I Read Books: Debt: The First 5000 Years

 

Debt: The First 5000 Years

Graeber writes an anthropological overview of debt, money and economics from the first records in Sumer 3500 BCE to the financial crisis of 2008. He suggests that pre-money barter explanations are fables – people did not exchange pelts for tools etc until finally someone invented coins (in Lydia 800 BCE, about halfway into the time period in question). Rather people would do business with those they knew, everyone knowing that you lend some help to your neighbour now, knowing there will be help or a feast later.

Debt, of course, is bound up in morality and society as much as economics, or rather economics is a somewhat artificially separated piece of society, culture and morality. Graeber looks into ancient and remote cultures attitudes to debts, and how their morality is reflected in that and their beliefs.

It is not an easy book to sum up. Or rather to sum it up is to glibly say that debts, money and economics are the result of human choices, beliefs and culture as much or more than resources in the physical world. This though is not where the greatest strength is. It is in the manifold strange ways that humans have considered debts and distribution of resources and work and morality. What we owe each other. And by considering how they have been organised elsewhere and elsewhen we might decide to arrange debts and society differently.

Read This: An extraordinary collection of cultures and economies flattened in regular history, and questions about the nature of our current economic realities
Don’t Read This: Hundreds of pages of weird stories, held together by violence