(Audio) Debt: The first 5,000 years, by Graeber

Friday September 6, 2024

Graeber doesn't like debt, in the modern quantified, financial sense. Also he thinks people are wrong about the history of money, and that we should listen to anthropologists more. Graeber's equation is something like "obligation + measurement + violence = debt."

A smattering of his ideas as I remember them:

• The standard economics story of money (as arising because barter is too hard) is silly because people hardly ever barter in the first place, except sometimes with strangers.
• The standard economics story of money starting with coinage, then later developing debt instruments (see also Dalio, "money as starting from metal, then notes exchangeable for metal, then fiat money") is silly because ideas and methods of debt come first.
• The moralism of "always paying your debts" in culture and language.
• No single theory of money (Chartalism, etc.) is right on its own because "money has no essence" and money is just one piece of a big evolving world. (Similarly, Graeber has no single thesis on debt.)
• "Baseline communism" refers to the natural "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" that we have in real human relations, like feeding a child or asking for someone to hand you something.
• Debt as two equals agreeing to no longer be equal: Now you owe me. (In the extreme: debt peonage.)
• The difference of kind that comes from quantification: Not just owing me a favor, but owing me $47.39. The relation to dehumanization, as when slavery puts a price on a person, which is only possible by removing or denying their complex real (unquantifiable) value. (Reminds me of The Tyranny of Metrics.)
• The necessity of violence to make people pay back debts, as when military power stands behind the IMF.
• Occasional hints of primitivism or anarcho-primitivism.
• And really, shouldn't we get rid of capitalism?