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. Ordinary people simply did not use coins that much, even in early civilizations that did evolve coinage, because the IOU system worked so well. If you like your books to be robustly argued with appropriate credence given to opposing arguments, I suggest you pick up something else. I recently read Debt: the First 5000 Years by David Graeber, and it has stuck on my mind for a while. Free download or read online Debt: The First 5,000 Years pdf (ePUB) book. How is it used by the rich and the poor? Then you demand further payment from the people you’ve just conquered; either in the form of outright debt (for “damages incurred”), new taxes, or both.

Tuesday, November 04, 2014. World history has progressed in cycles where one has dominated, then the other. It's like the Guns Germs and Steel for money, but with a much bigger bang. We don’t have that problem. In an economic system where money is fundamentally a unit of trust, the rules around recoupment and enforcement of debts are made in an environment where people generally know each other, so we see recurring features like strong creditor protection and pretty sophisticated dispute resolution. Instead of having to rely on coincidence or stockpile something that everyone in the village might want for means of exchange, we could instead use tokens or coins.

I’d love to translate this book to Persian if it hasn’t been done, not least because the author acknowledges the past and present influences of Persians on the global culture of debt, but more importantly because I find the insight the book provides is vital for all interested readers, equipping them with ways of interpreting economic power relationships in a new, mostly anthropological light. Neither of these So what happened? At this point, we’re ready to understand the two main theses of the book.
It reminded me a bit of reading Freud or Girard: it’s impossibly grand in scope, and some of the explanations are pretty ridiculous, but the observations are gripping and uncomfortable. I can't effectively write a short review of this book: it's masterful, revolutionary, thought-provoking, and on its way to being the best book of the year for me.An excellent analysis of how money equals debt, and how the concepts of debt and moral turpitude have been conflated and perverted over the centuries. “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. 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.

In contrast, there’s a Accordingly, the “myth of barter” is a false inference: we look back from today (where everything in our life is denominated in dollars) and think, “okay, they must’ve had some early substitute.” Anecdotal examples of prisoners using cigarettes as improvised currency are beloved by economists, but don’t actually tell us anything about the past: those prisoners grew up with modern money, so it’s natural that they might go recreate it.
So it is pretty much impossiblOne of the fun things about the Austrians -- well, the Mises cultists, there are factions -- is they're anti-empirical. If I need grain and my neighbour has it, he gives it to me, and then I owe him one.” This idea, “I owe him one”, is simple and powerful: the fundamental unit of commerce isn’t a unit of Although I have not independently done my homework to verify this, if you ask Graeber, he’ll tell you that most anthropologists support this view: there is little evidence that “barter economies” ever actually existed in early civilization.

Essentially, the author explores, through history and anthropology, the tension between the common beliefs that one should always pay one's debts and that to make a profit on lending money is wrong. 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.


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