And decades ago it was a number written down on a little piece of paper, and before that it was little pieces of “precious” metal locked away somewhere.
At least nowadays amateurs have a better chance to be literate.
In the beginning you would just lend stuff from other people and give it back, or with consumables give something back of similar worth.
Precious metal was pretty rarely used, as its main benefit is that you need almost no common trust relationship.
Anyhow, to explain for the forum: Graeber's book goes through the evidence we know of from the places were money first appeared. In essence, debt came first, and money was a later innovation. Very interestingly temple records using tally mark schemes may have been what lead to the development of cuneiform writing in the levant. A similar debt first pattern appears in other places, at other times too.
Coinage, particularly metal coins, came about much later as a clever hack by rulers to simplify raising and maintaining a large army. Pass a law demanding all citizens pay you X coins each year. Pay your soldiers in coins. Suddenly your society is figuring out how to feed and house soldiers, without you haven't to build a command hierarchy to run it all directly.
I can't recommend this book enough. It's dense in parts because he goes into a lot of detail that fully justifies what he's saying. Still, completely fascinating to learn much of the way we think of economic history is mythology. It's also a great lens for understanding what's happening now with cryptocurrencies.
Expanding on this - one of the brilliant innovations in Bitcoin was to make the ledger fundamental and the coin an implementation artifact. The blockchain doesn't store coins - it stores a ledger of who transacted with whom, and for what amounts, and then ownership of a Bitcoin is a derived quantity from the transaction history. Ethereum just expands that ledger to let smart contracts on the blockchain define other quantities to track, as well as the rules and relationships between them.
It's completely backwards from how I would've thought to implement a cryptocurrency, which would be to start with the coin and figure out how to make its ownership distinct & incorruptible. By starting with the ledger first, you don't need to think very hard about ownership (because it's all recorded in the ledger), you just need to find a way to define a source of truth for the transaction history.
An oversimplified hunter and gatherer society would just let the hunters give meat to the gatherers, assuming that they will one day be paid back with gathered vegetables or fruit.
It’s the difference between 1) going out to a bar with friends and remembering “Alice has bought the group X rounds, Bob has bought Y rounds, and I’ve bought Z, meaning it’s Bob’s turn to buy a round because he is in beer debt” and 2) “Alice and Bob and I generally buy each other rounds and it all feels roughly balanced so I’ll buy this round.” Tracked and tallied debt came much later as I understand it.
The money seems real, swiping cards or phone financial transfers lack a physical reality and my brain has less friction with digital transfers, thus I avoid them out of financial prudence.
I don't know if it's because I buy different things from you, or if I live in a different place from you, or what. But my andecdote is that no, I'm not paying more for stuff than a year ago.
Do you actually track spending or just don’t notice?
It sounds as if your basket of goods is different from mine. Most of the examples on that Wikipedia page are sugary foods, which I just don't buy a lot of.
Do you? The BLS does, and their inflation numbers for food is 3.5% YOY.
A 24pk of Rx Renal cat food went from 5.8oz to 5.1oz[1]. I buy two packs at a time and what used to cost $113.76 is now $114.72 Effectively they're charging me an extra buck to keep 33.6oz (5.7 old-cans / 6.5 new-cans) of cat food from me.
[1] https://www.chewy.com/royal-canin-veterinary-diet-renal/dp/2...
If you are trying to lose weight, shifting away from sugary & processed foods & meat to high-quality fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, etc. can definitely increase your grocery bill while reducing your weight in a very healthy way. Food bill may go down by going directly to farmers, but travel & fetching costs increase.
Or, it could be an unhealthy shift towards more processed foods, costing more in factory work & transport, and you are seeing real inflation.
So, insufficient data to indicate inflation or not.
I had a fixed grocery budget, and over months, I lost weight due to a caloric deficit. Literally I bought less food with the same money and the result was just over a pound a month lost .
That is the data we need to confirm that you're seeing inflation. Curious where you are located that you are seeing these numbers?
I live in a city an hour away from Toronto, Canada.