Cattle Herding... (was Re: in praise of gold)

[Ken Brown]

georgemw at 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