Tag Archives: Menger

From the anthropologist A. H. Quiggin’s A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency (London, 1949) on cattle or oxen as a standard of value in ancient and less developed societies: “Throughout the greater part of the immense region which includes Europe to the West and stretches to Further India in the East, cattle were the chief form of wealth, and, as is seen in Africa, where cattle form the standard of value, varieties of primitive money are undeveloped. .... Cattle, however...

The blogosphere has recently seen a new debate on the origin of money between George Selgin and David Graeber: Ilana E. Strauss, “The Myth of the Barter Economy,” The Atlantic, February 26, 2016 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/ Though not by Selgin or Graeber, I gather that this article set off the debate.George Selgin, “The Myth of the Myth of Barter,” Alt-M Ideas for an Alternative Monetary Future, March 15, 2016....