Dear John

Thanks for drawing my attention to David Graeber on Debt.  Have yet to
obtain the book, but Graeber outlines his positions at many places on the
web.  Incidentally, have you noticed that his career path bears a
considerable resemblance to that followed by Moses Finley?

Graeber repeatedly claims that the middle ages, world wide, represent a
retreat from coin use.  This claim bears almost no resemblance to the facts
at all.  Current thought is that Roman coin production peaked in the later
3rd century at about a million coins a day.  Peak production in the medieval
period was in Sung China, around 1070, with an apparent output of 5 billion
coins a year.  That is more than 12 times the Roman output.  Even allowing
for population differences, the Sung peak output doubles the Roman one. 
Vast coin outputs were typical of medieval contexts, world wide.

I suppose that, strictly speaking, pointing out that economic ideas are
often false is a contribution to the meta-theory HET, but this seems to me
to be as good a place as any I know to investigate such problems.

Regards

Rob Tye