It attempts to sell you on a grandiose prediction or statement of where we are in the arc of history and where we are going at the end of the book. the beginning of the agrarian empires, humans have been divided into debtors and creditors. Competition was essential to the nature of the market, but competition was (usually) nonviolent warfare.This is important, since it lies at the very heart of our image of the Middle Ages—and the explanation, I think, is revealing. Among them are: That money originated as “social currencies” used to rearrange relationships among human beings (marriage, funerals, blood money, and other social functions), and was not used to buy and sell things. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) by David Graeber. In this case, Graeber's book covers more facts than political lecturing but it's bumped several stars for being overt.Mixed feelings: many interesting little tidbits and quotes, but overall I get the feel of a vast thesis made up of confirmation bias and unreliable evidence like etymologies; some parts are flabbergastingly wrong, like his brief description of Apple Computer's founding. For more than 5000 years, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods. I clearly remember sitting in my intro to macro class and hearing about how before there was money, people bartered and it was terribly inconvenient, then money was created and saved everybody. This is a book that made an impression on me. Start by marking “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” as Want to Read: But the fact that it was conceived as equality before the market made such arrangements even more difficult to endure.On the other, a heavily armed itinerant soldier is the very definition of a poor credit risk.Notes: 1) must use coinage during war b/c it’s likely your creditor will diereturned from a far-off land to be entirely honest about his adventures.Notes: 1) profit sharing if there is trust. On the other, as I have continually emphasized, a loan does assume a certain formal, legal equality between contractor and contractee. (If you’ve read my other stuff on cryptocurrency you may have a sense of my stance on this.
Here’s the version of the story we’re usually taught: Before money, commerce happened through bartering. Either way, you're accountable. The book opens with a strong statement: our conventional origin story for money is totally wrong. Some people love books. On the other hand, I was disappointed not to get the same level of insight as the rest of the book. Neither of these So what happened? Edit to localize it to your language.If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. Financial crises-History. Lots of just really interesting stories. I’d mostly heard before that recoinings were economically disruptive events. If you like your books to be robustly argued with appropriate credence given to opposing arguments, I suggest you pick up something else. Debt was, indeed, sin—on the part of both parties to the transaction. In fact, something like this happens in a small way even in our most intimate social relations.

I have read many many books--I am a professor and it is my job to read. It is intellectual for a popular book, but not tight enough for an intellectual book (which is probably fine by me).
Graeber’s broader point is that all debt, especially interest-drawing debt, is intimately related to its enforcement mechanism. Debt: The First 5,000 Years redeems the social sciences. The precious metal positive feedback cycle went into high gear, and dragged the world along with it. As a sociologist, I've been despairing of late at the paucity of imagination and theoretical innovation in social science research. In contrast, when money is a hard, fungible unit of scarcity, enforcement isn’t a matter of trust; it’s a matter of force. This is its secret; one might almost say, the thing that has become invisible to us.Whereas Persian and Arab thinkers assumed that the market emerged as an extension of mutual aid, Christians never completely overcame the suspicion that commerce was really an extension of usury, a form of fraud only truly legitimate when directed against one’s mortal enemies. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate the book: I really liked it, and it made me think a lot. The first essay focuses on violence; the second, on technology; the third, on rationality and value.


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