Money is a really strange thing. All of us use it. We spend it, earn it, and save it, and we all know it when we see it.

Yet some of the world's best economists have a very hard time defining it.

It's been around for thousands of years yet there is still innovation

being made with it today. Learn more about the history of money, how it came about and

how it developed over time on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I'm going to go and The history of money goes back thousands of years, but before there was money there was something else.

Barter. Most economic historians are in agreement

that bartering probably goes back as far as humanity does. If there were

wandering nomadic bands of people, some of them might have acquired goods from

one location they visited like an

an obsidian knife. If they encounter another band of people, those people might have had things

from some other place, like the seashore. They might have had shells or something that the first group didn't have.

This form of exchange was simple, if inefficient, and there are multiple problems with bartering.

Suppose I don't want what you have, or I don't want as much of it as you have and you can't divide it.

If you have a cow you can very well divide it into smaller units.

Goods can also be difficult to transport and depending on what it is that's being traded, it also might be

perishable. There's another closely related concept of bartering, debt. I'm not going to go into

too much detail because I've covered much of this in a previous episode on accounting, but the evidence of debt

actually dates back much further than the history of money.

Debt is nothing more than barter delayed by time.

Instead of saying I'll give you one of these for one of those, debt is just saying

give me one of these and I'll owe you one. This form of exchange is probably more

prevalent within communities than between them. This division between debt, perhaps just consisting of

...