You will have to work pretty hard on this one Murphy.

There is a lot missing from this discussion actually, such as cultural/moral economics. Sahlins has a lot of good material on this.

From this page alone, I actually do not feel convinced of either of your theories.

Lets push this further. Maybe one can get massage in a massage studio for a price in silver coins. So you argue, that since Misses and Menger are always right, there will come a time when all families will use currency to settle economic activity within the household. Screw love, duty, shame, empathy and kindness. We are just rational utility maximizing machines. Since we do not observe this, we just did not have enough time for this behavior to manifest.

“But in a growing society with lots of credit even if farmers were exchanging gifts, the most exchanged gift would become the money of the society and prices would be set in peoples minds with regards to that. ”
But as Graeber points out, this isn’t what happened. People are interested in more than material goods. Perhaps you repaid the debt 3x over. You didn’t do it because you thought that was the rational value. You did it because you wanted to show everyone how generous you were (like Mark Zuckerburg giving 100 mill to New Jersey schools.)
Keep in mind the idea of “Keeping up with the Jonses” (trying to continually out-consume your neighbors with material goods) is a relatively recent phenomenon (seems to have started in the early 20th cent, but didn’t become as widespread until the 1970s or so). These people, throughout most of history, didn’t have the means to engage in goods-hording– there wasn’t enough wealth.

Yes, exactly; I was reading it and going “yes, and…that’s what Austrians have been saying all along”…”yes…Austrians again”, etc., every time he makes a valid point. The only objections are where he says things that don’t make sense within the context of his argument (such as “a silver shekel was fixed as the amount of silver equivalent to the numbers of bushels of barley that could provide 2 meals a day for a temple worker over the course of a month” — there’s obviously no “amount of silver equivalent to” anything else unless there are already prices: the only thing equivalent to a given mass of silver is a similar mass of silver!)

Using the daughter example. What would the farmer want in exchange for his daughter? A poor farmer may take less than a rich one. This is not fixed proportional value and it isn’t codified in law. It’ is strictly a subjective matter. If many of them accepted varying amounts of wool for their daughters, a price system has formed and likely more people would conform to that. Eventually a general commodity, maybe even daughters would be the money and prices would be determined via supply and demand.