O Desconhecido Economista: Alexander Del Mar

Artigo sobre o economista americano do seculo XIX Alexander Del Mar, um dos grandes nomes da economia monetaria: The transition from commodity money to paper (or fiat) money during the course of the 20th century posed a major problem for this conventional thinking. If what is designated as money has neither intrinsic worth nor backing in terms of precious metals, why should it have value at all? Why should anyone accept paper money that could not be converted on demand into gold or silver in the exchange of goods and services? Del Mar provided the first answer to these questions, one subsequently popularized by Georg F. Knapp, a German economist writing at the beginning of the 20th century, and a name known to all, John Maynard Keynes.
Del Mar sought to determine the particular quality that gives valuableness to money. His studies of the history of monetary systems revealed a common pattern in the adoption of money by ancient societies. The earliest form of exchange among rudimentary communities was barter, the direct exchange of one good for another. However, barter exchange depends upon what economists call a “double coincidence of wants.” What person A has to offer must match what person B desires, and vice versa. To remedy this inconvenience, Del Mar concluded, civilizations began to adopt some given commodity, such as a number of beans, shells, or lumps of metal, to serve as a crude measure of value. Such a measure “enabled any given exchange to be effected upon a more equitable basis than before, simply by its operation in holding a vast number of parities in view at once.”5
(...) In other words, Del Mar realized that money originated not to serve as a medium of payment in purchases (these discs were too heavy and bulky to be exchanged for goods), but to serve as a measure of value, or what economists call “a unit of account.” By establishing common units of account, early societies enabled the direct exchange of goods against goods to take place without the need for a physical object to be interposed as a medium of exchange.