Dear Felipe, James

In the 1690’s John Locke was rather explicit in identifying money very objectively with a weight of silver.  It is easy to see how historians then and now might make a start in testing that suggestion.  Felipe takes up the alternative modern suggested rather more subjective definition, “trust”, and role of anthropologists in promoting that definition.   Certainly the work of such as Karl Polanyi played a role in this change of focus, but why did that come about?  Accounts of the doings of pre-historic man are necessarily very speculative, and anyway have little in common with the historically recorded forms of social life that began, with history itself, about 2,500 years back. 

Rather than attempt to guess what happened to promote anthropology behind closed doors in the Cold War period, I suggest it is more constructive to look at the very recent events regarding the ERC “weight and value” project.  Concerning Bronze Age commerce, with announced funding of 1.9 million Euros.  Why has the project been advised by FRB staff with no background either in Bronze Age archaeology nor historical metrology?  Am I alone is seeing glaring problems in the ongoing way data is being interpreted?  I can find no published criticism.

Robert Tye, York, UK (no affiliation)

https://independent.academia.edu/RobertTye


On Mon, Jun 26, 2023 at 6:15 AM Felipe Sousa <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

    Dear Womack,

    Sure, trust in the sense that the monetary unit received - whatever it is - can be passed along, either in new exchange or in the discharge of debts.

    But is it not also the absence of trust? We no longer constrain our economic relations with only those in our community - those we trust or should trust - but because of money, we can transact with people we know very little about.

    I'm no anthropologist, and I know that they have some "reservations" about this kind of discourse. It seems things were never this simple. People, so they say, have always engaged in economic relations (in broad terms) with others from outside their immediate community, and the history of money is much more complex than either mainstream or heterodox economics admit.

    But what I was trying to get at is "how different conceptions of money affect an economist's vision of the economy and, in turn, his/hers theorizing".

    I don't know if that will lead somewhere, but I hope it does.



-- 
James C.W. Ahiakpor, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Economics
California State University, East Bay
Hayward, CA 94542
925-355-1789