> Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it.
- https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/05/against-economics/
#DavidGraeber #Economics #WrongMyth

> The evolution from barter to money is an old story in economics, repeated down the centuries in one form or another, to the point that even children are aware of it. It also happens to be only that: a story, and one with precious little evidence to back it up outside the heads of those who tell it.
- https://newrepublic.com/article/159227/david-graeber-changed-way-see-money
#DavidGraeber #Economics #WrongMyth #barter

> Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing”
- https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-invention-of-money-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics/
#EP3 #barter #money #Currency #DavidGraeber #IaR #IaRichards #EP3error #WrongMyth #CarolineHumphrey