“The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist.

The question is why the myth is perpetuated anyway.”

—  David Graeber

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Three, "Primordial Debts", p. 43

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David Graeber 55
American anthropologist and anarchist 1961

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