>Making factual errors that economic historians have to point out doesn’t help to demistify it, unfortunately.
That's exactly what he was doing. The fallacious story he debunks about money appearing naturally via barter was one I first read in an economics textbook (Mankiw I think).
I ctrl+f'ed "barter" in Mankiw's Principles of Economics and couldn't find any topic on the origin of money. I think the modern theory on the origin of money economists generally support is a tad more complicated than a strawman Graeber builds and destroys in his book.
It's usually an offhand story used to introduce the concept of money that economics textbooks don't spend a lot of time on. It is mentioned in Mankiw (mentioned under "double coincidence of wants"), but again, not as a core of its analytical framework, but rather as a "just so" introduction to the topic. I don't think it was even cited.
Modern economists really don't tend to spend a lot of time on historical analysis. That includes the default theory on the origin of money. This is a point that this example was supposed to illustrate. It is far from the only one but it has the benefit of being fairly clear cut.
They do tend to spend their time on polemics (driven by the way politics has driven the profession and the monetary incentives therein) or building elaborate mathematical models instead (driven by what i'd call 'hard science envy').
It wouldn't be the only academic profession to have intellectual blind spots, of course, and Graeber wouldn't be the first person to point out this one. Niall Ferguson, a more right-leaning historian/economist, has also made this point.
No, you are wrong, it is not mentioned in Mankiw. You are also wrong that modern economists don’t spend time on historical analysis, as there is a whole discipline devoted to it and it is DeLong, the professor of economic history, who spent a lot of time arguing against Graeber.
That's exactly what he was doing. The fallacious story he debunks about money appearing naturally via barter was one I first read in an economics textbook (Mankiw I think).