Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Exciting and well-written but unreliable and unfocussed. The main thesis is that debt isn't straightforward accounting: all systems of debt require a hidden moral assumption, which is that it's bad to be indebted, that debt overrules other moral claims like equity or even survival:
To establish this he goes into an array of human economies: slaving, gift economies, Kula rings... but the brute fact of diverse institutions doesn't really connect with his moral thesis. Then this all goes towards his grand equating of the market and the state (so that people will resist both of them).
He argues that formal debt (of accountants and lawyers) causes poverty and violence relative to traditional informal debt (of cousins, dowries, and sheep). But this is wildly inconsistent with the last two hundred years of social development; poverty is a fraction of what it was, and violence (including state violence, including incarceration as violence) is also down.
He gets worked up about "the myth of barter", the largely silly idea that there was generally a transition from pure barter economies to money economies at some point in cultural history. Even if we grant this, his estimation of the significance of barter being rare is excessive. It doesn't have any clear moral bearing.
His debt Jubilee idea, coming as it did post-Recession, is superficially good, especially since giant financiers had just received trillions in bailouts. But if we made debt forgiveness a common concern, we'd just be redistributing money to those best at obtaining credit via excessive self-esteem, credentials or scamming. And post-Jubilee credit system would immediately dry up, or sting us with vast interest rates. They couldn't exist otherwise, and then homeowning and car purchase would again be only within reach for the rich.
There are dozens or more or less serious errors in it. (Still less unreliable than most anarchism and most cultural anthropology.) If you still want to read it, you really should take note of the huge errata others have helpfully contributed to Graeber, not that he'd thank them:
- Henry Farrell
- Ann Leckie
- Noah Smith
- Gabriel Rossman
- Brad deLong
This is 4/5 for style and ambition, provided you don't take any particular claim too seriously. Read Clark and McCloskey for real Big Economics.
paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
To establish this he goes into an array of human economies: slaving, gift economies, Kula rings... but the brute fact of diverse institutions doesn't really connect with his moral thesis. Then this all goes towards his grand equating of the market and the state (so that people will resist both of them).
He argues that formal debt (of accountants and lawyers) causes poverty and violence relative to traditional informal debt (of cousins, dowries, and sheep). But this is wildly inconsistent with the last two hundred years of social development; poverty is a fraction of what it was, and violence (including state violence, including incarceration as violence) is also down.
He gets worked up about "the myth of barter", the largely silly idea that there was generally a transition from pure barter economies to money economies at some point in cultural history. Even if we grant this, his estimation of the significance of barter being rare is excessive. It doesn't have any clear moral bearing.
His debt Jubilee idea, coming as it did post-Recession, is superficially good, especially since giant financiers had just received trillions in bailouts. But if we made debt forgiveness a common concern, we'd just be redistributing money to those best at obtaining credit via excessive self-esteem, credentials or scamming. And post-Jubilee credit system would immediately dry up, or sting us with vast interest rates. They couldn't exist otherwise, and then homeowning and car purchase would again be only within reach for the rich.
There are dozens or more or less serious errors in it. (Still less unreliable than most anarchism and most cultural anthropology.) If you still want to read it, you really should take note of the huge errata others have helpfully contributed to Graeber, not that he'd thank them:
- Henry Farrell
- Ann Leckie
- Noah Smith
- Gabriel Rossman
- Brad deLong
This is 4/5 for style and ambition, provided you don't take any particular claim too seriously. Read Clark and McCloskey for real Big Economics.