I think Ingham phrases it nicely with the key issue in the development of money being
How are inter-subjective hierachies of value produced from subjective preferences
Monetary nominalism refers to the idea that different kind of moneys must ‘answer’ to the ‘money of account’ which is the ultimate ‘description’ of money. The commodity theory does not answer to this account proposing that each money is emergent from exchange.
The two conditions for ‘moneyness’:
- Measure of abstract value (unit of account).
- Means of storing and transporting this abstract value.
A preliminary is money as ‘circulating debt’.
But ingham prefers to use the idea of a network of cred-rebit relationships mediated by issuers.
Without money, this would be a realtionship of obligations of reciprocity in a community.
- Alice lends flour to Bob.
- Bob helps here with roofing.
A commodity, that ‘represent’ this reciprocity, would function as a symbol of something you are ‘owed’.
- Alice gets a communal coin.
- This represents Alice’s ‘right’ to get a favour from someone in the community.
As reciprocity increases, it might be necessary to standardize such transactions in terms of labour. It’s hard to intuit how the ‘creation’ of debt by the state would be something they’d want to do. In early civilization.
If you had a simple society, with some ruler, economic growth in the form of more crop production could be incentivised by ‘paying’ farmers in terms of promises from the chief of a token that can be redeemed for food, or some other resource.