georgemw@speakeasy.net wrote:
Cows might have served well as currency for primitives like the Etruscans, but can you imagine using them today? I took a bus this morning, the fair was 1.10 and I only had paper money so they ripped me off 90 cents. But if I was an Etruscan, they would've taken my whole cow!
As far as I know people who use cows (or whatever) like this make it work by running up all sorts of debts with each other. So it looks to strangers as if they are being all nice and friendly and doing favours, but of course A knows that B owes so many cows or goats or pots of beer next time someone from village X marries someone from village Y, while B can call in at C's village any time they want and eat prawns, as long as D has by then given some of those special beads made out of abalone shell to F... and so on. Great fun & entirely rendered obsolete by the invention of double-entry book-keeping. If our ancestors lived like that for a long while then maybe we are evolved to remember those reputation tensors Tim mentioned. We all, quite naturally, keep track of who owes what to who & whether they are likely to pay up. So the tribe benefits from old folks who remember exactly who brought what to which party years ago. Human beings as natural book-keepers. It is a good a sociobiological Just So Story and any other. Of course we do stuff like that informally. My sister & her husband owe me some money from when I helped them buy a car. But I, quite separately, owe him about twenty quid I borrowed to buy some beers - but then he owes me a round or two next time we are in a pub - the debts aren't commensurable (even though two of them are denominated in pounds sterling). The "round" is a powerfully symbolic system of exchange and reputation amongst British men (women sometimes join in, as do Irish & Australians, though they don't *quite* get it). As the Gikuyu proverb says "goats are not bananas". Try searching the web for "Onka's big Moka" (you have to avoid references to a band called Toploader that made an album with that title) It was an all-time classic TV program about some guys in Papua who had to successfully bring off a big party before the rainy season, so that they could hand over loads of pigs to their rivals. Like a potlach, with the added complication that, while you have the pigs, they have to eat - pig-capital has negative interest rates. But it wasn't just pigs... Ken