Bartering won’t really work well for an economy with a high degree of specialization, since the complexity of required exchanges will increase with the degree of specialization.
Of course you could get around that problem by introducing a new specialization, that of a broker who warehouses goods and give trades based on what people have on hand but that is just a more complicated version of money.
For real. Let’s say I make parts for nuclear reactor, and I want to acquire a scented candle. There is no one who deals in candles that has any interested in acquiring nuclear reactors. And even if you put in a massive amount of searching and somehow found some crazy fringe overlap of a person interested in exchanging those things, the value of my nuclear reactor is a trillion times greater than the value of the candle that I’m looking to acquire.
Bartering won’t really work well for an economy with a high degree of specialization, since the complexity of required exchanges will increase with the degree of specialization.
Of course you could get around that problem by introducing a new specialization, that of a broker who warehouses goods and give trades based on what people have on hand but that is just a more complicated version of money.
For real. Let’s say I make parts for nuclear reactor, and I want to acquire a scented candle. There is no one who deals in candles that has any interested in acquiring nuclear reactors. And even if you put in a massive amount of searching and somehow found some crazy fringe overlap of a person interested in exchanging those things, the value of my nuclear reactor is a trillion times greater than the value of the candle that I’m looking to acquire.
Yeah, it worked fine for agrarian societies, but Industrialization killed it.