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Money provides a convenient and shared way to value goods and services. There's an excellent description of this principle in Paul Samuelson's Economics textbook.

Without a common way to assign values, all transactions would involve barter. If you were a mechanic and needed to buy a shirt, you'd have to find a shirt-maker who was willing to trade the job of sewing you a shirt for your work in, say, changing his car's brake pads. It would be pretty unlikely that the shirt-maker would need new brakes at exactly the same time you needed a shirt AND who considered the swap to be an even trade, so the opportunities for commerce would be pretty limited.

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16y ago

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