Debt

The First 5000 Years

ebook, 576 pages

English language

Published March 20, 2011 by Melville House.

ISBN:
978-1-61219-098-3
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(3 reviews)

The author shows that before there was money, there was debt. For 5,000 years humans have lived in societies divided into debtors and creditors. For 5,000 years debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates, laws and religions. The words “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption” come from ancient debates about debt. These terms and the ideas of debt shape our most basic ideas of right and wrong. source

21 editions

An Essential Book with Some Holes

This is an extremely well argued, thought-provoking book, philosophically deconstructing the notion of debt to its core and then following its historical trajectory to the present day. As a corollary, Graeber shows how true “barter economies” have basically never existed, but the notion of money and debt has significantly evolved from its original development. The book goes a bit off the rails and is wildly inaccurate at the end once it gets into post-industrial economies, and the fact that Graeber doesn’t show his work and makes huge assumptions leaves lots to poke holes in. However, overall this is still an impressive and important book. Highly recommend

How we got here and why we're stuck

I read Debt right after The Dawn of Everything (also by Graeber), and my opinion of these two books is closely interlinked. The combination is an extensive unwinding of the sort of economic and social history I learned in school. I've had to re-imagine the ways that humanity developed our relationship with agriculture, with technology, and with the interplay of social obligations which we now categorize as money and economics.

The core insight and question isn't any of those individual revelations. What Graeber is trying to get you to think about is the stickiness of contemporary social relationships & structures, and the ways that we have lost the ability to imagine the possibility of change. No economic or political system has ever been as committed as ours is to narrowing the realms of the possible and foreclosing the ability to imagine other ways of organizing society. Historically, social dynamics have …

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