Graeber also offers probably the best critique as to why there may be no substance to his claim that there was no barter.

There are no equations at all in his book Principles of Economics, where he discusses barter and indirect exchange or in his paper “The Origins of Money.” There are no equations used in his discussion of barter and indirect exchange at all in his books.

He, in fact, rejected the mathematical approach.

Karl was actually the son of Carl but it was Carl who was the economist and published several books on the subject.īut more significantly, he writes that Menger, along with William Jevons, added to the idea that money developed after barter by stating that they only (emphasis added) “improved on the details of the story, most of all by adding various mathematical equations to demonstrate that a random assortment of people with random desires could, in theory, produce not only a single commodity to use as money but a uniform price system.”īut Menger never used equations in his discussion of the emergence of money, never mind as the core to his development of the theory of how barter and indirect exchange emerged. He misidentifies the name of the founder of the Austrian school of economics, referring to him as Karl instead of Carl Menger. Graeber is an anthropologist and makes basic economic errors in his book that no economist would ever make. Money was created by government as a means to tax individuals and there was no evolution from barter to indirect exchange (money)in her theory.Ĭuriously, other than a footnote reference by Kelton pointing to claims that there wasn't much barter before indirect exchange emerged, she remarkably does not attempt to prove the essential MMT claim that taxation creates money.īut her footnote reference is stunning it leads off by listing the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

The prevalent thinking is that barter first took place and then indirect exchange, which resulted in the emergence of money.īut this is not how Kelton sees it. This is what I wrote in Problems With Modern Monetary Theory: A Comment on Stephanie Kelton’s 'The Deficit Myth' about the most significant footnote in her book: I even bought a key book referenced in the footnotes to see what all the excitement was about.

The deficit myth book