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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

of course this wasn't the first currency; currencies had been in use for millennia at that point. it was the first coinage of the metals they were already using as currencies

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Coins (specie that had a direct connection to a ruler, usually with the name or visage of the ruler struck on them) were invented to facilitate war. They were given to soldiers to allow them to participate in the economy of the conquered. Since the free peasantry wouldn't trade with them (unreliable: they "died for a living"). The ruler demanded to be paid taxes in his own coin. This solved several important problems: reduction of military unrest against the ruler, free peasantry became a reliable source of goods and services, and the ruler could make war as needed. A market economy emerged as a side effect.

I had always (superficially) assumed the ruler as part of coinage was, somehow, to lend 'officialness' to the currency. But your informed and informative comment makes sense. Many thanks.-

David Graber's book "Debt, the first 5,000 years" goes into this in great detail. Highly recommended.

graeber is fascinating and compelling reading, and he may be right about things from time to time, but he is not a reliable guide to reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years#Cri...

Huato doesn't seem to have read the first line of page 22, as Graber actually refutes the claim that money and debt co-emerged. As far as the Cato institute's criticism is concerned, that section is almost entirely free of specificity, unsurprisingly considering how right-wing Cato is in general. All accounts are flawed to some degree, these criticisms you point to are almost entirely ideological or non specific.

the page also contains criticisms from left-wing and even anarchist thinkers; basically their criticism is that graeber's work amounts to storytelling, a cartoon version of history as you said, not research

Did you read the book? what were your personal thoughts, more interested in that then random political creatures

I read the book then sought out criticisms including some of the ones you linked. Did you read the book? I was actually surprised the criticisms were so weak and/or hadn't read the book. I finished thinking "wow cool ideas, but not sure which parts are fact or ideology" and then the criticisms from economists made it clear they're the ones peddling fairy tales

A consistent problem I’ve noticed with Graeber is that he seems to attract strident critics who don’t appear to have done more than skim the book they’re criticizing—and maybe not even all of it. It’s as if they read some sentence they don’t like, then red-out from anger for a few pages, then keep going and soon it happens again.

It’s really inconvenient if you’re actually interested in reading good-faith commentary on his work.

I quite liked the book actually, but a consistent problem with it is that if you have a half-decent familiarity with some of the relevant background it's basically impossible not to spot that it's full of errors, some of them pretty innocuous and others pretty glaring. Thing is, if you can't help noticing that Apple Computer wasn't, in fact, a non-hierarchical organization formed by ex-IBM engineers working in groups of 20-40 using laptops(!) in their garages and know enough about bond trading to realise than investors aren't getting involved as a means of paying tribute to governments, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether some of the stuff about ancient coinage and unusual tribal approaches to indebtedness might also be embellishments of misunderstood anecdotes or completely the wrong way round.

It's really inconvenient that the general response to this by Graeber and his acolytes has been to insist that anyone with the temerity to suggest it might be flawed must be doing so in bad faith.

Well, yeah. When a new ruler kills the old one you need to make sure all his old currency dies with it so that the peasants have to pay new taxes.

this is utter speculation; we don't have anywhere near the level of archaeological evidence about the social relations of 7th-century lydia necessary to make statements like this. no inscriptions survive in lydian from that century or the following century, except for the occasional graffito, plus of course words struck on coins. even from later in lydian history, we only have a few dozen texts of any length. the kings before gyges are quasi-mythical; we don't even know how kroisos, the most famous of gyges' successors spelled his own name. we don't know how kroisos's taxation system worked. we don't know if the peasantry was free or enslaved. we certainly don't have any contemporary accounts of social relations between soldiers and peasantry

however, we do know that rulers around the mediterranean were levying taxes and making war for thousands of years before the lydians started making specie into coins

Comment was not meant to cover Lydia; just generally how money emerged. And this is a "cartoon" version of the story.

we weren't talking about money; we were talking about 'Coins (specie that had a direct connection to a ruler, usually with the name or visage of the ruler struck on them)'

those specifically emerged in 7th century lydia, and that emergence is what the article is about

Rulers being on coinage was a later invention. The earliest coins used symbols for the issuing authority, for example the famous Athens owl tetradrachm. A lot of the remainder of your comment about soldiers and being invented for war is rather speculative and needs sources.

Ok, we've s/currency/coinage/'d the title above. Thanks!

Edit: oops, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020808 I think maybe we'd better just excise that whole bit.

coldtea there is generally considered to be incorrect; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin#Lydian_and_Ionian_electru... says, 'The earliest coins are mostly associated with Iron Age Anatolia of the late 7th century BC, and especially with the kingdom of Lydia,' which is what this article is about

there's the very curious fact that somehow china had exactly the same innovation within a few decades, so it's possible they were actually first

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