Title: Debt - Updated and Expanded Pdf The First 5,000 Years
Author: David Graeber
Published Date: 2014
Page: 542
Winner of the Bateson Book Prize awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology“One of the year’s most influential books. Graeber situates the emergence of credit within the rise of class society, the destruction of societies based on ‘webs of mutual commitment’ and the constantly implied threat of physical violence that lies behind all social relations based on money.” —Paul Mason, THE GUARDIAN “The book is more readable and entertaining than I can indicate... It is a meditation on debt, tribute, gifts, religion and the false history of money. Graeber is a scholarly researcher, an activist and a public intellectual. His field is the whole history of social and economic transactions.” —Peter Carey, THE OBSERVER"An alternate history of the rise of money and markets, a sprawling, erudite, provocative work."—Drake Bennett, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK"[A]n engaging book. Part anthropological history and part provocative political argument, it's a useful corrective to what passes for contemporary conversation about debt and the economy."—Jesse Singal, BOSTON GLOBE "Fresh... fascinating... Graeber’s book is not just thought-provoking, but also exceedingly timely."—Gillian Tett, FINANCIAL TIMES (London)"Remarkable."—Giles Fraser, BBC RADIO 4"Terrific... In the best anthropological tradition, he helps us reset our everyday ideas by exploring history and other civilizations, then boomeranging back to render our own world strange, and more open to change."—Raj Patel, THE GLOBE AND MAIL"An amazing debut – conversational, pugnacious, propulsive"—TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION (UK)"Graeber's book has forced me to completely reevaluate my position on human economics, its history, and its branches of thought. A Marxism without Graeber's anthropology is beginning to feel meaningless to me."—Charles Mudede, THE STRANGER"The world of borrowing needs a little demystification, and David Graeber's Debt is a good start."—THE L MAGAZINE"Controversial and thought-provoking, an excellent book."—BOOKLIST"This timely and accessible book would appeal to any reader interested in the past and present culture surrounding debt, as well as broad-minded economists."—LIBRARY JOURNALPraise for David Graeber“I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world.”—Maurice Bloch, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics "A brilliant, deeply original political thinker."—Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell“If anthropology consists of making the apparently wild thought of others logically compelling in their own cultural settings and intellectually revealing of the human condition, then David Graeber is the consummate anthropologist. Not only does he accomplish this profound feat, he redoubles it by the critical task—now more urgent than ever—of making the possibilities of other people’s worlds the basis for understanding our own.” —Marshall Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago David Graeber teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, Mute, and The New Left Review. In 2006, he delivered the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics, an annual talk that honors “outstanding anthropologists who have fundamentally shaped the study of culture.” One of the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Graeber has been called an “anti-leader of the movement” by Bloomberg Businessweek. The Atlantic wrote that he “has come to represent the Occupy Wall Street message...expressing the group’s theory, and its founding principles, in a way that truly elucidated some of the things people have questioned about it.”
Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.
Disappointing, weak, do not waste money and time on I was really disappointed in this book. It came recommended from a friend and I was hoping for some new ideas or insights around money and economics. It really is just a nonsensical ramble of which I was not able to eke out much. This review is the least I can do to warn others to not repeat my money and time waste.The author spends a lot of time at the beginning critiquing the "myth" of barter (that two paragraph parable at the beginning of 8th grade economics manuals - of how people would try to barter and thus discover it would be easier to use money). He builds this two paragraph parable into a huge straw-man, calling it the "founding myth of economics" which he proceeds to attack. That's his attempt to take down the discipline of economics (pls. note I am not calling it a science). That's like taking down anatomy because the anatomy drawings in the 6th grade manual are not accurate.The barter parable is meant to illustrate that any transactions (barter, credit, taxes etc) are nearly impossible without a universal unit of measure for value exchanged. Which is money. The parable uses the example of barter for a transaction because it is much easier for 8th graders to imagine that rather than more complicated transactions such as credit and taxes.He argues that anthropologists found no societies without money in which significant volumes of barter exists. Of course they did not. Without money it is impossible to keep track of the price of everything against everything. Which is the point the barter parable is trying to make in a simplistic way.Next the author argues that money is tied to credit transactions (including taxes) and that credit and money are really like the chicken and the egg. Of course they are. Credit transactions are exchanges of value with a time lag. Without a way to quantify the value exchanged they are nearly impossible to make (just like barter). And of course money is not coins. Coins are just symbols for money just like bank notes.The radical idea found by the author is that exchanges of value (trading goods, trading value in time as in credit, paying taxes) are impossible without a way to measure that value. Which btw. is exactly what the economists' parable of barter is trying to say too.All of this is peppered with random anthropological accounts, quotes from Nietzsche, quotes from some french economists about our primordial debt to gods, cries that our lives have become a "series of commercial transactions", and nonsensical expressions such as "bourgeois assumptions" (really? bourgeois?).The intent is to argue that money was involved in almost everything bad people did to each other through history and therefore there's something mysterious and bad about money (debt = money = slavery = capitalism = bad, or something like that). But wooden sticks, metals, clothes, and pretty much everything else including language were also involved in pretty much everything bad some people did to some other. So why single out money? Because it is an abstract concept, and abstract and invisible things draw weak minds like candles draw moths.Ever wonder why loonies come up with perpetual motion machines involving electricity and magnetism a lot more often than involving mechanics or thermodynamics? For the same reason - electricity and magnetism, just like money, are invisible and mysterious. Easier to make up fantasies about.Now I understand! Reading this book has given me an understanding of world history at a level I have never reached before. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in world history.At the same as reading this book, I was also reading books by Fools Crow, Crow Dog and Bear Heart. Each of these authors describe how the Federal Government set out to use debt to subjugate and eradicate Native Americans just as described in Graeber's book.
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