[P2P-F] HOW old is the market economy

Thu Mar 3 13:40:45 CET 2011

I've always learned that the standard story of evolving to the market from
barter was a myth, and that instead, the gift economy was dominant at first
(see mauss)

but here's a quote that claims the opposite:

Philosopher Fed Turner has some interesting
insights<http://frederickturnerpoet.com/?p=330>:
*”There is a myth that we as a species have moved from having an edenic and
arcadian gift exchange economy to a cold and corrupt market economy. As a
myth it has its uses; as a fact it will not fly. Archaeologists and physical
anthropologists now find trading practices among the earliest humans nearly
200,000 years ago; we were always buying, selling, hiring, trucking and
bartering. And economists tell us that even in today’s advanced industrial
economies the amount of value that is transferred by gift is greater than
the amount transferred by market exchanges. This may sound counter-intuitive
until we reflect that gift includes the free services rendered by parents to
their children, husbands and wives to each other, friends to friends,
hobbyists to their community, and the bequests of the dying to their heirs.

“We have plenty of theory about markets, since Locke and Smith and their
ilk. There is some theory about gift exchange in traditional tribal
societies (Marcel Mauss, for instance), but very little until now about the
economic, moral, social, political, ecological, aesthetic, and spiritual
implications of today’s gift economy in advanced societies like the United
States.”*

via
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/02/philanthropy-transparency-science.html;
http://frederickturnerpoet.com/?p=330
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