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Economic historian Karl Polanyi has argued that where barter is widespread, and cash supplies limited, barter is aided by the use of credit, brokerage, and money as a unit of account (i.e. used to price items). All of these strategies are found in ancient economies including Ptolemaic Egypt.
Though the definition of money itself is highly contentious, it is usually important that it be generally exchanged for useful things. What makes a mutual credit accounting system, into something like a money system is the contractual obligation of account holders to close all accounts at zero, which is to say, to depart the system neither ...
In a barter transaction, one valuable good is exchanged for another of approximately equivalent value. William Stanley Jevons described how a widely accepted medium allows each barter exchange to be split into three difficulties of barter. [19] A medium of exchange is deemed to eliminate the need for a coincidence of wants.
Also called resource cost advantage. The ability of a party (whether an individual, firm, or country) to produce a greater quantity of a good, product, or service than competitors using the same amount of resources. absorption The total demand for all final marketed goods and services by all economic agents resident in an economy, regardless of the origin of the goods and services themselves ...
Economic anthropology is a scholarly field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. Its origins as a sub-field of anthropology begin with the Polish–British founder of anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski , and his French compatriot, Marcel Mauss , on the nature of gift-giving ...
A moneyless economy or nonmonetary economy is a system for allocation of goods and services without payment of money. The simplest example is the family household. Other examples include barter economies, gift economies and primitive communism. Even in a monetary economy, there are a significant number of nonmonetary transactions.
Worried about the meaning of existence? You might turn to Raj Patel's book The Value of Nothing. Its title, however, isn't a reference to how much a vast supply of nothing might be worth, or how ...
There is no evidence, historical or contemporary, of a society in which barter is the main mode of exchange; [23] [24] instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economy and debt. [25] [26] [27] When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or potential enemies. [28]