The genius of money is that it makes this sort of exchange both much more efficient and much more democratic.
Using money I don’t have to find someone who has (but doesn’t want) exactly the bundle of goods and services I desire and who wants (but lacks) exactly those things that I have but don’t want.
I don’t have to work through a centralised intermediary in order to get access to the gains from specialisation or trade. I have individual freedom and some protection from stong form and weak form corruption.
It’s also more private. I don’t have to explain to the community what I’d like. I can take my bundle of ten pound notes and go and find someone who wants to do business with me without involving the king or the high priest.
It means that it can be irrelvant to me what the bundles of goods and services my counter-parties are. We can do a spot transaction.
The fact that two people have different desires for different bundles of goods and services and that these can condensened into money and then unbundled is what makes economics (the process, not the science) happen.
(Saying that, you would have economics in a fuedal manor economy which operated without money using barter and fair-does but I’d argue that it still had ur-money in the sense that people carried round status and the ability to parlay this status into stuff coming out of the commonwealth. Money is something that allowed people to carry status outside of their own communities.)
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The genius of money is that it makes this sort of exchange both much more efficient and much more democratic.
Using money I don’t have to find someone who has (but doesn’t want) exactly the bundle of goods and services I desire and who wants (but lacks) exactly those things that I have but don’t want.
I don’t have to work through a centralised intermediary in order to get access to the gains from specialisation or trade. I have individual freedom and some protection from stong form and weak form corruption.
It’s also more private. I don’t have to explain to the community what I’d like. I can take my bundle of ten pound notes and go and find someone who wants to do business with me without involving the king or the high priest.
It means that it can be irrelvant to me what the bundles of goods and services my counter-parties are. We can do a spot transaction.
The fact that two people have different desires for different bundles of goods and services and that these can condensened into money and then unbundled is what makes economics (the process, not the science) happen.
(Saying that, you would have economics in a fuedal manor economy which operated without money using barter and fair-does but I’d argue that it still had ur-money in the sense that people carried round status and the ability to parlay this status into stuff coming out of the commonwealth. Money is something that allowed people to carry status outside of their own communities.)