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>>"The issue with Graeber and others is they are looking for a historical account of barter pre-dating a historical record of debt, but they will never find it, because the record-keeping begin for the purpose of recording debt."

Is this is the case, it seems to me that the issue is not with Graeber and others but, with the guys that claim something about which there is not historical account.

>>"We have actual case studies of communities developing money prices from scratch: "

The point is not if barter is used sometimes or if some people, in some circumstances, would start using cigarettes as money, but if that's the main history of money, specifically in the context of early states, as has been claimed for many years without any kind of evidence.

The burden of proof is not in the guys that examine the historic and archeology evidence, but in the ones that want to sell a narrative without evidence.

> The point is not if barter is used sometimes or if some people, in some circumstances, would start using cigarettes as money, but if that's the main history of money, specifically in the context of early states, as has been claimed for many years without any kind of evidence.

Both sides of the argument are making claims without evidence, because evidence prior to record-keeping of debt doesn't exist, and never will. There are only theories about how money came into being, and some are more plausible than others.

Graeber himself contradicts his own "debunking" of Menger's theory:

> "All evidence that exists points to money emerging as a series of fixed equivalents 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 a silver shekel was fixed as the amount of silver equivalent to the numbers of bushels of barley that could provide 2 meals a day for a temple worker over the course of a month. It was the Temples that actually had a need to extend a silver system from a unit used to compare the value of a limited number of rare items traded long distance, used almost exclusively by members of the political or administrative elite of the societies in question – to something that could be used to compare the values of everyday items, like planks of wood, jugs of beer, and so forth."

Why silver?

Why were they already stockpiling silver?

How was it decided that silver would be used to measure fixed equivalents in long distance trade?

How was it decided the ratio of silver to bushels of barley?

What were these political and administrative elite doing when they proposed to offer a certain amount of silver for some long-distance traded rare items? (We have a word for this: 'barter')

Why would the foreigners they are trading with even want all this silver?

It takes some circular reasoning to get to where Graeber thinks he is, because he misinterpreted Menger to begin with. The above does not discredit Menger at all.

It seems to me, that nobody is denying the existence of barter. For instance, barter exist in our current modern societies. The question is if there are any evidence that the history of money is fundamentally the history of barter.

So, you have record-keeping that contradict the barter history and you have anthropology evidence that human semi-nomad tribes, even if they could barter sometimes, don't organize their society around barter, but, somehow, the more plausible evidence is barter. Don't know what to say to that.

This is still a misunderstanding of Menger. Menger's argument is not that societies were organized around barter at all.

He argues that where barter exists, people will quickly converge onto one or more forms of money for organizing trade. Even if it is not the intention of individual tradesmen, some astute traders will realize that they can profit by matchmaking (a necessity when there is a double-coincidence of wants). These astute traders will pick commodities which have the best saleability (those which are mostly likely to be accepted in exchange for other goods, and which retain value) as their means of measuring trade value. The successful traders will in turn, define which commodities emerges as the common monies in that economy, because traders who chose other (less saleable) commodities as their unit of measure will not be as successful.

It is not surprising that there are no historical documents outlining this, for it would likely pre-date even the written word by centuries or millennia. If it were the intention of a matchmaker to profit from establishing trades through use of goods with high saleability, they would also not likely advertise their tactics willingly, as they would be in competition with others attempting to make similar trades.

There are many historical accounts of monies being displaced when new, superior forms of money enter into economies, which is an extension of Menger's thesis (Also known as Thiers' Law). If a society is using a form of money which for whatever reason becomes much less saleable, and a new commodity enters the market which is more saleable, the more saleable commodity will eventually displace the old money.

So if it were the case that silver was selected (by who?) as the first money, 'for reasons', it seems like they hit jackpot on first try, for silver would remain the most saleable commodity for millennia until it would be later displaced by gold. Call me sceptic, but I don't buy such coincidences.

> It is not surprising that there are no historical documents outlining this, for it would likely pre-date even the written word by centuries or millennia.

Huh? During the 17th and 18th century European colonization of North America there was no existing standard of payment which all settlers had access to. Before the circulation of paper money by colonial assemblies, tax and wages for public servants shifted to tobacco due to the liquidity of the export market.

> There are many historical accounts of monies being displaced when new, superior forms of money enter into economies, which is an extension of Menger's thesis (Also known as Thiers' Law). If a society is using a form of money which for whatever reason becomes much less saleable, and a new commodity enters the market which is more saleable, the more saleable commodity will eventually displace the old money

In the American colonies, commodity money based on farm products was replaced by paper credit money loaned by governors on security of property. Gold and silver were skipped over as official forms of money because they were not in large supply, and because activists such as Benjamin Franklin argued that if people invested time in digging for Spanish gold and buried treasure they would be poorer than if they spent time plowing fields.

> for silver would remain the most saleable commodity for millennia until it would be later displaced by gold

What's important is not simply salability but liquidity. In industrial countries the value of credit money is secured by the value of the assets of borrowers, they have to collect money back in same unit of account after investing or spending it to avoid default and foreclosure. In America the colonies tobacco-money or farm-product money was displaced by paper money with no metallic backing. Metal-backed money was imposed by Great Britain.

> How do people even agree what things are worth

Being inside a deeply rooted paradigm, it is hard to imagine that the idea of "the worth" of a thing might not have been a paradigm that pre-historic people comprehended.

The thing that anthropologists like Graeber excel at is how they can take themselves out of their own conditioned thinking.

Think off this, when you see a n expensive car drive by you will most likely reflexively say "That car is probably worth $300,000". You assign an objective worth to the car, when classical economics will tell you that the actual worth of a car is subjective.

Personal ownership was not seen in the same way in the past as we see it today so objective worth might not have been in their mental framework.

>How do people even agree what things are worth in order to offer credit before there exists any prices?

This is prominently discussed by Graeber in the book, so this comment leads me to believe you have even read it.

I read it some time ago (~2011) and don't remember the details. At the time, I knew nothing of money and took most of the book at face value.

However, when I later began studying Austrian economics, it became quite clear that Graeber's assumptions were based on circular reasoning, and that Graeber's writings on economics are through a left-leaning lens. That isn't to cast doubt on his work on Anthropology, which is fascinating to read, but I have doubts that he truly understood Menger's argument to begin with (or perhaps willingly chose to filter it to fit into his world-view.)

Indeed. In fact, OP's quote is considered and dismissed by Graeber in Debt using precisely the same example:

"Occasionally, we can even find some kind of currency beginning to develop: for instance, in POW camps and many prisons, inmates have indeed been known to use cigarettes as a kind of currency, much to the delight and excitement of professional economists. But were too we are talking about people who grew up using money and now have to make do without it - exactly the situation "imagined" by the economics textbooks."