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Debt (the first 5,000 years)

Debt (the first 5000 years) is a book by anthropologist David Graeber that attempts to make a comprehensive history of the concept of debt through recorded history. According to Graeber it may be the first such history of debt ever written.

Big ideas

History of the world as alternating hard currency and virtual currency epochs

Graeber divides human history into large periods of time where, all over the world, and almost all at once, conceptions of money change from virtual to bullion and back again. The periods of bullion are characterized by immense violence, the rise of empires, and chattel slavery. The periods of virtual currency are characterized by the eradication of chattel slavery, and the rise of moral institutions that protect debtors.

Graeber argues that history can be split into the following periods based on dominant global concepts of money: Bronze Age (virtual), The Axial Age (bullion), The Middle Ages (virtual), Colonialist Era (bullion), The Modern Era (bullion -> virtual).

The Bronze age operated largely on credit. Some of the earliest writing that we have access to are calculations of compound interest as a justification for war. Graeber also presents evidence of bar tabs, credit instruments, and other forms of virtual money. Large temple complexes served as a kind of bank, warehouseing goods and keeping stone tablets that chronicled debts. Kings managed periodic debt crises, where wealthy merchants forced large portions of the population into debt peonage, by declaring periodic jubilees where all debts were forgiven and land was redistributed. The first recorded word for freedom, amargi, translates to return to mother and is used to describe these jubilees. Large portions of the population who had fled the cities into the hinterlands to escape their debts were allowed, quite literally, to return to their families.

The Axial Age represented a shift toward hard bullion currency. Markets were created around this bullion when states began to demand taxes in that currency. This was likely incepted as a mechanism to maintain (and feed) large standing armies. States paid soldiers in coin and then demanded taxes in that coin from their subjects. In doing so they essentially employed all of their subjects in the business of feeding and providing for soldiers. People taken as prisoners in war were enslaved and sent to work in the gold and silver mines. This created a complex that drove the expanse of the worlds first empires. The worlds great religions spring up around the moral and ethical problems posed by this materialist position of money.

The Middle Ages mark a return to virtual currency, the outlaw of usury, and the disappearance of chattel slavery. Credit is seen as honorable and as an extension of ones trustworthiness. Everyone is in each other's debts and debts are periodically forgiven. In the middle east this period gives rise to the worlds first free market ideologies and is marked by largely peaceful trade. Credit arrangements are managed by systems of trustworthiness and honor. The State is minimally involved while religious institutions enforce a moratorium on taking interest. Risk is understood to be inherent to investment and prices are seen to be god's will.

Europe during these period is a relatively barbarous backwater. Almost no hard currency is around, however debts are sometimes measured in old Roman currency, even though no-one had any. Precious metals consolidate in the church. Gradually interest taking is made semi-legal. Merchants use debts to conscript knights into military/plunder/trade ventures.

The power of wealthy merchants and the monarchy consolidates in the Enlightenment. Loans from the King are turned into tokens of debt that can be traded. Charging interest is made legal. Laws are introduced to enforce payments of debts. Ordinary people now have the power to place each other in debtors prisons, which, for a poor person, is essentially a death sentence. Attitudes regarding debt and credit change and debt and credit are seen as dirty and immoral. By contrast hard currency is seen as moral. There is very little hard currency in circulation. Paper debts are circulated as currency, again to fund war/exploitation/trade ventures. The first joint-stock corporations are combination military and trade ventures. Debt is used to impel people to join these ventures and used to manipulate colonized peoples. Chattel slavery is at the heart of these early capitalist ventures. Debts are used to reduce human beings to a state where they will do whatever is necessary to pay their debt no matter the moral consequences. For example, all the conquistadors were in entrapped in debts that they could not pay.

The Modern era begins with Nixon taking the US off of the gold standard. The US was one of the last countries to do so and only switched to alleviate economic problems introduced by its immense war debts. These war debts were used as a means to underpin the US dollar. The US empire asks its subjects to back their currency with US treasury bonds, creating a kind of tributary relationship that pays for further US military expenditure. The international value of the US dollar in this schema is directly related to US military supremacy. Money is created by privately owned banks and regulated by the Federal reserve. Banks create money by lending out money that they do not physically possess. Since this money will end up in a bank somewhere this is considered safe. The fact that banks are allowed to create money and that the wealthy in general have more or less direct access to it is obscured by deliberately complex processing surrounding monetary policy. Graeber argues that if ordinary people understood how money worked, they would demand that they be included and considered in its creation. This period is, so far, unusual in that it has been marked by the rise of global institutions for the protection of creditors. Institutions like the IMF and the World Bank exist to make sure that no country ever defaults on its loans. Domestically these protections for creditors are accompanied by laws making is extraordinarily difficult for ordinary citizens to declare bankruptcy and the repeal of anti usury laws. Graeber argues that these policies, and more generally the persistent attitude that creditors should be protected no matter the cost, to be insane. He blames it for the periodic and frequent debt crises that have plagued the US economy for the past 40 years. Credit, Graeber argues, should carry some element of risk. To make default impossible is to encourage stupid investment.

Debt as morality and "moral confusion"

The book begins with what Graeber calls "a moral confusion". It is common moral sense that "one ought to pay ones debts". Graeber argues that, in our culture, this is felt to be reflexively true in a way that we are not fully conscious of. As a result we apply this thinking even when it doesn't make sense. (For example, when the creditor is clearly manipulative, or when the debtor is no longer the person who took out the loan) Popular moral philosophy centers debt and payment of debt as a concept critical to what morality means. From some perspectives, all morality is seen as debt.

A history of debt is also a history of money... Also questionable is the story that economists tell us about the development of money. Most economics textbooks start out with a common sense history of the evolution of money that is entirely fabricated. This history always begins with a barter economy and then introduces money as a way to ease the burden of trading with a larger number of people with a wider variety of needs. (ex. If your neighbors neighbor needs chickens but all you have is a cow, you would need to barter your way to chickens to trade with that person)

According to anthropological/archaeological evidence most human economies begin with complex credit systems. Debts between neighbors or merchants were tracked and settled against each other often in the absence of physical currency.

Graeber's schema for human relationships beyond exchange

Economists, and many enlightenment thinkers before them, like to reduce all human relationships to exchange. This kind of thinking is a conceptual trap and fails to explain the majority of human relationships. Graeber introduces a schema for human moral relationships. This schema, like all models, is a fiction. However, this fiction does a better job of explaining a broader variety of human relationships and serves as a useful place to begin thinking about such things. Graeber's schema: human relationships are either a matter of exchange, hierarchy, or communism.

Exchange relationships are those that are undertaken between two relatively equal actors where each has something to gain from the other. Graeber argues that most exchange occurs with people who you don't know very well and are unlikely to see again. These relationships thus require a lower amount of trust.

Communistic relationships include any relationship that can be explained according to the principle "to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities." Graeber argues that most human relationships between friends and family fall into this category. He also argues that all human sociability is underpinned by a kind of everyday communism where ordinary people trust each other and operate according to this principle. It is important to note that Graeber distinguishes this communism from the capital C communism of states such as the USSR and the PRC. Graeber's everyday communism says nothing about property law. It is simply any relationship defined by the principle stated above.

Relationships of hierarchy are those where one party has immense power over the other. In hierarchical relationships, debt as a concept does not make sense as one party is not equal to another. A person cannot be said to have a debt to a king or a god. 1. No-one has anything the king wants as the king owns anything he wants. Its dangerous to have something that the king doesn't have as this threatens the power of the king. Having something valuable that the king doesn't is a good way to end up dead. Similarly, a god is all powerful. It can have anything it desires. A debt to a king or a god isn't really a debt, its a demand. A debt from a king to a subject isn't a debt, its a gift. Gifts given to kings are dangerous from another standpoint as they are not taken to be gifts but rather as a mark of the ongoing social relationships between king and subject. If you give a king a gift, you will be expected to give that same gift next year.

What money is

Money is a promise that we make to each other. If we can make these promised we could just as easily make different ones.

Money is an impersonal, quantifiable, transferable debt.