Dark Age America: The Hoard of the Nibelungs | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

Nov. 12, 2014 (Archdruid Report) -- Of all the differences that separate the feudal economy sketched out in last week's post from the market economy most of us inhabit today, the one that tends to throw people for a loop most effectively is the near-total absence of money in everyday medieval life.

Money is so central to current notions of economics that getting by without it is all but unthinkable these days. The fact -- and of course it is a fact -- that the vast majority of human societies, complex civilizations among them, have gotten by just fine without money of any kind barely registers in our collective imagination.

One source of this curious blindness, I've come to think, is the way that the logic of money is presented to students in school. Those of my readers who sat through an Economics 101 class will no doubt recall the sort of narrative that inevitably pops up in textbooks when this point is raised. You have, let's say, a pig farmer who has bad teeth, but the only dentist in the village is Jewish, so the pig farmer can't simply swap pork chops and bacon for dental work.

Barter might be an option, but according to the usual textbook narrative, that would end up requiring some sort of complicated multiparty deal whereby the pig farmer gives pork to the carpenter, who builds a garage for the auto repairman, who fixes the hairdresser's car, and eventually things get back around to the dentist. Once money enters the picture, by contrast, the pig farmer sells bacon and pork chops to all and sundry, uses the proceeds to pay the dentist, and everyone's happy. Right?

Well, maybe. Let's stop right there for a moment, and take a look at the presuppositions hardwired into this little story. First of all, the narrative assumes that participants have a single rigidly defined economic role: the pig farmer can only raise pigs, the dentist can only fix teeth, and so on. Furthermore, it assumes that participants can't anticipate needs and adapt to them: even though he knows the only dentist in town is Jewish, the pig farmer can't do the logical thing and start raising lambs for Passover on the side, or what have you. Finally, the narrative assumes that participants can only interact economically through market exchanges: there are no other options for meeting needs for goods and services, no other way to arrange exchanges between people other than market transactions driven by the law of supply and demand.

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