What is money and where does it come from?

These days, most money is electronic - numbers in a spreadsheet at banks. Picture: Shutterstock

Mainstream economists normally say that money developed within society as a solution to the inconvenience of barter, but this view is increasingly challenged, especially by modern monetary theorists.

Drawing on the work of economic anthropologists like David Graeber (who wrote Debt: the first 5000 years, Melville House, 2011), these economists say there never was a widespread barter economy and money was a state (government) creation.