Nate Schmolze wrote:
> Andy,
>
> This seems to also point to the "ethics" you brought forward in that the
> capabilities in children that we seem to value emerged from the historical
> change of a "barter" economy to modern capitalism.
>
> Nate
Aren't we talking about the change of a barter economy to an economy with
markets, that uses money?
A portrait of a historical "barter" economy encountering and being drawn into
a money economy, and the contradictions that evolve, is in E. Paul
Durrenberger's The Dynamics of Medieval Iceland: Politial Economy and
Literature, University of Iowa Press 1992. Chapter 2, "Production," explains
the operation of a subsistence economy based on hay and fish using slave
labor in an environmental context so tight that people are killed over grazing
rights to a single meadow; pasture, livestock and labor (mouths to feed) had
to be in exact balance in order to make it through the winters. There is no
money at this point, no market. This means that things get their value in
terms of how they affect a household's ability to get through the winter. A
tool increases labor productivity, reduces the mouthfuls of food required;
less hay in a cool summer means less fodder for livestock, fewer sheep and
cows will make it through the winter. The values of these commodities are
generally known. What you see is what you get.
In the next chapter, "Chiefly Consumption," Durrenberger tells a story from a
saga from about 1000 AD in which Snorri, who was to become a great chieftain,
comes back from a trip to Norway less splendidly outfitted than his
companions. This is taken to mean that he has spent all his wealth. But what
he has is money -- what you see is NOT what you get, here, and when someone
else sets a price on a good farm that Snorri wants, thinking that Snorri won't
be able to pay for it, Snorri pays for it immediately in silver. For this
sort of behavior, Snorri gets a reputation for craftiness.
Just thinking, here -- because this is realated to issues of globalization,
particularly the argument that it's OK to pay maquiladora workers low wages
"because that's a lot of money in their society" -- that the value of money is
not fixed, it's negotiated; the exhange rate may be fixed, but the value is
not fixed. The value of a sheep or a slave or a pasture in a barter economy
like medieval Iceland is fixed because everyone knows how much hay it takes to
keep a cow alive all winter; when the local chief comes to a tenant farm and
says, "You have to kill this sheep and that cow in order to get through the
winter," people understand the logic and either go along or risk having to let
it die of starvation if they run out of hay. But once money is introduced --
silver, which for a long time was what Icelandic chiefs got in Norway when
they brought surplus wool to trade -- then a mismatch between possessions and
wealth (measured in terms of tapestries, wooden buildings with carvings, down
coverlets, beer, hoards of dried fish, pastures, livestock and slaves) and
wealth embodied in silver, which had exchange value depending on where you can
spend it, but no subsistence value.
The moment I'm trying to isolate here is the way Snorri developed a reputation
for "craftiness" because he did not outfit himself (horse, saddle, spear,
clothes) as splendidly as his companions, to reflect the sucess of his voyage;
instead, he brought home money, which he then spent to buy a farm. I guess
what I'd like to see is something that looks at how people develop a sense of
the value of money.
Helena
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