[0xbadcafebee]

I'm fairly sure that's not accurate. Source for "most" economies not having money?

It would appear based on some simple googling that "money" has existed in many cultures going back 30,000 years, in two forms: "money of account" and "money of exchange". Of both of those they have taken various forms. Minted coins did not appear until around 3,000 years ago.

[cyberax]

"Monetary economy" means that it uses money for the exchanges, rather than barter. Most pre-industrial economies were not monetary.

Barter economy certainly existed, probably from before the Human Sapiens. But _money_ is a relatively recent invention.

[tomjakubowski]

> Barter economy certainly existed

What is the best evidence for this historically? Anthropologists strongly dispute this idea, and believe barter was mostly used for trade between total strangers (e.g. traders from outside your society or "economy")

Graeber's Debt: the first 5000 years covers this topic

[cyberax]

> What is the best evidence for this historically?

Mostly archeological. There are many burials that contain items that were clearly not locally sourced. In some cases, they had to be transported for thousands of kilometers.

And quite often this was done for non-functional items such as jewelry or dyes.

[kspacewalk2]

Er... Money has existed for thousands of years, and has replaced barter in any society with even moderate amounts of specialization, and a population size that gets into the thousands. In Roman times, this was already the case for thousands of years. Money is one of the great enablers of trade and specialization, of empire building. Barter economy cannot sustain any of that, because barter economy does not scale. Money is a relatively recent invention in the time scale of our species existence, but that's still 3-4 thousand years of near-ubiquitous use, minimum.

[eesmith]

Was there money in pre-1778 Hawaii? Not that I have been able to figure out. I believe it was a gift economy.

There certainly was specialization in Hawaii, and with a population of over 100,000 would seem like a good counter-example.

> Barter economy cannot sustain any of that, because barter economy does not scale.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money , "There is no evidence, historical or contemporary, of a society in which barter is the main mode of exchange;[23] instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economy and debt."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monetary_economy#Other_mon... list other money-less systems including "the Incas and possibly, also the empire of Majapahit". Both were empires.

[0xbadcafebee]

Hawai'ians had a number of skilled trades, and a caste system where a working class served a ruling class. Taxes were levied by the higher classes, and were paid in an amount based on the unit of land that was worked via subsistence farming. Those taxes were paid in the form of material goods (textiles, livestock, agriculture, etc). The material goods were the medium of exchange used to pay back a debt.

Therefore, Hawai'i did have money, in the form of commodity money (objects having intrinsic value in addition to value as a method of payment), which is distinct from barter in that there are specific recognizable units of exchange (specific amounts of commodity money used to pay a specific amount of debt). Material goods were also used as money for trade between islands.

[1] https://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitst... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahupua%CA%BBa [3] https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/kona/history1g.... [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20140605052446/http://www.hawaii...

[eesmith]

When you say "taxes", I worry that your are imposing your view on the system.

Your [1] starts "The concept of private property was unknown to ancient Hawaiians" and says:

> Many Native Hawaiian scholars today make a distinction between the annual exchange before and after written tax law. Ho‘okupu, the term used for the exchange before written tax law, is similar to ‘auhau, the term used after written tax law was instituted. Both refer to the requirement to provide labor or a portion of an individual’s labor production to a governmental agent, but as noted earlier, ho’okupu literally means “to cause to grow.”

> Some Native Hawaiian scholars believe that ho‘o kupu and tax are antithetical ideas, because, they argue, ho‘okupu was generated by the person who gives, while taxes were demanded from the person or group that receives.

Your [3] points out "Actually because the chief upon whose lands they lived owned all the land and resources in an ahupua'a, in a sense the tenants were only giving these resources to the rightful owner, in a useful form and upon demand, on a gift-tax basis."

If you own everything, how do you tax it?

If you own no private property, what does it mean to tax it?

Animals exchange goods - does that make it a monetary system? Eg, "Reciprocal Trading of Different Commodities in Norway Rats" at https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(18)30003... .

Why does Wikipedia list non-monetary cultures?

[0xbadcafebee]

Every article I found on the history of the practice stated they were taxes. They were called "tributes" at the time, but the practice of landed gentry getting payment in exchange for protecting (or not hurting) you is a form of tax, regardless of whether you're doing it willingly or not. Even paying tribute to the gods is a form of tax, because people are afraid that if they don't pay tribute, the gods will be angered and destroy their crops. Tax is really just materials the powerful use to rule or control.

Property ownership is not inherent to taxation, there are many forms of tax.

There's no reason animals can't have a monetary system. We are animals after all, even if some people like to pretend we're not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_among_animals

[cyberax]

The Roman Empire was basically modern. It had currency, banks, loans with interest, etc.

At the same time, the Slavic countries up north still were pre-monetary. There was little to no currency, but there was extensive trade in fur, salt, and other goods.

[Wytwwww]

> for thousands of years

It depends on how you define money. Coins didn't really exist until the 7th century BC, that doesn't mean long-range widescale trade did not exist prior to that for 1000+ years but they didn't generally use money (in the way we would understand it at least) so the boundary between using money and barter wasn't really that clear.

[noselasd]

This is highly dependent on the location. We certainly know there was a large interconnectede monetary economy around the middle east and the mediterranean around 3000 years ago. The roman empire was largely a monetarian economy as well, about 2000 years prior to what is commonly referred to as "pre-industrial", they had quite an extensive banking system as well.

[ETH_start]

Good paper from the progenitor of the blockchain, Nick Szabo, positing that the first moneys emerged up to 75,000 years ago and possibly enabled Homo sapiens sapiens to supersede Neanderthals:

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...

[cyberax]

I seriously doubt that currency (a standardized medium of exchange) existed in prehistoric times. But barter economy certainly did, we have plenty of archeological evidence for it.

Still, even the barter economy was used for mostly "optional" activities. People were not dependent on it for survival, a tribe could live just fine on their own, without trade.

[Wytwwww]

> currency (a standardized medium of exchange)

That's a pretty recent innovation, standardized coins didn't appear until the 600s BC, barely 100-150 years or so prior to the Greco-Persian wars. Widescale international trade existed for 1000+ years prior to that as far as we know, you don't necessarily standardized money for that.

[ETH_start]

Large scale international trade relied on standardized forms of money for thousands of years before the first coins were minted:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105873118

[ben_w]

I'm not sure why you're describing 600s BC as "recent"?

[Wytwwww]

Because we know that there were much older civilizations during the bronze age which relied on long distance international trade and at least their ruling classes were dependent on it for their survival.