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.

222 sats \ 0 replies \ @nkmg1c_ventures 5h

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.

122 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 5h

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