[cjf4]

>for many of us, money is only experienced through our phones, as a number on a screen. You pay your rent with one app, you buy put options with another. The number goes up, it goes down, it lives in the little portal we hold in our hands.

And decades ago it was a number written down on a little piece of paper, and before that it was little pieces of “precious” metal locked away somewhere.

At least nowadays amateurs have a better chance to be literate.

[legulere]

It's the other way around. First there was personal debt, then impersonal money.

In the beginning you would just lend stuff from other people and give it back, or with consumables give something back of similar worth.

Precious metal was pretty rarely used, as its main benefit is that you need almost no common trust relationship.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I see you've read Graeber. Great book and changed my views on a lot of things, particularly how much of our "common sense" understanding/education on topics relies on "just so" assumptions made by some aristocratic scholar a couple centuries ago.

Anyhow, to explain for the forum: Graeber's book goes through the evidence we know of from the places were money first appeared. In essence, debt came first, and money was a later innovation. Very interestingly temple records using tally mark schemes may have been what lead to the development of cuneiform writing in the levant. A similar debt first pattern appears in other places, at other times too.

Coinage, particularly metal coins, came about much later as a clever hack by rulers to simplify raising and maintaining a large army. Pass a law demanding all citizens pay you X coins each year. Pay your soldiers in coins. Suddenly your society is figuring out how to feed and house soldiers, without you haven't to build a command hierarchy to run it all directly.

I can't recommend this book enough. It's dense in parts because he goes into a lot of detail that fully justifies what he's saying. Still, completely fascinating to learn much of the way we think of economic history is mythology. It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.

[nostrademons]

> It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.

Expanding on this - one of the brilliant innovations in Bitcoin was to make the ledger fundamental and the coin an implementation artifact. The blockchain doesn't store coins - it stores a ledger of who transacted with whom, and for what amounts, and then ownership of a Bitcoin is a derived quantity from the transaction history. Ethereum just expands that ledger to let smart contracts on the blockchain define other quantities to track, as well as the rules and relationships between them.

It's completely backwards from how I would've thought to implement a cryptocurrency, which would be to start with the coin and figure out how to make its ownership distinct & incorruptible. By starting with the ledger first, you don't need to think very hard about ownership (because it's all recorded in the ledger), you just need to find a way to define a source of truth for the transaction history.

[michaelrpeskin]

Yeah. That’s a great way to describe it! It’s like a differential equation where the fundamental function is the change and you have to integrate it to find the state. Traversing the blockchain is like integration.

[imtringued]

Yeah this is true, people didn't necessarily "barter" back in the day. Traders and merchants probably did because they wanted immediate payment, but within a trustworthy community you simply record or memorize what you did and demand the other side to pay you back in the future.

An oversimplified hunter and gatherer society would just let the hunters give meat to the gatherers, assuming that they will one day be paid back with gathered vegetables or fruit.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Describing it as debt makes it sound like people tallied it, which I believe they didn’t for a long time. It gets the facts right but uses a very modern way to frame it. I think it’s more accurate to look at it as reciprocal altruism. I do you favors, you do OP favors, OP does me favors and we do so so long as it feels like nobody is mooching.

It’s the difference between 1) going out to a bar with friends and remembering “Alice has bought the group X rounds, Bob has bought Y rounds, and I’ve bought Z, meaning it’s Bob’s turn to buy a round because he is in beer debt” and 2) “Alice and Bob and I generally buy each other rounds and it all feels roughly balanced so I’ll buy this round.” Tracked and tallied debt came much later as I understand it.

[grafporno]

Strong disagree, people tallied it basically from the start, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

[newsclues]

I still have gold and prefer cash for purchasing daily items.

The money seems real, swiping cards or phone financial transfers lack a physical reality and my brain has less friction with digital transfers, thus I avoid them out of financial prudence.

[jp555]

Have you noticed how your cash is buying fewer items than it did a ~year ago? My daily item costs are WAY up, which is really just saying the value of the cash is WAY down.

[jfengel]

Honestly, no, I haven't. My groceries are the same. My electric bill is stable. The watch I'm replacing today is the same price today as ten years ago when I got its predecessor.

I don't know if it's because I buy different things from you, or if I live in a different place from you, or what. But my andecdote is that no, I'm not paying more for stuff than a year ago.

[newsclues]

Odd that some people don’t notice things like this... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation

Do you actually track spending or just don’t notice?

[jfengel]

A gallon of milk is still a gallon of milk. A pound of carrots is still a pound of carrots.

It sounds as if your basket of goods is different from mine. Most of the examples on that Wikipedia page are sugary foods, which I just don't buy a lot of.

[newsclues]

I used to buy 3lbs of carrots, but now the bags are 2lbs but cost the same.

[gruez]

>Do you actually track spending or just don’t notice?

Do you? The BLS does, and their inflation numbers for food is 3.5% YOY.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

[newsclues]

I do actually. Because I am poor, I’m extremely conscious of my spending, and have spreadsheets and save receipts to track price changes in normal purchases.

[wcfields]

I just saw this in real-time this past month with cat food.

A 24pk of Rx Renal cat food went from 5.8oz to 5.1oz[1]. I buy two packs at a time and what used to cost $113.76 is now $114.72 Effectively they're charging me an extra buck to keep 33.6oz (5.7 old-cans / 6.5 new-cans) of cat food from me.

[1] https://www.chewy.com/royal-canin-veterinary-diet-renal/dp/2...

[francisofascii]

Clothing prices seem to be way up in the US, especially shoes. My suspicion is people are flush with cash from the stimulus checks and retailers can charge whatever and people are buying.

[newsclues]

Yes, inflation is real, and since I’m on a fixed income I noticed that despite cutting out luxuries and limiting meat purchases, my groovy bill went up and I still lost weight.

[toss1]

Insufficient data - supports several modeks.

If you are trying to lose weight, shifting away from sugary & processed foods & meat to high-quality fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. can definitely increase your grocery bill while reducing your weight in a very healthy way. Food bill may go down by going directly to farmers, but travel & fetching costs increase.

Or, it could be an unhealthy shift towards more processed foods, costing more in factory work & transport, and you are seeing real inflation.

So, insufficient data to indicate inflation or not.

[newsclues]

Wasn’t trying to lose weight and my diet remained essentially the same other than modification due to cost (mainly less meat).

I had a fixed grocery budget, and over months, I lost weight due to a caloric deficit. Literally I bought less food with the same money and the result was just over a pound a month lost .

[toss1]

I'm sorry to hear that you are having such difficulties; I hope things improve for you soon.

That is the data we need to confirm that you're seeing inflation. Curious where you are located that you are seeing these numbers?