A fascinating review of the role of debt in creating the society that we currently live in. Through storytelling Graeber makes complex economic themes memorable and comprehensible to non-economists. ( )

I was reading it for a month. It went tought, but I persisted, unearthing every now an then a nugget or two of incomparable wisdom. I'm an athropologist, so I may be biased, but...if you're short of time, read first pages on refutation of the barter idyll, and then fast forward on to the last chapter, conclusion and the afterword. Your world will never be the same again. No kiddin'. ( )

An excellent, highly readable history of debt, our conceptions of it and how it has affected our entire political life. Has a LOT of stories and anecdotes and stuff from various times in history. Skimpy on some details but that's inevitable when you're doing such a wide ranging history and he always says enough to illustrate his point. I disagree with some of the stuff he says from a Marxist perspective but it's not totally shit - it's just I think he does the typical anarchist thing of ascribing changes to an amorphous "state." Ultimately though I thoroughly enjoyed it. A radical book that does a great job of challenging our preconceived notions of economics and what's "natural", pointing the way towards radical change and providing a fascinating historical primer along the way. ( )

The author, an anthropologist, teaches a very large amount about the origins of money and the history of debt. It is eye-opening, partly because he also teaches a lot of history of peoples from many other times. He is stunningly knowledgeable about many areas. I was absorbed by this book and will read others of his. ( )

A bizarre mix of provocative evidence, absurd statements, wild speculations and exaggerated conclusions!

The first few chapters are dedicated to arguing that money originated as a unit of accounting for debts, and not as a valuable commodity acting as a unit of exchange to facilitate barter of goods, until in chapter 4 we are suddenly told that, after all, it's "obvious" that money is both these things!

Indeed, why would Sumerian accountants have used the silver shekel as a unit of account equivalent to a bushel of barley, if a silver shekel could not be exchanged for a bushel of barley? It must have been so, if for no other reason than that, if a silver shekel was worth one bushel of barley in the granary books, and worth half a bushel in the marketplace, a merchant could sell half a bushel in the market for a single shekel that would be credited to him as worth a whole bushel for tax purposes!

Villagers living cheek by jowl at the origin of money could indeed record who owed whom what; Graeber denies that this accounting of debt constituted barter though. Yet what did the baker originally expect to receive from the brewer in payment of his debt, if not beer, a useful commodity, or at least a beer-token or beer-credit? Surely the point of an IOU is that one owes a certain value, and this value would originally have to be stipulated as an amount of some useful thing, ideally in the most universally useful and easily circulated thing (in prisons, cigarettes; potentially, labour).

What seems to have seduced Graeber into obsessing over money's role as a unit of accounting for debt, rather than as a commodity for facilitating bartering, is simply the issue of time. As he writes, money started in Sumer as an accounting of debt to suppliers "to be settled at harvest time in barley or anything [debtors] might have at hand": so debt was really just a record of valuable commodities owed for payment at a later time! Debt was after all then just barter with a time-lag.

Of course trade between people who did not expect to have a continuous relationship would also naturally have to be settled by items of value to each of them; in circumstances without states or banks this must have been a commodity item: something desirable in itself like gold or cowrie shells, which are ornamental, durable and portable even at relatively high values. With the advent of states, and taxation being required in the form of certain stipulated things, the most natural form of tax was of course at first useful commodities like food delivered to the royal granary, or else commodity money exchangeable for other commodities.

Once states and banks could be relied on to honour them, credit notes could circulate as claims on gold and silver either sitting in banks or as promises to deliver them to the bearer. Later on, paper and electronic money could be detached from conversion into real commodities and continue to function throughout their assigned value as legal tender for paying taxes. But people will actually accept them to a greater or lesser degree (i.e. deflate or inflate their value) according to the more real value of goods and services in circulation: the value of money remains tied to the value of commodities. If the quantity of money available rises faster than the quantity of useful goods, then the price of goods rises and each banknote or electronic credit is worth less in real terms. We still therefore value money according to the amount of commodities it can claim, which is why (as Mike Beggs points out in his review) governments may no longer tie currency to gold, but they tie it instead by means of inflation-targetting to a basket of consumer goods: the value of money in terms of useful goods must be preserved at a reasonably stable level. If banks or the state or shops lost confidence in the ability of money to purchase a stable amount of goods, and demanded cigarettes instead, everybody would revert to commodity money. Which all goes to argue that money must be tied to commodities in order to function as a unit of accounting for debts: it must be a means of facilitating barter to have value for settling debts.

Graeber begins the book wondering why money debts should be paid. The reason surely is that borrowing money is an agreement to exchange values just like any other transaction: give me £1,000 today in exchange for £1,100 next month. One is supposed to keep one's promise to pay, and failure to do so is provided for in the agreed rules of the contract, or in the laws governing debt. Like any other transaction, in a fair society borrowing might be hedged around with rules that protect against exploitation and excessive suffering of defaulters; hence why we have regulations about how and when creditors must or may not be paid back. There is no "sacred principle" that debts must be paid, as Graeber writes: he apparently has not heard of insolvency law, in which creditors will be paid back as much money as can reasonably be generated, without the bankruptees having to enter debt-peonage or sell their children. I don't think we necessarily needed the history of debt this book attempts to give us, in order to answer questions of the ethics of debt-forgiveness. ( )