Jul 13
As historians have shown, there is no evidence that pure barter economies ever existed, anywhere; instead, the historical record is rich with human societies in which credit came first, deeply intertwined within moral and cultural systems, with money and markets developing only later, via the state. Capitalism benefits from the fiction that free trade is natural and that there are neat divisions between different spheres of behavior, most importantly the marketplace. “The economy” is to be left to its own devices, to be navigated by individuals, to be studied mathematically by economists, to be tinkered with only on the edges by technocrats.
Andrew DeWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture
