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This article is part one of The Conversation’s “Business Basics” series where we ask leading experts to discuss key concepts in business, economics and finance.
For the most part, economists continue to believe a story of money told to generations of students by a series of textbooks over the past 150 years.
The conventional story is that early gold and silver exchanges evolved from a barter system. Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SAThis story asks us to imagine a pre-monetary barter economy, where people bought goods and services by trading them for other goods and services.
Eventually a suitable commodity – perhaps gold or silver – emerged as both an acceptable means of exchange for conducting trade and a convenient unit of account for expressing value.
Later, coins were issued – eventually to be monopolised by governments – and later still paper money, credit, and banking systems.
The problem with this story is that there is no historical evidence to support it. As was noted by prominent anthropologist Caroline Humphreys:
No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money … all…
