I have noticed that many critics of Graeber like to challenge his historical account, but I think this is missing the point. May 15, 2020.
Actually, to be precise, I think that Graeber is right to point out that we do have a moral/interpersonal/communal aspect to our nature.
Then during the Axial age, metal became commercial money. But maybe they weren’t. You’d go through everyday community life with the IOU system, and then resort to barter or other commercial rituals on the occasion where you’d trade with strangers. Everyone else suddenly had to go find precious metal, and lo and behold, Europeans had just “discovered” a whole lot of it in Central America. Money has much deeper roots in the forms of obligation that … The rise of coinage coincided with a rise in organized military power and empire building in Rome, India and China, as I mentioned before.The Middle Ages saw a swing back to the old ways of doing things, where precious metals were largely confined to tribute while free trade flourished under the IOU system. However, this trade, at least initially, did not take place in order to secure material advantage. But in communities where most people know each other, if you never had hard currency in the first place, you might get by perfectly well without it. See my article on ‘Abundance: The Future Is Better than You Think’ here: I subscribed to your site after you mentioned you will be giving your opinion on the Krugman/Schiff debate. In contrast, there’s a Accordingly, the “myth of barter” is a false inference: we look back from today (where everything in our life is denominated in dollars) and think, “okay, they must’ve had some early substitute.” Anecdotal examples of prisoners using cigarettes as improvised currency are beloved by economists, but don’t actually tell us anything about the past: those prisoners grew up with modern money, so it’s natural that they might go recreate it. We have all sorts of propensities.
If you went back in time to a prehistoric village and asked, “how do you solve the coincidence of wants problem?” they’d look at you strangely: “What? The story runs that people started off with a barter economy, where they traded goods back and forth.
Ordinary people didn’t hold any coins, and didn’t transact with coins, so they probably didn’t care. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. Economics, stale memes, and distraction from productive activity. Your claim is that we will not be able to produce enough energy in the future to support sustained growth (or, at least the growth trend that we are currently on). The average life cycle of early coins was not facilitating trade among stranger after stranger. It’s also hard not to read this book in the context of what’s going on with Bitcoin right now, which is basically a pure, digital expression of money as fungible, abstract scarcity, where interpersonal trust has been fully engineered out of the picture. Tribute isn’t ever repaid, so the IOU system doesn’t work. The story of debt takes us from the origins of money itself; through to the age of slavery and conquest; on to the origins of the major world religions (with their near universal prohibitions on usury); through to the middle ages, and the beginnings of capitalism and the modern banking system; and finally on to the modern age itself with its national currencies, central banks, and commitment to market capitalism.While this story is interesting in its own right, Graeber’s main argument here is that tracing the history of debt unearths some uneasy truths and deep flaws in the nature of modern capitalism, and it is high time, he proposes, that we rekindle the conversation about how and with what we might replace it.According to Graeber, capitalism is faced with two fundamental flaws.
If I had extra wood and you had extra grain, we could negotiate and swap for mutual benefit and both be better off. I recently read Debt: the First 5000 Yearsby David Graeber, and it has stuck on my mind for a while. Here’s the version of the story we’re usually taught: Before money, commerce happened through bartering. And then credit and banking evolved on top of that. Hence people began trading their goods for coin, and money was born.The problem with this story is two-fold, according to Graeber. During the Axial Age (the last few centuries BC) we saw the rise of Roman, Indian and Chinese empires that all evolved hard currency systems that infiltrated all of commerce.
Ordinary people simply did not use coins that much, even in early civilizations that did evolve coinage, because the IOU system worked so well. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber (New York: Melville House, 2011). This entry was posted in books , Cities and civilization , economics , Web links and tagged David Graeber , Debt the first 5000 years on September 3, 2020 by Andrew Martin . “Recoinage” was a relatively frequent occurrence, where kings had to recall and reissue currency to fund their conflicts because there simply wasn’t enough metal circulating – too much was stuck inside the temples. Of course, the “Middle Ages” did not mean the dark, forgotten years where Western Europe didn’t do much; the rest of the world flourished between 600 and 1500, particularly the Middle East, Central, and East Asia. A fact that has been brought home with particular poignancy in recent times by the role that debt played in the latest global financial crash of 2008, and the continuing threat of growing consumer debt and national debts in places such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and now Italy, and, of course, the US.
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