It’s plausible, but I doubt the main cause. You’re right that taxes would generally be in kind rather than coinage. The Egyptians have particularly thorough records of taxes paid in cattle, grain, beer, etc. קיבוץ רשפים - רשפים- קהילנט << Here’s a fairly interesting account of their goings on.
I personally don’t think barter starts to lose out until you have artisans producing goods too valuable to be consumed by anyone outside a small set of individuals, like jewelry intended for the nobility, and that are too valuable for any reasonable exchange to occur for perishables. Can’t really trade a gold ring for a couple loaves of bread and some beer, and a fair trade would mean more bread and beer than could be easily stored. And then taxing it is an additional difficulty; it’s relatively easy to assess the productivity of a field, but far more difficult to assess the productivity of an individual.
And you could also do it through notional transfer (eg: John owes me two thousand loaves of bread in exchange for a single ring) as a sort of early futures trade rather than an actual physical transfer. There are plenty of records extant in the many early written languages that provide grounds for that possibility.
The assumption that soldiers are “buying” their food with loot rather than being provided it by the army seems particularly speculative – and entirely too unreliable and short term in thinking for something that from a military standpoint must be done well.
And yet it was indeed the common practice. You can peek through primary source documents, most famously the Anabasis, and see all sorts of references to, and bitching about, markets set up for soldiers or the lack thereof. In the Classical period it appears to me that mercenaries were paid in coin or kind, while citizen soldiers were mostly unpaid outside of plunder or grants.
Seems a mistake to me to assume the adoption of money was necessarily due to any one thing, or to implicitly believe that it started off the same way everywhere.
This I agree with. There are too many other potential reasons for adoption like, say, a desire to protect local merchants from outside trade by requiring a disadvantageous rate of exchange into the local currency.
I doubt, however, that ease of transport was among those reasons, as we have examples from the early Renaissance/Late Medieval period of a banking system emerging precisely because carrying coinage from place to place was far too dangerous – you can’t tell the prior owner by looking at the coin. Notarized letters of credit were used instead, with banking occurring in major cities and at fairs. Local merchants appeared to work on a complex credit system.
That said, I do think it was driven by the state rather than the market. An individual is safest when carrying accounts in a book or in their head rather than as a bag of money – you, as a bandit or pick pocket, can’t steal a promise to deliver bread. Also much harder to tax someone whose entire earnings and profits are promissory and not in any sort of common unit.
Some of the wheat harvested and belonging to private owners was stored in state warehouses. So was much of the grain collected as taxes. Written withdrawal orders by owners of lots of grain were used as a kind of currency. These grain banks continued to serve growers and traders even after the introduction of coined money in the latter half of the first millennium BCE. Under the Ptolemies a central bank at Alexandria recorded all accounts of the granary banks dotting the country. Payments were transferred from account to account similar to the modern giro system. Credit entries were recorded with the owners name being in the genitive or possessive case and debit entries in the dative case.
Found this on the previously linked (and fairly comprehensive) website.
I’m also peeking over the history of banking article on Wikipedia. Wish my college had carried the subject. History of banking - Wikipedia
Anyway clearly not much interest in the subject, but I think at this point I’ve tossed enough in here to throw some doubt on the claim that money came from the need to pay soldiers.
Seems like a very euro-centric theory to me. In other parts of the world, beads, cowry sells and ivory developed as currency. Of course, our knowledge of these areas is scanty due to the lack of substantial written records (and degradation of artifacts), but I’m not convinced that the hypothesis in questions holds for such contexts. Also worth noting that in some areas (particularly Africa), bartering is still very much the norm as it has been for millenia - despite the pressures of war and the modern world.
That’s the actual article; don’t worry, I’m sort of guilty of not reading it myself and only responding to the op, so this is a climbdown for me too.
These quotes shed some more light on the subject:
Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing”
If money is simply a mathematical system whereby one can compare proportional values, to say 1 of these is worth 17 of those, which may or may not also take the form of a circulating medium of exchange, then something along these lines must have emerged in innumerable different circumstances in human history for different reasons. Presumably money as we know it today came about through a long process of convergence.
However, there is every reason to believe that barter, and its attendant ‘double coincidence of wants’ problem, was not one of the circumstances through which money first emerged.
Based on the actual article, I’m right about the futures stuff – people didn’t just go with spot transactions. He then goes on to talk about a hierarchy of goods observed in gift economies, so that people wouldn’t trade, say, a car, and then get remunerated with a later (unwanted) gift of a balled up piece of paper. Spot transaction barter occurred between strangers. I can’t remember which society did it, but the best example I can think of is the anonymous trade of salt for gold by people who would leave the salt on a blanket, walk away, and come back to find gold on the carpet from the natives. The only time spot barter would occur in a settled society among members of that society would be in a situation where both parties have something in particular the other guy wants. Like, say, sex for food.
Barter only emerges in cashless societies made up of people excluded from the cash society; cigarette economies in prison systems, for example. It’s not a logical outcome, it’s just how our brains are wired.
The actual evidence is that in Mesopotamia—the first case we know anything about—these more widespread pricing systems in fact emerged as a side-effect of non-state bureaucracies. Again, non-state bureaucracies are a phenomenon that no economic model would even have anticipated existing. It’s off the map of economic theory. But look at the historical record and there they are. Sumerian Temples (and even many of the early Palace complexes that imitated them) were not states, did not extract taxes or maintain a monopoly of force, but did contain thousands of people engaged in agriculture, industry, fishing, and herding, people who had to be fed and provisioned, their inputs and outputs measured. All evidence that exists points to money emerging as a series of fixed equivalent between silver—the stuff used to measure fixed equivalents in long distance trade, and conveniently stockpiled in the temples themselves where it was used to make images of gods, etc.—and grain, the stuff used to pay the most important rations from temple stockpiles to its workers. Hence, as economist and Naked Capitalism contributor Michael Hudson has so brilliantly demonstrated [6], a silver shekel was fixed as the amount of silver equivalent to the numbers of bushels of barley that could provide two meals a day for a temple worker over the course of a month. Obviously such a ration system would be of no interest to a merchant.
And then there’s this bit, which pretty conclusively tosses water on my idea that state bureaucracies were the ones who generated money. Apparently it was the non state bureaucracies, the giant temples that functioned as mini-states but, critically, owned all the product of their land and the people who worked on it/for them.
For instance, Sumerians, though they had the technological means to do so, never produced scales accurate enough to weigh out the tiny amounts of silver that would have been required to buy a single cask of beer, or a woolen tunic, or a hammer—the clearest indication that even once money did exist, it was not used as a medium of exchange for minor transactions, but rather as a means of keeping track of transactions made on credit.
The non-temple potential route for a development of money (no evidence for it, but fairly logical as described) was, oddly enough, the legal system. It required all sorts of unusual penalties that were heinously specific, and when that came to fines for minor crimes it might be difficult for, say, a jeweler to come up with the mandated cattle. Obviously you need a universal equivalent!
This is a description of what actually happens—and not only in the ethnographic record, but the historical one as well. The numismatist Phillip Grierson long ago pointed to the existence of such elaborate systems of equivalents in the Barbarian Law Codes of early Medieval Europe. [7]For example, Welsh and Irish codes contain extremely detailed price schedules where in the Welsh case, the exact value of every object likely to be found in someone’s house were worked out in painstaking detail, from cooking utensils to floorboards—despite the fact that there appear to have been, at the time, no markets where any such items could be bought and sold. The pricing system existed solely for the payment of damages and compensation—partly material, but particularly for insults to people’s honor, since the precise value of each man’s personal dignity could also be precisely quantified in monetary terms.
Much of the article is taken up with ranting about economists, so I excised the good bits.
It’s a huge step up from Draco, whose response to p much every crime was very Queen of Hearts.
But an interesting method of getting around a lack of currency, and an obvious (in retrospect) point where the injection of a uniform unit of account would hugely simplify things.
I was just reading an article about businesses going cashless and how some local, state and US government ass, er politicians are thinking about passing laws that prohibit stores from going cashless. Says it hurts the poor because they don’t have bank accounts. Whether or not that is true I don’t know, but as for me I still use cash a lot. I use cash for most purchases under $500 and when I buy things off of Craigslist or Offerup. So that means I use cash for at least 75% of my purchases. I do use my credit card or PayPal for online purchases or big ticket items, but most of what I buy is local and I use cash.
What does the good people of Quarter to Three think about going cashless? As for me, I’m against it. I don’t like stores or banks tracking every purchase I make.
I also find it interesting that the Book of Revelations from the bible mentions that one of the signs of the end times is needing the “mark of the beast” in order to buy and sell. A cashless society with a chip implanted in you meets this and this was predicted around 2000 years ago. Are we actually headed for a cashless society? Does this mean we are in the end times that the christian bible predicts?
Basically you can’t mix apples and oranges when debating cash vs cashless, tin foil hat mixed with reasonable debate.
If you have a religious objection to cashless purchases (an objection whose content is entirely about adherence to religious texts), that’s kind of a completely separate issue to whether or not cashless negatively affects the poor.
It’s like saying you dislike violence in video games because of it desensitizes young people to violence (reasonable!) and also because it’s a form of idolatry (not reasonable!).
What part of it’s interesting that a 2000 year old book mentions a cashless society is crazy or a religious objection? Not once did I write that I objected because of religion, I said I objected because I like to use cash over a credit or debit card. I don’t want to use my debit card to buy a $0.79 taco at Fred’s Taco stand. However I did ask if you are ok with a cashless society.
There’s nothing about the mark of the beast being used for implants.
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
The implication is that every person would have the same mark, and it’s explicit about that mark being on their foreheads or right hands. If you think going cashless is the same as the mark of the beast, I think it reflects your own preconceptions.
On the other hand, it’s usually better to use plastic instead of cash today. I find (and probably most people find) the annoyance of getting cash enough so that I tend not to use it unless I specifically set out to get it. Running all transactions in cash today is certainly doable but something of a headache.
OTOH, forcing poor people to buy plastic prepaid cards for purchases would just be another tax upon them in an economic system that gives monetary incentives for purchases for the rich and squeezes fees from the poor when they do the same. The poor are already going to be transaction taxed when the convert paychecks to cash, then they’d be “taxed” again when they buy/refill cash onto a prepaid card. In that respect i’d agree going plastic only would be another 2-5% decline in the purchasing power of the poor just in fees and transaction costs forced upon them.
I do not use cash completely, I have credit cards that I use for online purchases and big ticket items. Being cashless for somethings and using cash for other things is fine with me. I don’t get upset when people in front of me take an extra 30 seconds to pay with cash. I do get a little perturbed when a store won’t open up more lanes when it’s busy because they don’t want the pay for extra cashiers, but that’s another topic.
As for the mark, why is it implied? Couldn’t you consider the same type of chip being implanted into everybody receiving the mark? Also the chip could have all your personal information stored on it, in addition to having the number 666 followed by 12 digits which to me could satisfy all the requirements spelled out in the book of revelations. One could infer that the purpose of the mark is to give the beast the power to track everyone.
I agree that under today’s current conditions it would burdensome to require the poor to buy prepaid cards, however if you required every employer to pay employee’s through direct deposit which in turn would force people to get some sort of account, be it bank or cash checking account it could be done. After all a lot of people use a check cashing firm now to cash checks and they charge for their services.
The one side effect of a cashless society would be the elimination of the black market. Not that all the things bought on the black market are good, but it would eliminate you buying that used lawnmower from Frank using cash. In a cashless society that transaction would be tracked and Frank could now be liable for the taxes due to the money received. Just food for thought.
But you do use cash sometimes, right. For instance your neighbor Bert is moving and is willing to sell you his $2000 4k tv for $200 and will only accept cash.
I stiffed a taxi driver in Ireland like $10 Euro because he only took cash, and I never use cash, only had cards with me. Then some Google girl split her chocolate tart with me because I didn’t have cash at the castle’s kitchen. I bought their taxi ride later on the way back at least.
Through the lens of faith all things that might be, are.
I’m not actually sure what your objection is, at this point. Do you mainly have a religious objection to cashless or a libertarian objection to cashless?
Eliminating all black market activity would almost certainly be a net positive despite having to pay for lawnmower taxes. The effect on the poor would require subsidizing prepaid cards, and it’s unlikely this will happen, although for a few blue states, it’s possible. Prepaid cards can’t really be tracked though unless you deliberately register them. Anyway the point is that we don’t do much to help the poor escape predatory fees now, so it’s unlikely this would change in the near future if all cash was replaced by cards.
Tracking your activity is the future. Google already knows everything about you, and through analytics may know more about you than you know about yourself. Always on cameras are going to be everywhere in the next 10 years. You might be anonymous going cashless to buy that lawn mower, but you googled your destination, Facebook and Instagram will track your every movement to recommend you follow people close to your destination, and a dozen doorbell cameras will record your location and face wherever you pass them.
I’m be more concerned about government forcing cashless on us. While I’m not typically paranoid, and use my credit cards freely, i appreciate the fact that I can go ‘off the grid’ if i want to. And if that means that perhaps the sales tax was included in the price of my purchase, and I have no receipt, well, i guess that’s that.
My objection to going cashless is that it removes any and all chance at anonymity. Currently I have no facebook, instagram or twitter account that tracks me. However that does tell them that I don’t want to use their garbage. As for location services on my phone. I don’t turn it on because I always know where I am. I do use Google maps to find a place I haven’t been to, but I never turn on gps or location services. I also use maps to look at places I’ve never been and will probably never will go to. In other words If someone really wants to find out about me they can, but it won’t be all in one spot and will have to dig deep for the information. Plus I don’t use any cloud services so no one has access to my files and all my important files are on a nas server with no internet access. Also when I just typed my name into Google nothing comes up. Which gives me the illusion that Google doesn’t know that much about me.
I asked the question about going cashless to see how many of you actually are cashless now, don’t mind if we go cashless or still want to use cash and cards.
I asked the question about the book of revelations predicting a cashless society 2000 years ago because I find it interesting that something like a cashless society could be thought of 2000 years ago. I mean the only way to force people to buy and sell with the mark is to go to a cashless society.
