New answers tagged economics
1
The accepted answer is unreferenced and factually inaccurate. The story being told in the accepted answer has been known to be false for 100 years.
Here is a constructive critic of Graeber affirming this:
As Graeber explains, however, pure barter as such never existed. The myth of barter is a
handy story for explaining the origins of money in terms that ...
3
A famous practical example was found in WWII prisoner of war camps where cigarettes became a de-facto currency. This happened without any central organisation or planning; prisoners started with barter, and over time found that cigarettes had become the medium of exchange because they were more-or-less fungible, small and common enough to buy small things ...
6
The first real source for this is an essay Graeber wrote in 2013:
"On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant" which he then reworked into a full book on the subject of
— Bullshit Jobs. (Website)
A YouGov poll in 2015 then found that
37% of British workers think their jobs are meaningless
He just quotes that actual number from that poll in ...
4
Similar statements are in Ricardo's obituary in the Sunday Times on 14 September 1823 and Paul Samuelson's more recent articles about Ricardo.
This story might be described as mythical and also involves some confusion between David Ricardo and Nathan Rothschild, also supposed to have made a large fortune over news from Waterloo, especially as one of the ...
3
LаngLаngС found that:
"Kapitalismus" does not appear in the German version of Das Kapital Bd. I.
It does appear in Das Kapital Bd. II published from Marx's notes after Marx's death.
It does appear in Marx's other notes and letters after 1877.
Lunchonacho additionally found that:
It does appear in multiple places in the 1872 edition.
It appears in the ...
1
I had a look at the etymology of capitalism and, according to Wikipedia:
The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the capitalistic system (kapitalistisches System) and to the capitalist mode of production (...
12
It is quite absurd to claim that Marx did not know that word. Although, in his most important writings the exact letter sequence is indeed not recorded. For example: It is not in the German version of the first edition of the first volume of Das Kapital In lesser known works — it is present.
It was a prominent word used by economist David Ricardo which Marx ...
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