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"Ancient tally sticks across three civilizations challenge myths about money"phys.org/news/2025-09-ancient-tally-civilizations-myths-money.html

1667 sats \ 8 comments \ @Scoresby 13h econ

Cool title! You got me for a look-see...

Rosenswig's study, "Ancient Tally Sticks Explain the Nature of Modern Government Money," published in the Journal of Economic Issues, shows that tally sticks—independently invented in England, China and the Maya world—were consistently used by state officials to record and cancel tax or tribute obligations.

I am willing to entertain that governments loved producing their own little methods of figuring out who they should steal from next, yes.

Orthodox economics, which treats money primarily as a medium of exchange, does not fit the evidence. Tally sticks, he argues, suggest that money originates with governments as a system of accounting and taxation.

This is the parr I get hung up on: just because governments around the world were keeping track of debts with tally sticks, doesn't mean that they came up with the idea of money. Seems at least as likely that governments got the idea from systems already in use.

This, I agree with:

"The historical record shows that barter doesn't precede the creation of financial money," Rosenswig said.

This is bonkers:

"Tally sticks remind us that money is not a scarce commodity but an accounting system rooted in political authority."

I should probably bread the paper rather than relying on this summary, but it's not a top priority right now. Maybe when I get around to finishing my post about money that I've been trying to write all year.

If money's origin is fundamentally an institutional, political accounting system rather than a product of barter markets, it could change how we think about fiscal policy today, Rosenswig suggests.

Uh oh, I think I see where this is going...

He argues that austerity policies, premised on the idea that governments face strict financial limits—like households needing to balance their checkbooks—lack historical support. Instead, governments spend first, then tax to manage inflation and demand.

He's an MMT-er!!!

"Once unshackled from the orthodox assertion that financial money is primarily a medium of exchange," said Rosenswig, "fiscally sovereign governments are free to help the working men and women who elected them during the inevitable downturns of our modern capitalist economy."

Ah, yes -- your contributions are so important you have to remind the rest of us:

For Rosenswig, this is also a reminder of anthropology's role in public debate.

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102 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 2h

"The historical record shows that barter doesn't precede the creation of financial money," Rosenswig said.

This can't possibly be correct. The historical record may not show that barter does precede financial money in an evolutionary way but it definitely does not show that it definitively does not.

Barter and money predate scholarly writing, so how would we even have such an account?

42 sats \ 4 replies \ @Scoresby OP 2h

Right! I don't know how the guy could prove such a thing, but I read it as "People assume barter came before money, but that isn't more true than money came before barter." Maybe I am being too charitable, as his statement is stronger than that.

I suppose he thinks that demonstrating that money is really old is enough to prove that barter didn't necessarily predate it.

I should have read the actual paper...

102 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 1h

I haven't read it either, but money being created by the state to track tax obligations is a very common view.

It doesn't make much sense to me why money would be a valuable commodity, though. The oldest taxation we know about was in-kind: farmers had to give a share of their crop, for instance.

If gold wasn't being used as money already, why would farmers even have gold to pay their taxes with?

And, if they didn't already have gold coins, why would some government bureaucrat think to distribute gold to them for the purpose of collecting it back later?

And, if it wasn't already money and they didn't just distribute gold coins, how did they convince farmers to accept gold coins in exchange before gold coins were a medium of exchange?

The story really doesn't make much sense.

On the other hand, we know that money emerges pretty quickly in economies (POW camps, MMO games, etc.) and if there were a medium of exchange in circulation there's no mystery at all as to why the government would collect it as tax payment.

217 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 1h

I get really annoyed at these guys. They go straight from "ledgers were used to track tax obligations" to "money is created by the nation state and taxation should be used to manage the supply." Seriously, if you actually read the linked article, that's what they say.

It's so mind-bendingly stupid that I have trouble even responding.

The most likely truth is that both things developed concurrently:

ledgers for tracking obligations, and those ledgers may have been enforced by some sort of chieftain or authority
commodity based moneys for facilitating barter and exchange

I really don't see how any of that leads at all to the claims of the MMTers. And there's no way in hell that the chieftains recording obligations on ledgers had any notions that they were doing this to stimulate or manage the economy.

These guys are mush heads.

30 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 1h

Even as I was writing my response, I was thinking about how so many of the obligations in small communities would have been informal: i.e. I helped you rescue a goat last spring so now I need help fixing my roof, and even there it wouldn't be consciously calculated and tracked.

As society gets bigger, it's harder to keep track of that stuff and some people are more prone to score keeping than others, so they may have started keeping tallies. It also becomes easier to freeride, so people take more notice of who isn't pitching in, which is easier to do if you give some token of value when someone helps you.

There was also probably an informal tribute system with the upper class who provided protection or salvation or whatever. Those gifts/taxes may have been loosely tracked but a universal numeraire would be needed to compare the worth of a tribute of wheat with a tribute of wool. Once that numeraire exists, the farmer may give wheat plus other assets in tribute during lean harvests.

etc. etc.

Money solves so many problems that it's just not surprising for money-like things to pop up.

522 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 1h

What's really bothering me is that this is the behavior of activists masquerading as academics. Take something that the data plausibly shows, then irresponsibly extrapolate it to their desired policy position.

Examples include:

Academic documentation of historical discrimination faced by transgenders --> Men should be allowed in womens' bathrooms
Academic observations of rising global temperatures --> We need to phase gas cars out by 2035 or face extinction
Academic documentation of discrimination faced by women in the workplace --> All differences in labor market outcomes between men and women must be attributable to discrimination

So irresponsible, but very dangerous and persuasive to some people, because the first part of each of those arguments are true and well grounded in fact. It's the extrapolation that's false, but also since the activists have a veneer of academic respectability, it's hard for a layperson to argue back.

264 sats \ 0 replies \ @nkmg1c_ventures 10h

orthodox assertion that financial money is primarily a medium of exchange

Money is pretty much always a market good at the same time, the way we think of money.

There are multiple ways to think of money that are valid, but if its just a ledger of what you owe the government, and cannot be transferred to someone else or traded for something you want, the tally sticks are basically counting obligations only.

For Rosenswig, this is also a reminder of anthropology's role in public debate. "Studying the past reminds us that money is not timeless or universal in form," he said. "It is a political tool, and how we choose to use it today is a matter of policy, not natural law."

This is a really statist view of money. Money should be (somewhat) timeless and universal otherwise it's bad money. I can write unidirectional IOUs and try to force people to use/honor them but that's unlikely in the long term.

164 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 9h

I also took on some of these arguments here: #1015621

The MMTers are desperate to prove that money originates from state power

I worry because these ideas are incredibly attractive to those who want the government to do more to solve problems because they falsely believe in government's ability to solve problems.

I worry it may become a false consensus, the way other pseudo scientific claims, like gender ideology, have become a false consensus among elites