Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

As the anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, Adam Smith’s parable of the entrepreneurial savages has become “the founding myth of our system of economic relations”9 and is retold uncritically in pretty much every introductory academic textbook. The problem is that it has no basis in fact. When Caroline Humphrey, a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, conducted an exhaustive review of the ethnographic and historical literature looking for societies that had barter systems like those described by Smith, she eventually gave up and concluded “no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” and that “all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

Wow!