The excerpt of Adam Smith's 'Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' focused on two things:
A. The way in which production/manufacture of goods becomes faster when it is departmentalised
B. That if man had no propensity to trade goods of his production for the goods of another's production, man would have no reason to try to make more/better.
When man lives in society, he finds that no longer can he do all that he needs to survive. He has 'almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren' and must show that 'it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.' And so a barter system develops in which goods are traded for goods. [best quote ever: 'Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.']
And now a segue to The Fed! See, the Federal Reserve Bank has a series of educational comic book-style publications which can be found at http://www.newyorkfed.org/publications/result.cfm?comics=1 couple deal with the history of money, the more entertaining of which is entitled 'Once Upon A Dime'. On an island nation, there's a fisherman who wants to marry a doctor. They discover that to get flowers for the wedding, they have to trade fish for spears, spears for coconuts, coconuts for a net, and the net for some flowers. That's when they decide that barter is too much work and invent money. All through the second chapter of the excerpt, I'm reminded of the [poorly drawn, badly scripted] comic explanation of barter, and money, and thought I'd put this resource out there.
