Debt: The First 5,000 Years

This book is a wild ride. It's in my 2016 reread queue which is tentative high praise. I need to check the sources and read it again but nevertheless it's highly entertaining and surely subversive. Incidentally it has one of the best surveys of peasant life through history that I've read since I listened to the lectures ‘The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World' by Robert Garland. A great summer read in any event.

When I first started this book, I was hoping it would be a thorough shellacking of our current economic system through the lens of historical context. There was a little bit of that, but I feel a bit short-changed (pun) by how little our present economic system was covered. He barely even mentioned modern credit scores. While he did lambast the evils of the IMF & World Bank, it left me wanting more, but that's because it's not that kind fo book. It's a history book by an anthropologist.

This is my favorite type of book because it gives me historical facts that actually go against our preconceived notions. That's why I read books: to add to my repertoire of fun facts that sound false, but are actually true.

For example: The myth of barter. There's this popular urban legend buried deep into the zeitgeist, invented by the hack Adam Smith, and perpetuated by economics textbooks that before the invention of money, societies operated on barter to buy and sell goods. That was made up by proto-economists and disproven by anthropologists.

The book also shows that the field of economics is closer to philosophy than to the hard sciences. That ties into the most important thing this book shows, which is exactly what I've been saying: Money is made up. Humans made it up. We can do whatever we want as long as it is within the real world, but money cannot hold humanity back because it is an artificial limitation. Anyone who claims we can't do things that help people because of “the economy” or “inflation” or some other nonsense, they either lack imagination or benefit from how the system is designed.

We can build a better world if we believe we can.

Graeber frequently indulges in the hidden assumptions and leaps of logic that he criticizes classical economists for, but even if his weaker arguments fall short, many of his arrows still hit home. And he presents a refreshing take on the misadventures that led mankind to fall into this mess we call civilization.