It necessarily has a unit of account, but you can undertake all kinds of transactions under a credit system with nobody involved exchanging, or intending to exchange, that actual thing (silver coins, goats, bails of flax, abstract “favors”, whatever)
Coins (specie that had a direct connection to a ruler, usually with the name or visage of the ruler struck on them) were invented to facilitate war. They were given to soldiers to allow them to participate in the economy of the conquered. Since the free peasantry wouldn't trade with them (unreliable: they "died for a living"). The ruler demanded to be paid taxes in his own coin. This solved several important problems: reduction of military unrest against the ruler, free peasantry became a reliable source of goods and services, and the ruler could make war as needed. A market economy emerged as a side effect.
this is utter speculation; we don't have anywhere near the level of archaeological evidence about the social relations of 7th-century lydia necessary to make statements like this. no inscriptions survive in lydian from that century or the following century, except for the occasional graffito, plus of course words struck on coins. even from later in lydian history, we only have a few dozen texts of any length. the kings before gyges are quasi-mythical; we don't even know how kroisos, the most famous of gyges' successors spelled his own name. we don't know how kroisos's taxation system worked. we don't know if the peasantry was free or enslaved. we certainly don't have any contemporary accounts of social relations between soldiers and peasantry
however, we do know that rulers around the mediterranean were levying taxes and making war for thousands of years before the lydians started making specie into coins
we weren't talking about money; we were talking about 'Coins (specie that had a direct connection to a ruler, usually with the name or visage of the ruler struck on them)'
those specifically emerged in 7th century lydia, and that emergence is what the article is about
I had always (superficially) assumed the ruler as part of coinage was, somehow, to lend 'officialness' to the currency. But your informed and informative comment makes sense. Many thanks.-
I read the book then sought out criticisms including some of the ones you linked. Did you read the book? I was actually surprised the criticisms were so weak and/or hadn't read the book. I finished thinking "wow cool ideas, but not sure which parts are fact or ideology" and then the criticisms from economists made it clear they're the ones peddling fairy tales
A consistent problem I’ve noticed with Graeber is that he seems to attract strident critics who don’t appear to have done more than skim the book they’re criticizing—and maybe not even all of it. It’s as if they read some sentence they don’t like, then red-out from anger for a few pages, then keep going and soon it happens again.
It’s really inconvenient if you’re actually interested in reading good-faith commentary on his work.
I quite liked the book actually, but a consistent problem with it is that if you have a half-decent familiarity with some of the relevant background it's basically impossible not to spot that it's full of errors, some of them pretty innocuous and others pretty glaring. Thing is, if you can't help noticing that Apple Computer wasn't, in fact, a non-hierarchical organization formed by ex-IBM engineers working in groups of 20-40 using laptops(!) in their garages and know enough about bond trading to realise than investors aren't getting involved as a means of paying tribute to governments, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether some of the stuff about ancient coinage and unusual tribal approaches to indebtedness might also be embellishments of misunderstood anecdotes or completely the wrong way round.
It's really inconvenient that the general response to this by Graeber and his acolytes has been to insist that anyone with the temerity to suggest it might be flawed must be doing so in bad faith.
Huato doesn't seem to have read the first line of page 22, as Graber actually refutes the claim that money and debt co-emerged. As far as the Cato institute's criticism is concerned, that section is almost entirely free of specificity, unsurprisingly considering how right-wing Cato is in general. All accounts are flawed to some degree, these criticisms you point to are almost entirely ideological or non specific.
the page also contains criticisms from left-wing and even anarchist thinkers; basically their criticism is that graeber's work amounts to storytelling, a cartoon version of history as you said, not research
Rulers being on coinage was a later invention. The earliest coins used symbols for the issuing authority, for example the famous Athens owl tetradrachm.
A lot of the remainder of your comment about soldiers and being invented for war is rather speculative and needs sources.
The most radical are Co-Ops. The workers own the company. They're called Worker-Owners. Where management is a skill, not a rank. The problem with this model is three-fold:
• Outside investment can undermine the Co-Op's autonomy (many don't allow it)
• Raising capital is hard; usually you're bootstrapping (worker-owners must divert some of their income)
• Sometimes worker-owners get caught up in the democratic process of collective decision-making and get frustrated
On the other hand:
• A real Co-Op is real community. They exist to support the humans through work. You're all in this together. You can be "kicked out" by vote, but when you do, you give up your share and all that share money accumulating is yours.
• You are "The Man" in the worst and best way you can imagine If something is wrong with the company, you can change it.
• No more perverse mgmt incentives.
The biggest Co-Op is the Mondragon. They are very successful, too.
The big German companies invite the unions in because they are a source of innovation too. And managing the connection between the people who actually build the cars and the people who design/plan them is important.
This is interesting. I sat next to a German manager of DaimlerChrysler (which really dates me, I know) on a flight. He agreed with the idea of worker unions being inside the company and having a seat at the table. He also disliked the practice of building cars "offshore" because, he said "the knowledge of building the car leaves the country".
Just one example: the class attribute in HTML vs className in JSX.
It’s not that it’s complicated, you just use one or the other. But it’s very indicative of what’s going on under the hood: despite looking exactly like HTML, JSX isn’t creating HTML. It’s creating elements via JavaScript APIs.
The only "debatable" thing that React does is to use the names from the JS API in JSX (where some people would expect names from the HTML API because JSX looks like HTML)
That’s basically what I said, though? The point is that JSX is made to look like HTML so you think you’re writing HTML but you’re not, you’re using a JS API.
Also I had to laugh at the sibling replies:
> Narrative violation: className and friends are NOT a React thing!
> FWIW, the className prop is a React thing not a JSX thing
FWIW, the className prop is a React thing not a JSX thing. Other libraries which use JSX will happily accept a plain class prop. The React limitation is abstraction leakage: props are not attributes, they map to DOM properties.
But to the point that JSX is a DSL, that limitation is specifically because React itself is very tightly coupled to DOM semantics… but JSX explicitly has no built in semantics[1].
1: First sentence of https://facebook.github.io/jsx/ - “JSX is an XML-like syntax extension to ECMAScript without any defined semantics.”
I'm sure this has some amazing features that really help with project and personal productivity mgmt compared to other systems.
But let me ask you a question. If I want to get your attention, which one of the following techniques will work best:
1) Write you a snailmail letter
2) Send you an email
3) Send you a text
4) Write it on a yellow post-it note on your refrigerator
The answer is 4. Because it's the most difficult to ignore and leverages our ancient human physiology. It's not an accident that Kent Beck (Author of "Extreme Programming: Embrace Change") used post-it notes stuck to a wall that had every story written on it that mattered to the team within eyesight of every developer.
The problem is that when we get together to put information into a Jira or a Trello or whatever, we're making THE TOOL happy. What matters is the state of the tool, not the state of the system you're working on.
I think it depends. For simple notes/reminders/to-do lists, paper and pen are enough. But for bigger projects, you might need a tool. Choosing the right tool for your needs can make a significant impact on your progress. That's why there are so many PM tools on the market. Cheers,
I believe your comment might be a bit too broad for the claims you're making.
Arguably, the most advanced "tech stack" for moving trains around rail systems today (at scale, with the highest safety rating) is based around the Sicas ECC electronic interlocking by Siemens.
However, this article is merely about the technology used for collection of fares for the NYC metro rail system.
No it doesn't have a world class freight rail network. The North American rail infra is incredibly primitive. Most of it is "dark territory" (no track sensors), unlike Europe. I used to write rail automation software for a German firm. They were appalled at the state of affairs here. One of the most lucrative rail systems in the US had an average speed of their trains in the single digits MPH!
I think the term "world class" is unfortunate with connection to freight rail networks.
Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech. What it needs is to be able to travel everywhere at high throughput and cheaply. US is doing quite well in that regard.
High throughput comes with a caveat, since it’s high throughput given the existing poor conditions.
The US used to have much more tracks, but the private railroads stripped a lot of them as far as they could get away with. There are lines that were four-tracked or were electrified that have now been reduced to unelectrified single track, so you now have a much more sluggish, polluting and congested railroad, and on top of that much is poorly maintained to save money.
—-
Also a lot of the freight is bulk freight like coal. This has led to some interesting dynamics where freight railroads oppose coal plant closures, because they will lose a major source of tonnage.
> Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech.
That depends on what you want to ship. In the US the train just gave up on many other class of freight. Yes, large scale slow bulk transport doesn't need speed, other things might.
Track sensors are especially useful in they middle of nowhere.
And there are plenty of latency sensitive applications for freight rail which are developed in other places. They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
> They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
There really isn't. Freight companies are responsible for maintaining investing in the rail, and if it doesn't make them money, they aren't going to put it there. Heck, a lot of places are single rail (meaning, no two way traffic at the same time), because it doesn't really make sense to dump more money into an extra set of tracks in those places.
Again, you're conflating things. There is a market for low latency rail freight. The rail companies find that it's better to keep the rail as is and invest the profits somewhere else. That doesn't mean that the market doesn't exist.
The correct approach is for low latency rail freight to operate on passenger rail systems which already have the necessary speeds and flexibilities. This is structurally unfeasible in the US but it's still definitely a market that better rail systems can service at no extra cost.
The freight companies own the railway, they optimize the rails for freight, which is why we move much more freight by train than Europe. Passenger service is something they do for the federal government subsidy and nothing more.
And actually, sharing tracks between passenger and freight service is something that they don't really do in Europe. Because they share tracks, American passenger trains have to build at a weight on part with freight trains. Most lines in Europe separate out passenger and freight service lines so they can run lighter trains for passenger service.
A big part of why the US moves more by rail is simply because it moves more goods overland than in Europe.
Low latency freight for smaller, high value items is often done on passenger lines (or even passenger trains) because it doesn't put any scheduling pressure on passenger service.
As far as use of freight in Europe, the elephant in the room is that the EU uses a lot more sea freight than the US. Indeed, while the modal split for EU trucking is around 50%, it's around 70% in the US, and it thus seems clear that the real reason that there is less rail shipping within Europe is because there is much more competition from maritime shipping.
This is a perfect example of path-dependent policy. Because the decision was to select for freight, other kinds of rail are "unfeasible". I'm using scare quotes to suggest that it's not really unfeasible, it's a choice.
And since trucking capacity has been maxed out in the US for quite a while (Amazon is the big mover for this situation, even before covid), you can bet this path dependence is biting us now.
I'm surprised by the general opposition to your comment. I agree. US transit infrastructure, including rail, is anything but world class. Sure, we move tons of freight, but is that the standard alone?
Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved better. It's always ok to reject the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mentality.
In the context of freight, it is the lone standard because as another commenter pointed out, throughput is more important than latency in bulk goods transport whereas latency is a much more important variable when passengers are involved.
US rail owners and operators know what the variables are that they care about and their customers care about are, and also what insurance companies care about and as a result, they are adept at moving goods coast to Great Lakes to coast, across the Appalachians, Missouri-Mississippi river system, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades and the California Coastal Range.
If they’re not using some software package or have complete sensor coverage on their tracks, they probably judged that they don’t need it. If a competitor actually finds advantage with these things tomorrow, then they will all adopt it.
I think it’s easy to call something out as primitive but what changes could be made and how much impact would it have? It doesn’t seem like our freight trains are the bottleneck when moving goods around the country.
They kind of are if you consider how many goods are still shipped by trucks.
The US is perfect for rail - lots of long trips, with lots of goods. It could probably have more market share if goods could move more quickly and flexibly.
Just to add some numbers, the freight modal splits as of 2018 (most recent year with complete data), measured in tonne-kilometers, for a few countries [1] and the EU taken as a whole [2]:
US: 45% road, 38% rail, 17% other (water/pipeline)
Europe is not perfect for rail. Shorter trips, complicated geography, etc. etc. there are some legacy technology constraints that the us doesn’t have or solved a hundred years ago (loading gauge, max train length, couplers).
The fact is the us could do better, pointing to Europe which could also do better is moot.
I believe this as well. And I happen to know of one of the largest rail systems in North America changes its topology weekly. I'm not sure "throughput over latency" is as much of a mindset as those here who say it is.
Imo, your choice of scare quotes around "smart" telegraph your unwillingness to consider even a well-founded data informed argument, for what it's worth.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
GP asked for a well founded data-based argument, assuming they don't actually want that is in bad faith.
I agree with GP that the connection between sensors and high speed to better freight rail is tenuous, whereas large amounts of tonnage moved more clearly indicates good freight rail.
