Money Did Not Come From Barter - It Came From Blood Feuds

[@prschuster]

"The state played the central role in the evolution of money from the very beginning". Libertarians are not going to like this.

[@s3lfFish]

depends, libertarians at the core and still to this day everywhere in the world except the US, means the anarchists. The so called new libertarians are just a new breed of capitalists who stole our denomination to undermine us and to make them look more "progressive" and shiny. But we anarchists and real libertarians were and always will be against capital and state (therefore against money too). Which is why our fellow libertarian/anarchist comrad Graeber made all those studies about money and destroyed this lie ;)

[@anonimo5912]

Yeah so what? Fu*** libertarians

[@jab1289]

@prschuster An-Caps may not like this, either.

[@KoDeMondo]

Who? The state ? Is that a thing?... Who played a central role here it's only the people themselves that needs something to do their own daily exchanges... So money was born for the people by the people... Meaning me, you, them, us but not the state.

[@KoDeMondo]

Most people believe that money is real wealth. Yet, everything we spend money on requires energy to mine, create, deliver, run, maintain, and dispose of. In this way, money is ultimately a direct claim on energy and resources. Our economic stories assert that with more money we can create more of anything. The truth is we cannot create energy. We both extract and burn it faster by using technology and printing money. Natural capital -particularly energy-is the true foundation of our monetary systems. As we create more money we don’t create more resources, we merely access them faster.

[@s3lfFish]

David Graeber also said credit was invented before money

[@TheRepublicOfUngeria]

In other words: "Bitch you owe me" came before "owe you what?"

[@Lessdeth14]

Yes - and it is referenced in the talk.

[@KoDeMondo]

@@s3lfFish yes

[@tylersingleton9284]

So money's value probaby comes from authority, not from trust.

[@controldata972]

Yes. Having heard a few of these explanations now, it sounds to me like 'money' has to have its value defined more or less precisely by the 'authority'. So that could be the king setting the price of commodities. Or it could be the government loosely setting the value by its monetary policy (and mediated by the currency markets and other financial markets). Capitalist markets on their own, without firm 'authority' controls, are seen to follow boom-bust cycles which can be very destructive, even to those capitalists themselves. Our challenge now is to understand these underlying principles and create a monetary control system that doesn't stifle innovation, but that also allows governments to provide what they are mandated by their citizens to provide.

[@therealnoodles7638]

Yes. Today's fiat currency may not have intrinsic value but it does have extrinsic value, which is enforced by the Government.

[@onee]

​@@therealnoodles7638 Not just by the government, but also by the people believing it has value. Just look at countries where people do not believe in the value of their own money. It often are countries with heavy inflation and because of this many people often end up either using gold, dollars or nowadays even cryptocurrencies, because these are seen as (more) valuable in their eyes.

[@yole7390]

There is a deep relationship beetween trust and authority.

[@miguelgr11]

Check out 'chartalism'

[@derekmcdaniel6029]

Wray throwing down with the kindergarten teacher on primitive economics. Would love to be a fly on that wall.

[@kennedycrouch5171]

this is a really interesting video and it couldn’t have been put out at a better time!!

[@KoDeMondo]

From Alan Greenspan in 1966: “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.”

[@jbug1979]

There was no Bitcoin in 1966!

[@User24x]

False.

[@DrSanity7777777]

Money has always been two-faced, appearing both as a technology, and as an object of value. It began as a process of accounting, by relating the value of many different things to a standard one; to the value of a weight of silver, or a bushel of grain. It later developed into something more abstract, not related to a commodity, but to a universal scale of economic value. However, because people find it easier to think of objects than to think of processes, they focus on the object, the piece of silver, and ignore the process which defines the meaning of the idea. They mistakenly think of the value of money, rather than valuation by money. Confusion was compounded with the invention of coins in the 7th century BCE. Coins are made from precious metal for very good reasons. Gold and silver are rare and therefore valuable. They are also stable and dense. Their density allows them to be small and portable. They are also malleable, so can be stamped with images, making it easy to distinguish them. So, when the idea about the measuring unit of value, money, was turned into something actually valuable, into gold coins, they seemed to be the actual commodity, rather that an intermediate measuring device. Since then, this mistaken idea, that the token for money, the coin, is the actual wealth, has caused much confusion about the nature of real wealth, a confusion at the root of many crises, and a plague on our philosophers, economists, and politicians. Before coinage there had been systems of accounting for wealth and for debt, there were so many cows, or so many bushels of barley, and one person owned so much, or was in debt for so much to another. It was easy to understand what constituted wealth: it was the strength, skill and knowledge of that society, the land and goods which it controlled. But coins, once they were invented, were no longer just measuring devices, tokens. They assumed the Janus face of wealth itself. The intrinsic value of the precious metal in them focused everyone’s attention on the tokens. The tokens became the items for which to strive, and blinded us to the real meaning of money, which, in the end, measures and transmits the power that we have over our environment and each other. Money tokens, even electronic ones, are seen as actual wealth, even when precious metals no longer figure in our money systems. They continue goading us with ever more desire in the commercial dreamworld that we now inhabit. A dreamworld in which debt is misinterpreted as actual wealth, and qualities which do not fit into the realm of property, qualities like care, air purity, or health, are measured, inappropriately, by money, in a vain attempt to make them interchangeable with property. For what is money in our time, but an illusory idea of universal value, a process that aims to reduce all items, acts and qualities down to a single mode of valuation. So long as only a small minority understand all this, the rest of us are open to both moral and financial exploitation. We should not think of what money is, but of what money does. For the crucial fact about its nature is that money is a technology, or procedure, devised to manage trust, trust that a creditor will be repaid. One could say it is the operating system on which we run our economies. For to trust is to have a belief in someone, to credit him, and if they are obliged to you, they are in your debt (hence, credit and debt) - a fact clearly asserted by the Knights of Malta, when in 1565 they stamped this motto on their coins: Non Aes, sed Fides - Not the Metal, but Trust. “The problem is that money is not really a thing at all but a social technology: a set of ideas and practices which organize what we produce and consume, and the way we live together. When it comes to money itself - rather than the tokens that represent it, the account books where people record it, or the buildings such as banks in which people administer it - there is nothing physical to look at…But currency is not itself money…Coins and currency, in other words, are useful tokens to record the underlying system of credit accounts and to implement the underlying process of clearing [these accounts].” - Felix Martin

[@jumpingspider7105]

Amazing comment!

[@KoDeMondo]

Here you go another CRAPTO Scammers... That still thinking that money is not a thing but all revolve around thrust and an ideology that as destroyed and rot our society since millenias. No very sorry! I don't accept that BS. FOR ME MONEY IT'S NOT ONLY A MEANS TO MEASURE OR EXHANGE BUT MAINLY A STORAGE OF A ENERGY VALUE! BECAUSE YOU CAN PASS IT ON TO YOUR CHILD'S AND PARENTS OBVIOUSLY THIS IS ONLY ONE OF THE MANY PROPERTY OF GOLD AND SILVER AND NOT THE CRAPTO COINS...

[@lowersaxon]

No, money is wealth from a micro perspective. As long as you can buy everything with money its clearly your wealth. Money as a technology, i.e. from the macro perspective, represents wealth as well. Technology is part of society‘s capital and capital is wealth.

[@DrSanity7777777]

@@lowersaxon Most economists will explain that money is: (1) the medium of exchange, (2) a store of value, (3) a standard of value, and (4) a common measure of value. Only the first two of these, however, apply to all money. The other two describe currency, “current money,” and really say the same thing: “a commonly recognized determination of value, often regulated, but need not be created, by government.” Most simply put, money is anything that can be accepted to satisfy a debt. In this way, “money” and “credit” are simply two sides of the same thing - a system of making promises and keeping those promises. As Black’s Law Dictionary states, money is “all things transferred in commerce.” All money is therefore a contract and, in a sense, all contracts are money. Can I implore you to look into an article covered by Christopher Nedzynski called "Money Isn’t Everything".

[@KoDeMondo]

@@jumpingspider7105 no really a lot of Nonsense, but if you believe it, everything is great

[@CaribbeanCryptoTips]

Thank you for making this video

[@jessejojojohnson]

Hey, where's the full talk?

[@superlacroixboi]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/e2athaFtfLhnpaM&ab_channel=St.FrancisCollege

[@e.g.3924]

John Taylor:Humans are diverse, everyone has different capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, talents. John:The push for social equality and human rights is about how that diversity is understood and you seem to think people should only be valued by how well they compete in the business game as if the violence spread between the rich and the poor reflects objective human worth. Simon Devoe:John, I amuse myself with the notion of the money God because it isn't far from the truth. Simon:Some system has to exist to divide up a scarce world and nature has spoken as to what that system must be. Simon:Those who reach the top of the pyramid deserve it, not because you or I think it's right, but because that's what nature is selecting for. John:So nature prefers sociopaths and psychopaths to guide the species ? Because those are the dominating traits of the ruling class today. Simon:The system is as the system does. John:Is that what the Malthusian Mandate is about ? to select out the poor and weak. Simon:We'll get to the mandate in a moment. Simon: I'm still bothered by your denial of the fact our social system reflects our true biological nature and if this revolution you speak of did magically occur, it would just be a matter of time before the innate compulsion towards social dominance prevailed yet again. Simon:Deep down, John, the slaves don't want to be free, they want to be slave owners. John:Nice one. John:Too bad history paints a different picture. Simon:Hierarchies have remained constant throughout recorded civilization. John:For perhaps the last 12,000 years, sure. John:but you know as well as I do, before the discovery of agriculture, there was no such thing, ninety-nine percent of human history has been egalitarian. Simon:I said civilization, John, meandering hunter-gatherer tribes chucking spears and eating grubs isn't civilization. John:How contemporacist of you, yet 20th century studies of numerous hunter-gatherer tribes, those still surviving in remote areas just as they did thousands of years prior, actually show socially rich cultures. Adult life spans not far from ours. John:Relatively peaceful in balance with nature. John:No leaders, no group hierarchy, no inequality. John:To argue today's society is somehow more civilized is dubious at best. Simon:Well, then perhaps you can encourage all your enlightened followers to come together and live out their utopian fantasy in the Amazon jungle. John:You mean what's left of it ? what hasn't been destroyed by the supposedly advanced culture that's ravaged the natural world into total decline in the name of infinite consumption and economic growth ? John:and the point here, Simon, is hunter-gatherer cultures are evidence of human variability, variability which contradicts your vague biological determinism. Simon:John, just because history shows a range of behaviors across time doesn't prove anything. Simon:The introduction of agriculture indeed changed the human condition because it triggered a dormant trait in our evolutionary psychology, a trait that wasn't expressed before. John:How ? Simon:By the advent of economic surplus. Simon:Resources and goods that could be stored, hoarded, stockpiled, owned, traded, controlled and leveraged for personal gain, a phenomenon that was impossible in a hunter-gatherer reality, and it was that realization that sparked our now omnipresent drive toward dominance and hierarchy. John:I didn't know that. John:Genetic dormancy of an evolutionary expression, needed an environmental trigger, psychological drive, but then morphs into complex oppressive institutions and structures. John:Compelling. Intuitive. Plausible. john:Too bad it's total bullshit. John:All simpleton, pedestrian, bio-deterministic conclusions that are nothing more than elitist projections. John:Agriculture did change everything but not because of someone's dormant psychological drive magically triggered by economic surplus. John:It was about what a society technically required, dramatically shifting incentives and the very nature of human relationships. John:Think about it. First you need the proper land, water, the right conditions to farm, then creating settlements around those fruitful areas as opposed to foraging. Since land quality varies some settlements will prosper due to their geography and some will falter. So what happens when a group finds itself with failed crops and no way to survive the winter ? They may trade with other groups, building out what we call a market today, giving way to the idea of property and so on. Or if they have nothing to trade, desperate, they may invade, they may steal, compete, establishing the need for protection, laws, armies, the state institution itself. At the same time, people begin to notice the imbalance and power of this new propertied reality, rationalizing the hoarding of wealth for the sake of future security. Hence the birth of inequity, poverty, socio-economic class. John:Simon, every major structural aspect of society today, from ownership to trade to nation states to institutional warfare to the competitive ethic to vast economic inequality and power hierarchy was predictable. Snowballing ever since. Simon:So your theory is if you change the structure of society you change the human condition ? There's no going back, John. John:No one's going back, we're going forward. John:Humanity has been trapped in this immature stage for far too long, not to mention the sickness manifested by this endless striving towards social status is palpable. Children, when who asked what they want to be when they grow up say,"Rich and famous." How the most wealthy nations, those beacons of supposed success are by far the most mentally ill. People don't know who they are, where they're going, what they're doing. Lost in a perversion of social image, a spectacle that no longer has any relationship to anything real. From Peter Joseph's 2020 film Interreflections.

[@rainbowmonkMC]

interesting thought experiment. but not rooted in the empiracal reality that there were surpluses in egalitarian cities after the agrarian revolution.

[@WilhelmDrake]

What about the temples & palaces of the Ancient Near East?

[@miguelgr11]

They were basically huge (grain) banks

[@rainbowmonkMC]

read Graeber and Wengrow's 2020 book about the history of humanity. or start with Graeber's 2011 book on the history of debt.

[@rainbowmonkMC]

in these empires there are jubilie's every 7 to 49 years to end interpersonal debt

[@OliverOttoman]

this is an interesting video but the last point--about how the euro is "disastrous"--seems, at best, a premature take. There are issues with the euro that specifically relate to its disarticulation from more traditional sovereignty, for sure, but a large part of that is due to the relationship between fiscal and monetary policy, which isn't exactly something that existed in its current form in the historical examples he's talking about. the second issue here is that part of the reason the euro has had difficulties is that the central bank's directive is only to restrict inflation, not to restrict inflation *and* fight unemployment, which is the prerogative of the Fed. Is the Euro going to be a resounding success (whatever that means) as long as the EU stays in its current form? No, probably not, but its more an issue of political coordination and abdication of certain sovereign powers than it is a problem of money as such.

[@KoDeMondo]

Being greedy is part of human nature. Who wouldn't be, given the opportunity? This can only happen when you have the power to print money with no limits. No one in this universe should have this type of power, as that is where the true danger lies.

[@Hulloder]

Is there more to this lecture?

[@anonimo5912]

Where's the rest of the video?

[@KoDeMondo]

Most people believe that money is real wealth. Yet, everything we spend money on requires energy to mine, create, deliver, run, maintain, and dispose of. In this way, money is ultimately a direct claim on energy and resources. Our economic stories assert that with more money we can create more of anything. The truth is we cannot create energy. We both extract and burn it faster by using technology and printing money. Natural capital -particularly energy-is the true foundation of our monetary systems. As we create more money we don’t create more resources, we merely access them faster.

[@bsdiceman]

great

[@KoDeMondo]

MONEY IS NOT ONLY A UNIT OF MEASURE, WHICH IS AN IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTIC LIKE METERS, LITERS, KILOS ETC BUT MUST SATISFY OTHER REQUIREMENTS AND CONDITIONS TOO... STORE OF ENERGY VALUE, SCARCITY, TANGIBLE ETC THIS GIVES THE "INTRINSIC VALUE TO MONEY"

[@markcorrigan3930]

3:47

[@markcorrigan3930]

8:20

[@Vincent_Upstate]

This lecture is full of contradictions. He says money predates (or pre-exists in his terms) written history, but then says he knows money came before markets. Markets are just the consequence of choice and competition though, so they also predate written history. How can he say money predates markets? They seem co-dependent to me. Also, he restates Graeber’s claim that there is no evidence of barter economies anywhere, then later insinuates there are places in the world outside the United States where things can be bought in terms of “x number of chickens” instead of “x number of dollars”. Really sloppy work.

[@kentheengineer592]

Money is trade debt that represents deferred revenue u pay off the debt with the future asset

[@AcaoRestauracionista]

Interesting, thanks.

[@audrajones]

David Graeber's "Debt-the first 5000 years" is one of the best books I have ACTUALLY READ (several times!). Wray should be ashamed of himself for neglecting the work of his colleague.

[@whataboutthis10]

Graeber an actual intellectual. This guy is trying to establish his own value by belittling others

[@alfredkwaak]

Read Thomas Pikettys Capital in the Twenty-First century it explains why capitalism does not work without progressive income taxation and wealth taxation. Inflation trough moneyprinting is also a wealth tax.

[@mrzack888]

inflation hurts working class now due to globalization depressing wages

[@Nickle314]

So lets take socialism. Welfare states in the EU, the US, etc, are socialist. Money comes in and is given away. So now that creates a debt. People are owed pensions for their contributions. Now that's a problem. If we take the UK 30% of taxes go on paying the debts. You get state austerity, they have less to spend on services because of the debts. The public have less because the state screws them with high taxes to pay the debts. It's not that inflation will fix it. The debts, pensions which make up the bulk of the debts are inflation linked. You can't inflate your way out of inflation linked debts. Piketty is wrong because its a socialist problem. The idea you can make people richer by giving their money to others is the big delussion

[@therealnoodles7638]

Nothing progressive about income tax. We want people to work but we discourage them from working by introducing an income tax. We want people to hire so we keep unemployment down but we discourage them from hiring by taxing them. We need to re frame taxation and use it to discourage unlawful behavior or to control inflation.

[@markcorrigan3930]

No

[@standowner6979]

@@Nickle314 Nope

[@c.kainoabugado7935]

04:30 don't find the barter system because theres not a paper trail...just trading off of materials among traders. Much differences probably arose on value of materials traded. 10:06 read about values for resolution of community issues in the bible too. Established by the Levites after leaving Egyptian slavery and for giving back to God 10% out of possessions.

[@DrSanity7777777]

Inflation is natural within the realm of produce.

[@KoDeMondo]

Not in a sound and hard money system

[@graffitiabcd]

more like it came from some idea of debt which is also likely the origin of blood feuds?? idk just a ~ t h e o r y ~[1] [1] i once read a few philosophy books among them were Nietzsche and Graeber

[@mr.coffee6242]

So it came from Blood Feuds *BECAUSE OF BARTER, AHHHHHH* Man what a joke these people are. This channel is a joke.

[@davefroman4700]

Blood feuds? No. Conquest created the necessity for money. Nobody was willing to accept a debt from a soldier.

[@AndresMbernal]

You’re conflating gold/silver coins with ancient credit money

[@karlbrake1278]

Graeber said all of this, and much more, much better, and his book is so eminently readable. Not to have read does not reflect well on this fellow as an academic. Coinage only existed after 600 BCE. Credit came first. The metals kept in Mesopotamian temples only was a way of counting contributions to the temple, taxes. What we consider money is intimately related to violence, conquering armies. Read some anthropology. This guy does not define money. Debt existed long before coinage or paper money. The fact that he uses the word "Tribal" as an academic term pretty much devalues his credentials. You can have all kinds of restitution of blood feud without money units.

[@alaakela]

If you are in this field of study maybe you should read Graber's book. Doesn't mean you should agree with it, but at least read it.

[@csp103]

Sounds like revisionist history bullshit to me Irrespective of whether the *driver* was a bloodfeud, you still need some element of barter to set value For instance, was the death of say "Hagrid" worth 100 sheep or 30 cows? There is still barter value invoved

[@petersampson4635]

Blood fueds........hmmmmmmm so then 30 shekels of silver......? Hmmmmmmm!?

[@LittleIggy2010]

Jews

[@taureandials1246]

This is fundamentally and structurally incorrect

[@tmkeesler]

Please, expound on that.

[@redpad79]

You won’t!

[@Deca_dent1999]

@taureandials1246 why don't you elaborate on that point?