Comment by _heimdall
16 days ago
I've heard many arguments that barter came before currency, if I'm not mistaken that was even one of Adam Smith's tropes in his writings that influenced currencies and economies we have today.
I don't necessarily buy the idea that someone with a chicken and needed bread wandered around looking for a baker in need of chicken, but their argument does fly in the face of the idea that barter follows failed currencies.
If nothing else you have a chicken and egg problem to unwind there, and barter does seem a bit more basic or simple than currency so I'd have guessed it came first.
There's a book Debt: The First 5000 Years (by the David Graeber that parent commenter references several times) that observes that there’s no documented case of a society that ran mainly on barter and then invented money to escape it. The "barter first, then money" story is mostly a thought experiment. I'm not in a position to confirm or refute this based on my own knowledge or to do the research to develop that knowledge, but I'm not aware of anyone seriously challenging Graeber on this point.
IIRC, Graeber suggests that debt comes first. Initially it is tracked by memory, then when that gets too complicated, some kind of item is chosen to represent debt, which then in some cases evolves into currency. I believe this process has been observed.
It's less "I have bread and want a chicken" and more "I'm mostly self-sufficient by necessity, and provide what I need, but I have extra bread this week and Bob over there has a chicken ..."
You can watch both barter and currency develop in groups of children almost spontaneously.