One of the blogs I subscribe to is Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao. I came across it as a result of a standing search I have for items related to Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation, and kept reading it because Rao does interesting in-depth posts on various topics of interest to me.

His most recent one is on the “discovery of money,” where he asks

Do we need to elevate the notion of money from the level of cultural construct, where we created our problems, to the level of universal fundamental, where we might be able to solve them?

and concludes

I think we do, and the first step is to start thinking of money as something yet to be discovered, like the concept of zero, or the idea of Π (or equivalently, circularity). It is not something to be invented.

He then goes delving into philosophical investigations of the nature of money, but I wonder if he might be better served by looking into evolutionary theory. As I noted in a comment to the post, isn’t money in a sense just an abstracted version of the sort of inter-personal accounting that is associated with and required by reciprocity) (especially indirect reciprocity) as it has evolved among humans? A bit of googling turns up these papers on the evolution of indirect reciprocity and (in this context) money as an externalization of confidence. (The latter paper is not available in English, unfortunately.) If nothing else they are at least suggestive of a potentially fruitful approach to discovering the true nature of money.


Venkat - 2009-05-16 18:03

Interesting that you use the word “evolutionary” … my argument hinges, in part, on equating “evolutionary” with “invention.” Strictly speaking, in my sense of the word, life forms are “inventions” made by Darwinian processes :)

Edgar - 2009-07-25 05:19

Interesting comments about money. I was trying to find an English translation of the japanese article and have actually contacted Dr. Arita (the author) and he didn’t know of any english translation except for the Abstract. So I googled again and found your post. With regards to indirect reciprocity, I agree that it’s possible to view money as an externalized image score. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know about Dr. Nowak’s work until this month, after having intermittently worked on my currency ideas for a few years. Anyway, just glad to see someone else thinking roughly along the same lines along as I am. Edgar

hecker - 2009-07-25 15:07

Edgar: Thanks for the comment. You should also check out the comments on Venkat’s original post.

tyaga.org » Blog Archive » Indirect Reciprocity and Image Scores - 2009-07-25 18:50

[…] to externalize image scores. Others have also realized that connection, and besides another blog, there is even a published article on money as externalization of confidence (unfortunately for […]