ABSTRACT
As Mark Peacock points out: as soon as we enquire into the origins and not the persistence of an institution one cannot presuppose the existence of what we are to explain; in the case of money, it is therefore inadmissible to posit an explanation which states that people use money because everybody else uses it. Similarly Rosenberg draws on the work of Frank Hahn, who argues that origin of money presents an insoluble game-theoretic puzzle and that economists have no choice but to begin their analyses by taking the institution of money as given. My point is that if one adopts the Friedman-Searle theory, one ought to be also committed to the Smith-Menger theory of the origins of money. But in the case of the origin of money the Smith-Menger account is a far more plausible alternative, and the proponent of the Friedman-Searle theory therefore has no excuse for not adopting it.
