Throughout reading this book I felt like little epiphanies were going off in my head as Graeber presented new information or new analyses that I hadn't considered before. By the time you get to modern banking and the bank of England, what you've been told is irrelevant. Again, they very well may have When they did use coins, it was primarily around two kinds of debts. Or, a la David Harvey, to regurgitate Marx with minor variation, with a focus solely on the neoliberal period, and in US/Eurocentric fashion. This is why no accounts need be taken. Published If you like your books to be robustly argued with appropriate credence given to opposing arguments, I suggest you pick up something else. So we needed something else, and that’s where precious metals and coins emerge on the scene.Graeber argues that we have the wrong idea about the basic life cycle of currency in early history, and for that matter, until a few centuries ago. The last couple of chapters (the last 200 years or so) just weren't as heavy and thick with detail as the previous millenia. It’s also hard not to read this book in the context of what’s going on with Bitcoin right now, which is basically a pure, digital expression of money as fungible, abstract scarcity, where interpersonal trust has been fully engineered out of the picture. He’s saying that people exploit themselves by taking out debt to invest in the same corprations that then own them.Insofar as it was borrowed for what economists like to call discretionary spending, it was mainly to be given to children, to share with friends, or otherwise to be able to build and maintain relations with other human beings that are based on something other than sheer material calculation.

Everyone else suddenly had to go find precious metal, and lo and behold, Europeans had just “discovered” a whole lot of it in Central America. But maybe they weren’t. Just when I thought I understood all the false assumptions in modern economic theory, David Graeber uncovers yet another huge, unfounded assumption that economists discuss as if it's a matter of fact. She discovered that he was involved in protesting against IMF policies and asked what he hoped to achieve, to which he replied that he wanted the debts third world countries owe to rich countries wiped out because of the appalling injustice it was creating, to which she replied that surely we all have to pay our debts.

Not As a sociologist, I've been despairing of late at the paucity of imagination and theoretical innovation in social science research. Ordinary people didn’t hold any coins, and didn’t transact with coins, so they probably didn’t care.

It is easy to get swept up in that sentiment, because David Graeber is clearly a passionate, intelligent, and contentious person.This dream book got me to love the potential of nonfiction. In contrast, when money is a hard, fungible unit of scarcity, enforcement isn’t a matter of trust; it’s a matter of force. Perhaps because he is an anthropologist, not an economist, he is able to take on a seemingly boring and pedestrian topic, and write an eye-opening book which addresses the origins of the current crisis of capitalism.If you think capitalism and modern economics are the worst thing to ever happen to the world, this will be a great feel good read for you. Some people love books. by Melville House Publishing If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. His 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, made him famous. 1 . If you think capitalism and modern economics are the worst thing to ever happen to the world, this will be a great feel good read for you. “Recoinage” was a relatively frequent occurrence, where kings had to recall and reissue currency to fund their conflicts because there simply wasn’t enough metal circulating – too much was stuck inside the temples.

The collapse of the ancient empires did not, for the most part, lead to the rise of new ones. Academics, perhaps because of the need to publish quickly and garner grant money, seem content to only add statistical validation to already established conclusions. Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. Neither of these So what happened? In the United States, there were 401(k) retirement accounts and an endless variety of other ways of encouraging ordinary citizens to play the market but at the same time, encouraging them to borrow.Notes: 1) fascinating. The man objected indignantly:“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.” But Graeber starts way before any other book I've ever read on the subject.

IOUs don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re made in societal context. Whatever you think about the history of economic relations between people is probably not only wrong, but was taught as such intentionally, in order to control the very concepts and categories with which we think about it. For a while I was thinking, "Is there no idea that this guy won't rip apart?" Money and coinage evolved as an abstract representation of scarcity, in order to facilitate that bargaining.


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