Now, admittedly, neoliberal positions appear often appealingly simple, even when counterintuitive. The problem is that they appear simple because the complexity is hiding in unexamined assumptions, assumptions often concealed in neat little parables like “money, markets, and businesses arise as a larger-scale elaboration of primitive barter relations”. These parables are simple and sound plausible, so we give them very large priors. Problem is, they are also complete ahistorical, and only sound simple for anthropic reasons (that is: any theory about history which neatly leads to us will sound simpler than one that leads to some alternative present, even if real history was in fact more complicated and our real present less genuinely probable).
This particular example doesn’t seem troublesome to me, because I’m comfortable with the idea of bartering for debt. That is, my neighbor gives me a cow, and now I owe him one- then I defend his home from raiders, and give him a chicken, and then we’re even. A tinker comes to town, and I trade him a pot of alcohol for a knife because there’s no real trust of future exchanges, and so on. Coinage eventually makes it much easier to keep track of these things, because then we don’t have my neighbor’s subjective estimate of how much I owe him versus my subjective estimate of how much I owe my neighbor, we can count pieces of silver.
Now, suppose I’m explaining to a child how markets work. There are simply less moving pieces to tell it as “twenty chickens for a cow” than “a cow now for something roughly proportional to the value of the cow in the future,” and so that’s the explanation I’ll use, but the theory still works for what actually happened. (Indeed, no doubt you can explain the preference for debt over immediate bartering as having lower frictional costs for transactions.)
In general, it’s important to keep “this is an illustrative example” separate from “this is how it happened,” which I don’t know if various neoliberals have done. Adam Smith, for example, claims that barter would be impractical, and thus people immediately moved to currency, which was sometimes things like cattle but generally something metal.
This particular example doesn’t seem troublesome to me, because I’m comfortable with the idea of bartering for debt. That is, my neighbor gives me a cow, and now I owe him one- then I defend his home from raiders, and give him a chicken, and then we’re even. A tinker comes to town, and I trade him a pot of alcohol for a knife because there’s no real trust of future exchanges, and so on. Coinage eventually makes it much easier to keep track of these things, because then we don’t have my neighbor’s subjective estimate of how much I owe him versus my subjective estimate of how much I owe my neighbor, we can count pieces of silver.
Now, suppose I’m explaining to a child how markets work. There are simply less moving pieces to tell it as “twenty chickens for a cow” than “a cow now for something roughly proportional to the value of the cow in the future,” and so that’s the explanation I’ll use, but the theory still works for what actually happened. (Indeed, no doubt you can explain the preference for debt over immediate bartering as having lower frictional costs for transactions.)
In general, it’s important to keep “this is an illustrative example” separate from “this is how it happened,” which I don’t know if various neoliberals have done. Adam Smith, for example, claims that barter would be impractical, and thus people immediately moved to currency, which was sometimes things like cattle but generally something metal.