how much my local community hates me for being a transgender woman in love with another transgender woman. If my local community could get away with it, they'd torch my house to cleanse us of sin.

[@A_name_is_a_name]

I think it’s more of a situation where the macroeconomic structure based on barter & trade routes was what constituted bartering being used as the default method of exchange of the past. Because it was the default method of exchange between tribes very far apart from each other.

[@magnarcreed3801]

Of course though. At the core all function on an individual baseline. You work together because it has benefits. If it doesn’t, they stop. Same with all social species. Even ants. Queen ant literally had to make them rely on her for reproductive success.

[@davidmenasco5743]

"Economics" is the mythology of our age. Economists are people whose job it is to rationalize the status quo, telling us why it's a good thing that a handful of people own almost everything. This is why so much of it seems nonsensical, and why science and observation tell a different story entirely from what economists insist must be true.

[@A_name_is_a_name]

@@davidmenasco5743 After a discussion with some peers on the matter I found a very simplistic way of explaining your dilemma. Think of economists as you would meteorologists. The uncertainties that follow both practices is the similarity I’m comparing.

[@jonathanverret6872]

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.

[@ZealotOfSteal]

Yes a barter system is more primitive than a monetary system. Because monetary systems are much newer than anything we might call barter. Primitive is also not necessarily a value judgement. Also you've put the cart before the horse. It's not that money is alienating, it's that in a large group of people "community-oriented transactions" just doesn't work and a more impersonal way of conducting a transaction is necessary.

[@Rellikan]

Long range transactions and fleeting transactions are by default alienated. Strangers who know nothing about each other's personality, goals and personal values. If your own community doesn't have what you want you will have to resort to going outside of it.

[@FaceD0wnDagon]

​@@RellikanThis isn't actually a hot take, but alienated is not the same as alienating. One suggests a pre-existing condition, while the other suggests a causal relationship.

[@42Psyche]

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.

[@packman2321]

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.

[@anatineduo4289]

Profound

[@yoeyyoey8937]

Yeah so that’s the value, just because it doesn’t look like what you think it should doesn’t mean it’s not barter or banking or capitalist

[@amoureux6502]

​@@yoeyyoey8937if your grandma knits you a scarf is it capitalist to wear the scarf because you love your grandma? I read the original comment twice and I still can't see how you're drawing your conclusion.

[@yoeyyoey8937]

@@amoureux6502 that’s my grandma. That’s not some random person across town or over a river or mountain. You can’t compare familial relations with a society made up of thousands or millions of strangers. I hope that it is obvious that they are completely different social relations. That’s the whole issue with these theories.

[@amoureux6502]

@@yoeyyoey8937 grandma was a bad comparison maybe. Your friend? "a statement about your connection to the people who made you the clothing" I figured this meant, you know, showing who you're well-acquainted with. The value of human connection exists outside of capital value.

[@elijahbrown9738]

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

[@LiverpoolReject]

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!

[@lordknightalex]

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)

[@MZero8099]

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

[@grimjoker5572]

and violently tore apart any other community they came across while practicing such things as exile or more vicious punishments for any cultural, spiritual, or political dissent... these systems largely determined by the shape of the moon. Yes, let's go back to that.

[@XSpamDragonX]

Your ancestors would have kicked anyone out of the community if they didn't pick up their tab. People wouldn't just keep giving to the guy who doesn't work.

[@oscarlove4394]

​@@grimjoker5572 progress isn't linear. We can progress in one way and regress in others. Learning from the past doesn't mean we have to replicate their mistakes, if anything we now know how things can go wrong and are more aware and on guard for such things.

[@grimjoker5572]

@@oscarlove4394 The only lesson worth learning from the past is that human nature cannot be entrusted with authority. Liberty is the only lesson of humanity.

[@TacticusPrime]

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.

[@ericrae7531]

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 :)

[@lewisnicolls7933]

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.

[@mygills3050]

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

[@monsieurdorgat6864]

Honestly, Americans exist in a hilarious space where they say they want something like Anarchism while instead supporting a sort of ultra-capitalist feudalism...

[@akoben]

Bitcoin

[@aganib4506]

​@@monsieurdorgat6864The cognitive dissonance is truly unreal with some of these Americans. Smh

[@monsieurdorgat6864]

@@aganib4506 Dissonance all over the place in America and Europe. Even the Euro-American left is pretty weird - the same folks who support LGBTQ+ rights and campaign for labor unions often have no issues supporting the imperialist war industry. I mean, who do you think those people are? Conservatives sure as hell know. That should be their first clue.

[@sauerkrautlanguage]

you can't escape taxation cuz printing money is literally indirect taxation. Instead of directly taking money from the people, you create more money and cause a diffuse chain of inflation to propagate throughout the economy while the people just scratch their heards wondering why prices keep going up. Money is by design a tool of labor control, it's just very indirect so as to give the illusion of freedom

[@barryrobbins7694]

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

[@Duiker36]

I actually call money a "proxy for trust" basically for this reason. If you use money, then you don't have to trust the other person.

[@barryrobbins7694]

@@Duiker36 Trust is a fundamental aspect of human relationships. Money deemphasizes the individual relationship between people, but trust is still required when using any form of modern government issued printed money.

[@dokchampa9324]

So true dude, and that's exactly why it's awesome. Sincerely, an Introvert

[@yoeyyoey8937]

L take

[@yoeyyoey8937]

@@barryrobbins7694yes it does that on purpose and that’s why it works. You don’t have to personally know Joe at the electric company 20 miles away in order for you to get power in your home

[@Graymalkinn]

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

[@tangymonarch5166]

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

[@Tangers3345]

Yeah, a lot of people are talking about how such a system as this would benefit them personally and giving anecdotal evidence of small scale transaction in which it worked while ignoring the fact that they have each benefited from chains of billions of impersonal transactions in order to even make such a thing as posting on a KZbin video possible. I do agree that something seems off about assuming a barter system preceding money, that was cool of him to point out. I think that community giving and sharing is something that should be radically increased but the idea that it could completely replace money in any sort of advanced society is extremely naive.

[@VersusThem]

This is all beside the point, I'll copy paste a comment "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."

[@nobodyimportant2470]

Also he is forgetting about staples. There are many products which are always of use which would be used as intermediary goods prior to money. You wouldn't trade 10 bushels of apples for a goat as the apples would likely go bad before the person getting them can use them. However Salt has no expiration date and every one needs it for preserving food so you could trade say 1 bushel of apples for 1/4th pound of salt with 10 people then trade the 2.5 pounds of salt for a goat. Salary comes from the Latin word for salt as people were often paid with salt.

[@krinkrin5982]

The development of writing is thought to have started for the purpose of accounting in early cities for exactly this reason. You can't remember all of the various IOUs for hundreds of people, but if you write it down, you have a permanent record, so you don't have to remember. As for money, it is just the latest in a diverse web of things used to represent value. Ancient Japanese taxes were paid in rice, legionaries in Rome got salt for their service, At least one tribe of people in the Americas would exchange gold idols and bracelets for salt, this exchange being the basis of their trade and why the Spanish thought there was a hidden city of gold. One of the island populations literally uses huge immovable stones as currency in intra-family exchanges, they just remember who owns which stone.

[@GSBarlev]

This is largely the point he makes. Equivalent exchanges arose in cities with temples and in long-distance or spontaneous transactions between strangers. Bear in mind that it's only very recently (as in, literally, 2007) that the majority of humans have lived in urban as opposed to rural communities. The point of this video is also to consider whether there are other ways this system could be scaled. I know the "C" word is _verboten_ in many circles, but one need only look to _Star Trek_ to imagine how a system of gift-giving could be extrapolated to a galactic scale when large pockets of it exist in post-scarcity conditions.

[@Wallnuts]

The skit midway through was entertaining and refreshing while making a good example of how unnecessarily complicated an imagined 1:1 bartering would be as opposed to a community based system of debts and favors

[@Vaeldarg]

Quest: Plow-shares to Swords Bake some bread and turn it in to me. Reward: 1 spear.

[@SoMuchFacepalm]

I mean, if you go with a child's interpretation of how barter works, then sure.

[@maryjackson1194]

This is so sane. It's crazy that academics held onto an idea that doesn't mirror what we see. I've known people who were always trying to "barter" all things, including favors. They were jerks. I worked for a collaborative company that was acquired by a competitive one: no one in the acquiring company knew the concept of "sure, I can do that for you; you can owe me one."

[@AleksandarBell]

I love academia, but there’s a ton of people who are just straight up out of touch with how reality is with certain things. They know how to research really well but don’t understand how to empathize or see things other ways

[@HesderOleh]

It is funny how you don't even realize that "owing" someone one, is almost exactly a form of money, as it is an IOU which is a debt which is the actual basis of money. Just because it wasn't explicit, doesn't mean that you didn't have a ledger of people who were in too much debt.

[@ginnyjollykidd]

That reminded me of the "school supply list" every American grade school student gets. It lists all the supplies students need for class. Some went into a personal school box (which in my day was a cardboard box. They were fashioned after cigar boxes that I suppose were earlier used to hold school supplies). A few of them were collected by the teacher, such as boxes of tissue. I remember wondering what happened to the tissue when it was collected. It didn't occur to me that there was always a box of tissue in the teacher's desk for us to get a tissue to blow one's nose. Not until one day when I saw the teacher go over to the stack of tissue boxes next to a side wall. She picked up a new box, opened it, then placed it on her desk where the tissue box always sat. Mystery solved, and alternate economy revealed!

[@colleenforrest7936]

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?

[@FacebookAunt]

In the case of tree fruits like avocados those trees were planted years ago and it isn't easy to swap them to something else. You can't just chop them down and plant apple trees, because the land/climate that was great for avocados probably isn't good for apples and besides it would take years before you get your first apple anyway. More generally gardening/farming is an uncertain process and you never know exactly how much you're going to get. Maybe your tomatoes get a blight but your zucchinis get a bumper crop. More zucchinis than you know what to do with. Next year the reverse happens and you're swimming in tomatoes. C'est la vie.

[@Atoll-ok1zm]

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.

[@megana5766]

For sure! Or even the typical borrowing an egg or some sugar. If I borrow ingredients from my neighbors I give them some of the final product and they do the same for my family. And for some reason food almost always tastes better when someone else makes it so everyone’s happy😂

[@skullshapedbox]

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

[@SoMuchFacepalm]

Where did you get the flour?

[@hamnchee]

I was gonna ask the same question. How are you making bread in the first place?

[@armartin0003]

My grandma was a subsistence farmer and she was always making more food than she could eat or can. She didn't sell her extra. She didn't barter it away. She gave it to her neighbors, inviting everyone over to share in the extra food she would cook up for dinner. She did it for friendship, and for fun, and just because it made her feel great. Obviously, she was a pinko commie and should have been put away in a re-education camp and taught that it's better for the food to rot than to give it away.

[@SilverStarHeggisist]

That's not really being a commie. Being a commie isn't giving away your stuff, that's charity. Being a commie is giving away other people's stuff.

[@purplepenguin43]

Having your neighbors be nice to you i return for food is still a trade, your trading food for relationships. The classic modern examples of this are making brownies or having a BBQ for all your neighbors so you have an excuse to meet and get to know them. This helps improve community relationships, and you exploit those relationships for safety and better community, for example people will notice and care if they see a strange vehicle parked in the driveway(thief) or will be willing to lone you their truck for a project, or you take them to the airport so they don’t need a taxi. Those good relationships i bought for the price of a BBQ are potentially the value of a security system, rental truck, taxi etc… Now some label this as generosity, but i like to label it as a calculated risk, or an investment, maybe i see the return on that investment maybe I don’t. But for me it is an investment even if the only things i get out of it are metaphysical like friendship.

[@xx_amongus_xx6987]

Being part of a commune doesn't mean you're a commie lol, you can still be charitable. Also, if you're referring to businesses throwing out leftovers instead of giving them away for free, this isn't because of "muh capitalism", it's because of how the law and suing works. Food gets thrown out for a reason, if a business gives away this food that should have been thrown away, they can be liable for what happens to the homeless person after they eat the food. And if you start giving away food to 1 homeless person, more will eventually show up. And to put it bluntly, a bunch of homeless people crowding around a business is not good for business. This part isn't a problem with capitalism either, it's a problem with how people would naturally react, how you would probably react.

[@WiseFool888]

​@@purplepenguin43 congratz you are a sociopath.

[@celeri6497]

​@@SilverStarHeggisistcharity implies that those people are needy and not co-equal to the ever-generous giver tho. it'a very communist to freely give your surplus and share with your neighbours, that's called mutual aid

[@thomasstewart9752]

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.

[@lilbilliam]

New Andrew dropping 🤘🏾

[@clareselgin3208]

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.

[@Egalitariat-likesecretariat]

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.

[@ldblokland463]

Great video man! Barter never really made sense to me as an idea on the long term anyways. Also gotta say your narration is great. You have a really nice and comforting voice to listen to:)

[@genericytprofile852]

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.

[@Sordatos]

But you will still expect rhe the others to help you out, children have an idea of fairness pretty early, one than even seems naturally and not learned.

[@The_Loreseeker]

“If we ignore historic examples of barter, barter never existed!” Ok lmao

[@clairecelestin8437]

Whenever someone has to explain something complicated, it's common to present a slightly wrong oversimplification first, and then give a more advanced and correct version later once the students have grasped the fundamentals. For example, when teaching physics, we start out with Newton's laws of motion and imagine that there's no atmosphere and no friction. Later on, friction and atmospheric drag are added back in, and at some later point we start to deal with more accurate models such as Einstein's relativity that do a better job of modeling how motion works at extremely high speeds or near gravitational fields. What you've done in this video is analogous to saying, "All of physics is wrong, because look, friction takes place in the real world." Yes, it does, you're right to point it out, but high level physicists understand this, so all you've managed to do is show the limitations of physics 101, but not debunk the entire discipline. Similarly, although it's not covered in econ 101, high level economists are aware that gift economies exist within family groups or small, tightly interconnected societies, and also shows up in phenomenon such as the Choctaw-Irish bond or the desire for progressive companies to (at least make a show of) operating in an environmentally green, ethical, sustainable way. Non-monetary strategies are not only acknowledged to exist, but are directly studied for example as a known solution to the tragedy of the commons- rather than privatizing the common good, some societies leave the common good as non-excludable, but apply social pressure to people who overconsume, resulting in social incentives instead of strictly economic ones. The real argument about why monetary systems are beneficial for organizing human effort are that gift economies and social pressures are difficult (although not completely impossible) to scale beyond small, culturally homogeneous groups where individuals have direct interpersonal bonds. Milton Friedman talks about this point directly when discussing the Lesson of the Pencil, when he says that one of the astonishing things about the monetary system is that it's able to coordinate effort even across language, religious, and other cultural barriers. Although he doesn't talk about the alternative directly, if you read between the lines a bit, the reason he thinks this culturally heterogeneous coordination is remarkable is because non-monetary systems either struggle or completely fail to achieve this. Even if everyone agrees to cooperate and means well, attempting to act in good faith to coordinate effort, another limitation of non-monetary systems is that they fail to solve the information problem of economic effort. Remember that we're trying to coordinate at a scale at which, not only do participants not have a direct pathway of communication, but often it's difficult or impossible to even identify who is involved in producing or benefitting from a certain economic effort, or how the resources used in production could be applied to thousands of competing, alternate uses. Prices do coordinate this; Learn Liberty's 6 minute 40 second video "What if there were no prices?" does a fantastic job of explaining how this works. In summary, while non-monetary incentive structures exist and are worth studying, economists are aware of this and have good reasons for thinking those systems would be ineffective for solving global economic problems. Edit- fixed a spelling error

[@cdw2468]

i guess then the question is: if non-monetary systems are harder to achieve in larger societies, should we then just have smaller societies rather than getting rid the “non-monetary” part?

[@clairecelestin8437]

@@cdw2468 In my opinion, the negative tradeoff to this approach is that economically isolated groups don't benefit from the wealth that is created by economies of scale; specifically they don't get access to the higher quality (or cheaper) goods that are made available when people are able to specialize and trade. For example, economically isolated areas like Appalachia have strong community bonds, but lag behind when you look at metrics like per capita income, life expectancy, and so on. However, every individual has their own priorities and their own subjective value functions, and some individuals can and do choose to live in such small, tightly knit, isolated communities. They prefer that over the comfort and benefits of monetary exchange. No economist can tell you what you prefer.

[@evanwheeler634]

I think you miss understood the argument. He's not saying "all physics is wrong because friction exist" he's saying "simple physics without friction is limiting our imagination on what physics is and can be". He is essentially just pointing to the fact that most trade historically did not occur with strangers or in large scale where monetary systems or the traditional "barter" model makes sense. You're in agreement with his argument essentially except dismissing the notion that micro/macro economists don't think outside the paradigm. This flies in the face of what most economic research focuses on which is a simplified model that works at scale but may fail at the small scale of modeling human behavior. Only recent economic research has addressed this. Ofc prices coordinate, but what do prices mean to a tribe of 150 trading internally? This kind of local trading matters for market activities and the allocation of resources a central foci of economics as a discipline.

[@clairecelestin8437]

@@evanwheeler634 I think his point is reflected in his quotes, "Why does everything have to be this rational, calculated exchange?" and "Consolidating everything into one sphere of exchange through money is not the only way of organizing economic life". I believe he's saying that the tendency of economists to fixate only on monetary value biases their way of thinking in such a way so as to cause them to fail to consider other modes of exchange, and other strategies for organizing economies and societies. What I'm trying to point out is 1) that's not an accurate description of what economists believe; there is an important distinction between 'monetary value' and whatever subjective metric is used by the individual when evaluating their utility function. Non-monetary factors are an important part of any utility function. If utility functions were strictly monetary, it would be impossible to explain gift exchanges during cultural events such as Christmas. The idea that non-monetary factors should be included in an individual's utility function is not new or poorly studied; it goes back at least as far as Jeremy Bentham's felicific calculus, which predates even Marx. However, even though utility functions are often discussed in monetary terms because the monetary side is easier to quantify and discuss, the link between economics and sociology is that humans use the same decision making process to optimize both monetary and non-monetary forms of subjective value. Andrewism is very correct to point out that this decision process is often less an arithmetical ledger that exists in the brain, and more a vague feeling that comes mostly from the heart, but it's still a subjective utility function. Behavioral economists have been explicitly saying this for 50 years. Even a heartful, impassioned decision like whether or not to cut a toxic relative out of your life can be explained through the same decision processes and principles with which humans try to optimize other sorts of value. 2) Saying that non-monetary systems exist doesn't even come close to proving that such systems are superior to monetary exchange at providing a better environment in which for humans to live and prosper. I have a lot of empathy for the widespread confusion about the benefit of monetary systems, because our emotional and psychological ability to understand concepts like fairness and wealth evolved in small, socially interconnected tribes during the Pleistocene, under dire resource scarcity that made something like a positive-sum economy impossible. Hearts are terrible at understanding dollars. Nevertheless, widespread access to monetary exchange and lightly regulated markets has been and continues to be an astonishingly effective source of real human prosperity and means for coordinating human effort to meet human needs. Economists are aware of non-monetary exchange and do consider them, and the reason economists conclude that monetary systems work better is because they do actually work better.

[@gabrielcid7905]

Thank you for this post. Underrated

[@nanothrill7171]

i almost pissed myself on 'bluray is a social construct'

[@jankostrhun8725]

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

[@wfjhDUI]

10:24 For large industrial economies, consolidating everything into one sphere of exchange through money actually does seem to be the only way of organizing economic life, or at least a collapse into one sphere seems inevitable. In a small community, everyone knows each other's business and social norms can enforce the isolation of spheres, but that doesn't work in large communities where there's an expectation of privacy and most members are strangers. If two people on the other side of town are conducting a taboo cross-sphere exchange, we have no way of even knowing, much less stopping them. An example of this in real-life is the sale of welfare benefits by their recipients, e.g. selling "food stamps" for cash. It's illegal to sell welfare benefits, so in this way it's an attempt to isolate the economic spheres, e.g. groceries vs. non-groceries, but crossing spheres by selling welfare benefits is still widespread. Even if you tie welfare benefits to ID and manage to enforce that, people can still sell the groceries after acquiring them. And even if you somehow DRM every last grape, simply by providing someone with welfare benefits you've freed up their existing money to be spent elsewhere.

[@SoMuchFacepalm]

Exactly. That's why command economies don't work byond a personal scale, because no person can actually do that. Let alone all the people in the economy.

[@MassDefibrillator]

The spheres given as examples, are not normally what is considered "economic life", economic life, as what you mean, is just one of the spheres. Like, do you consider courting and marrying a woman to be part of "economic life"? No, it's instead a separate sphere. the spheres still exist, it's just that one has grown and displaced the others. Someone else pointed out another good example of a sphere, if a friend's family member dies, you don't hand them a bunch of money, that would be inappropriate, you make them some food, or something like that.

[@1495978707]

8:40 This kind of social shaming and reputation is crucial for this sort of system to work, which is why it can only work in small communities where people have personal relationships with everyone else. The difference is that in our interconnected world, the vast majority of value exchanges that happen are between strangers, and are not at all bound by social rules like that.

[@ClintLock1]

yes. trust is the most valuable resource.

[@Zecuu]

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

[@modestMousse]

Before even beginning the video, just wanna proactively say thanks for putting out a video on this subject. After personally getting introduced to this matter in David Graeber's "Debt", I was honestly kind of surprised and aggravated that it seems economists have misled us this profoundly. I'm happy to see this little revelation rippling through the culture. We might just yet have a better future to make for ourselves.

[@DyDiKing]

I've discovered this a few months ago from a lenghty video, and it blew my mind and made me angry. Glad to see this subject touch on in a quick video ! Too add my two cents, if I remember correctly some videos on this subject, invasion and "centralized" money also worked hand in hand to spread this value system. The idea was : a community (kingdom, empire...) rely on raiding their neighbours, stealing their things and redistributing to their own people. But you need to go farther and farther away to find new targets, and that becomes a logistical problem, to have enough food, items and such for your armies while they are so far away from the main HQ. So, a way to ensure they are taken care of : you tax the places you've already conquered, but you only accept YOUR money for the tax. And you give this money as "salary" to your troop. Suddenly, conquered ppl have to make trades with the invaders in order to pay taxes and be able to live... This gave rise to villages solely organized around services for the soldiers, which we named "Bourg". And some people got rich like that, and suddenly you have a whole bunch of ppl who were "victims" be very proud of their status and all... (not blaming people to do what's necessary to survive and making the best of the situation, but the reversal is always a weird thing to see...) And that's where Bourgeois comes from.

[@monzerfaisal3673]

What a refreshing piece of knowledge and debate. I am from African and Arab culture. We still live with gifts, giving and care for family, friends and neighbors knowing there will be a day they'll look out for us too. Sadly I live in Europe now😂

[@DonnaLLong]

Wonderful Andrew. Thanks for sharing what those of us who study pre-colonial systems have known for quite awhile. Sharing and gifting is how we are truly human.

[@bpj1805]

And trading for money is also how we are "truly human". Don't fall for the "noble savage" fallacy.

[@theforgetfulalchemist]

"Blue Ray is a social construct" is the best and wildest take on economic anthropology I've ever heard

[@suzieaustin1]

So eloquently explained with mind blowing connotations. How do we even begin to "unplug" or restructure our minds to rethink our entire belief system. So many concepts are embedded into our minds at such a young age that it's difficult to think outside of the box we have been locked into. Amazing video, very well presented.

[@KingDeathagorn]

I never thought about this before, and yet I see this practice in real time many times over in survival multiplayer video games. Complete strangers willing to just share community goods, some less trusting doing bartering for goods they know they want and others have, and then you get lonely traders who won't really see any interaction with people unless the developers go out of their way to make an economic system.

[@Rellikan]

Someone would abuse the freebies though.

[@LaloMartins]

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.

[@pennywright3274]

Commenting so the algorithm gods favour you. Holy shit. This video was really eye-opening. I've been wondering about these questions a lot lately, and I gotta say I feel so much less alone now. And I'm also angry that it wasn't taught at an early age that, like, hey, our community based on money isn't really a thing without capitalism.

[@Lia-uf1ir]

I once saw a documentary about how men and women were actually much more equal in the Paleolithic era. At one point, it is mentioned that things like muscle shells were found scattered across Europe and the narrator said: „the proof of the earliest barter system“. And I was like: „Uh, no. That just proves that these shells were carried across the continent but it doesn’t prove how. It could’ve been a gift economy for instance.“ Even in paleontology, people often want to come to a conclusion that affirms their hierarchical capitalist worldview.

[@revwroth3698]

I've heard that 40-50% of hunters in hunter gatherer societies were women.

[@Lancasterlaw1175]

The difference between reciprocated gifts system and a barter system is only really a distinction which matters to a sociologist or a economist.

[@Jarjar-X]

This reminds me of the comic I read when I was in elementary school, Bone. In the valley, there were village people who don’t use or even know the concept of money, but did solely trade with one n’ other. I guess that was my first time being subjected to such an interesting practice, thank you for this video.

[@Daehpo]

I love the Bone series, but this video sours it a bit in hindsight. If I recall correctly there are examples of gift giving & mutual aid thru-out the story, at least for Fone Bone. I don't remember precisely, but I feel like bartering really only becomes noticeable when the scumbag capitalist Phoney Bone arrives in town & there was instance on paying debts with concrete amounts of livestock & animal products...

[@terryjones573]

Oh. My. God. You’ve just opened a time capsule in my brain.

[@andrewroberts8959]

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.

[@ImBalance]

Great video breaking down our unfounded assumptions about how early human economies functioned, but can the gifts and debts, even just social benefits that come from trade relations, which served as the most common means of transaction, still be considered bartered items?

[@spencerharmon4669]

No. Barter is trading a good or service for another good or service. This is why we use ethnographic data to study real economies: so that we understand the intention, meaning, and social function of the flow of materials. Would you consider a birthday present a bartered item? What if you plan to also give a gift to that same person on their birthday? Obviously no. Andrew did a great job of explaining the difference between a gift economy and barter, but if you want to understand in depth, I recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. It is a treatise on this exact topic.

[@rebeccaholcombe9043]

​@@spencerharmon4669You called this book a treatise. Is it a book someone like me, who is uneducated in economic and sociological issues could read and understand?