On the surface, prices are a running record of the cost of commodities as they change hands in the market. This is their most common and familiar meaning. At the same time, they may also be studied in a different way, as evidence of the changing value of money—which is how some economists prefer to think of them. On a third level, prices tell us about systems of production, and especially about structures of exchange—a subject of growing historical importance, as scholars begin to discover that processes of exchange may have played much of the role that Marx attributed to the means of
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