The Shared Story of Money

The Weight of a Promise

Before there was money, there was stuff. If you were a farmer with a surplus of grain and a need for a new pair of shoes, your task was simple, yet maddeningly complex. You had to find a shoemaker who not only had a pair of shoes your size, but who also happened to be in the market for a large quantity of grain at that exact moment. This frustrating puzzle is known as the “double coincidence of wants,” and it represents the fundamental limitation of a pure barter economy. Trade was possible, but it was inefficient, clumsy, and tethered to the whims of chance. To solve this, early societies didn't invent money. They identified it. They began to recognize that certain goods were more consistently in demand than others. Salt, for its preservative power, became a common medium of exchange. Roman soldiers were famously paid a *salarium*, or salt allowance, giving us our word "salary." Cattle, grain, and shells all served as early forms of what we call commodity money—objects that had their own intrinsic value, but which also came to represent a store of value that could be traded for other things. This was a major leap. It broke the tyranny of the double coincidence. The farmer could now sell his grain for salt to anyone who wanted it, and then take that salt to the shoemaker, confident it would be accepted. The salt wasn't just salt anymore; it was the *promise* of shoes, or a pot, or a tool. But it was still stuff. It was heavy, difficult to divide, and perishable. A cow is a poor way to buy a loaf of bread, and a bag of grain is useless in a rainstorm. The promise was there, but it was still trapped in the physical world, weighed down by its own substance. Humanity needed a better way to represent value—something more durable, more portable, and more abstract. They needed to move from a system of valuable objects to an object that simply *represented* value. The solution would be a story, told in a language everyone could understand.