8 ms·

To anyone wondering what debt "means", or if some debts will ever be repaid, or wondering about "jubilees" where debts are forgiven, I recommend David Graeber's

by shoo 8y ago

To anyone wondering what debt "means", or if some debts will ever be repaid, or wondering about "jubilees" where debts are forgiven, I recommend David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5000 Years". I am not sure if some of the ideas about debt that Graeber argues are correct, but he does discuss a lot of interesting examples of debt from societies throughout history. https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/debt/ https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/debt/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

nonbel 8y ago
>"To anyone wondering what debt "means", or if some debts will ever be repaid, or wondering about "jubilees" where debts are forgiven" Can you just give the answers to these questions?
- dpiers 8y ago
  To be fair, he directed people to a >500 page book on the subject as a good introduction to some of these ideas. Do you expect him to effectively summarize a massive text in a single HN comment?
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    Is three sentences asking too much?
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      I feel this way every time someone recommends a study or a book to me. If you can't summarize it for a 5 year old, then you are either lazy or don't understand it yourself. For example, instead of telling me to read a 500 page book, you can say "the Big Bang is this really crazy but suprisingly plausible theory that our universe just suddenly exploded from nothing into this really hot and dense and chaotic realm, and now everything is expanding and cooling down and getting farther apart but also clumping together because of gravity. Check it out!" Becuase at least then you can say "oh wow, why is it clumping together? how do we know gravity is a thing?"
      - jacobolus 8y ago
        The two-sentence summary is ”Cultures around the world (historical and current) have an incredible variety and richness of traditions/practices related to debt. Debt is of central importance in every human society, predates and provides the conceptual foundation for economic exchange and property rights and many other cultural practices/institutions, and the culture-specific details are fascinating to read about.”
        loeg 8y ago
        That covers the first clause, but not: > or if some debts will ever be repaid, or wondering about "jubilees" where debts are forgiven,
      - kristopolous 8y ago
        Explain the Riemann hypothesis to me, including the contexts and the current work, without using technical language, to a general audience, in three sentences or less. What about the Japanese language? The history of Israeli-Palestine relations maybe? Some things are complicated and take 200 pages. There's nothing more to it.
        anoncoward111 8y ago
        "The Japanese language is a very interesting and unique human language. With over 250m speakers and a rich linguistic history, everything from its orthography to grammar to pronunciation provides interesting areas to explore further." At least now the reader can ask, "what makes the orthography so interesting"? To which a deeper conversation can be had about its symbolic writing method and efforts to romanize and digitize it efficiently. Now the reader has more reason to check out the book with just 4 or 5 sentences of info. Its like an outline vs a headline.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
        To be fair, the OP could just be time poor at present. Perhaps the laziness, then, lies with those who will not duck.com !w debt the first 5000 years
- kiliantics 8y ago
  The answers are very complex. In the book, Graeber shows that debt is as much a cultural/social norm as any other abstract, social construct we've invented throughout history. What debt meant in early Buddhist Nepal or Sumeria or aboriginal Australia, and what it means in modern western economies is completely tied in with governmental/religious/familial etc. structures that existed in the given time. He goes into great detail about many forms which debt has taken and - where it's known - gives some relevant context to help understand it. One thing he does point out, however, is that in recent decades, much of our debt has seemed to shift from a more useful tool for robust modern economies - as it was used in early 20th century for Keynesian stimulus and the likes - to more of a tool for subjugation, through new forms of debt peonage - e.g. with student debt in the USA or financial aid packages to former colonies - very similar to what we've seen in earlier times. I think it's a fantastic book, offering a very compelling narrative of how our social systems have evolved around these notions of debt since civilisation began. Also, if anyone wants to dig into the book right away, there are free versions of the book online[0], including an audiobook[1]. Since Graeber is an anarchist, I'm sure he doesn't mind if not everyone is paying for it ;) [0] https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf [1] http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years
  - FartyMcFarter 8y ago
    The book, page 3: > and ask her to contemplate the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictator, or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children. I'm still willing to give this book a chance, but it's not a good look when the third page already contains an emotionally manipulative and gross misuse of "literally".
    - kiliantics 8y ago
      I mean, this predatory lending did lead to a lot of starvation. That is not controversial. He may be using exaggerated narrative (and that part is only the introduction, setting the scene) but he is quite clear in the text about what the known or suspected facts are and what we might deduce from them.
- jazzyjackson 8y ago
  I'll give a crack at some cliffnotes: A debt is a very natural thing for humans, because we feel compelled to provide value to people who can't pay us yet. Even before money people had gifts and favors - we give with the expectation that we'll be given something in the future - or we say 'you owe me one' when someone has helped us through an issue without sending us an invoice. So the genius of fiat currency is that you get to represent these IOUs as a standard, fungible currency, such that I can take the debt you owe me and transfer it to someone else, so now you owe them. Being able to trade debt like this essentially turns debt into the currency. The benefit of this being that economic growth is not limited to how many gold coins we can mint -- we can become as indebted to each other as we like -- the more people go into debt, the more money we have to trade. Pretty neat.
  - ssalka 8y ago
    The problem is that if everyone were to try to collect all the debts owed to them, there would not be enough currency to fulfill it all. We freely create debt, but the result is a deficit that can only be resolved by creating enough value to offset the debt. And if that is somehow infeasible, economic collapse occurs.
    - RobLach 8y ago
      Or society works because people do things for others without expecting repayment and there’s enough social pressure for the vast majority to not exploit that system. Problems really only arise if debt is systemically expected, like a housing market that works only on a foundation of mortgages.
      - ScrimptonDeluxe 8y ago
        there’s enough social pressure for the vast majority to not exploit that system What fucking world are you living in, pal?
    - talltimtom 8y ago
      Currency is debt. If you have a 20$ bill that means essentially that the government owes you the equivalent in value. If everyone converted all their debt to currency that just means the state buys all the debt and prints sufficient government IOU’s (bills) along the way. If there is not enough value to cover the debt, the notes just lose value as others refuse to trade them at their previous rate.
- anonymouzz 8y ago
  Shortest possible answer: debt is money. Or you could say it's dual to money - creating debt creates money, paying debt destroys money. There's literally less money in the world when you make your mortgage payment (bank just sends much of your payment to /dev/null), and there's literally more money in the world when you take a mortgage (bank pulls it out of thin air). If all debt would be repaid then almost all of the money as we know it today would disappear.
  - Ir0nMan 8y ago
    That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
    - robertAngst 8y ago
      Don't just say No. You need to explain why. Also, I agree that the person you replied to was oversimplifying.
  - Joeri 8y ago
    That’s not really how it works. The bank takes savings deposited and issues most of it as loans keeping enough on hand to issue to people withdrawing their savings (fractional reserve banking). The interest on the loans pays the interest on the savings (which is why one tracks the other). They also borrow money from the markets (or the central bank) at low interest rates to reissue as higher-interest loans. Nowhere in that system do they create money out of thin air or send money to /dev/null (although I get the impression they do some of that in derivatives markets).
    - anonymouzz 8y ago
      This is how the system works. There's a limit to that practice (the money multiplier), which is one of the reasons why banks need to rotate money as you said (another being cross-bank transfers). See this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_o... It's a very counter intuitive concept that underpins the entire economic system. It was even a subject of a (failed) Swiss referendum recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Swiss_sovereign-money_initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Swiss_sovereign-money_ini...
djrobstep 8y ago
While I'm very sympathetic to the themes of the book, I found it so verbose, unstructured and meandering as to be unreadable.
- cribbles 8y ago
  Me too. I gave up after a couple hundred pages. At times interesting, but too unfocused, not to mention daunting due to the extreme length. Note that none of the commenters here have been able to supply a much more thorough synopsis than “debt has taken lots of different forms in different societies throughout history, including our own today.” By contrast, I found Graeber’s follow up collection “The Utopia of Rules” startlingly provocative and a super fun read - one of my favorite books. I think Graeber’s divergent writing style and argumentative form work better in the essay format.
- ThrowMeDown01 8y ago
  Since this subthread is about personal anecdotes of reading experience, mine was completely different. I had no problem finishing the book in record time and I'm glad I bought (and read) it.
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  I liked his talks as Morea easily digestible, but the book was full of useful tidbits. As an alternative to the real way debt is used today though, I suggest John Perkins books and The Tower of Basel

by shoo 8y ago

nonbel 8y ago

>"To anyone wondering what debt "means", or if some debts will ever be repaid, or wondering about "jubilees" where debts are forgiven" Can you just give the answers to these questions?

dpiers 8y ago
To be fair, he directed people to a >500 page book on the subject as a good introduction to some of these ideas. Do you expect him to effectively summarize a massive text in a single HN comment?
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Is three sentences asking too much?
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    I feel this way every time someone recommends a study or a book to me. If you can't summarize it for a 5 year old, then you are either lazy or don't understand it yourself. For example, instead of telling me to read a 500 page book, you can say "the Big Bang is this really crazy but suprisingly plausible theory that our universe just suddenly exploded from nothing into this really hot and dense and chaotic realm, and now everything is expanding and cooling down and getting farther apart but also clumping together because of gravity. Check it out!" Becuase at least then you can say "oh wow, why is it clumping together? how do we know gravity is a thing?"
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      The two-sentence summary is ”Cultures around the world (historical and current) have an incredible variety and richness of traditions/practices related to debt. Debt is of central importance in every human society, predates and provides the conceptual foundation for economic exchange and property rights and many other cultural practices/institutions, and the culture-specific details are fascinating to read about.”
      - loeg 8y ago
        That covers the first clause, but not: > or if some debts will ever be repaid, or wondering about "jubilees" where debts are forgiven,
    - kristopolous 8y ago
      Explain the Riemann hypothesis to me, including the contexts and the current work, without using technical language, to a general audience, in three sentences or less. What about the Japanese language? The history of Israeli-Palestine relations maybe? Some things are complicated and take 200 pages. There's nothing more to it.
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        "The Japanese language is a very interesting and unique human language. With over 250m speakers and a rich linguistic history, everything from its orthography to grammar to pronunciation provides interesting areas to explore further." At least now the reader can ask, "what makes the orthography so interesting"? To which a deeper conversation can be had about its symbolic writing method and efforts to romanize and digitize it efficiently. Now the reader has more reason to check out the book with just 4 or 5 sentences of info. Its like an outline vs a headline.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      To be fair, the OP could just be time poor at present. Perhaps the laziness, then, lies with those who will not duck.com !w debt the first 5000 years
kiliantics 8y ago
The answers are very complex. In the book, Graeber shows that debt is as much a cultural/social norm as any other abstract, social construct we've invented throughout history. What debt meant in early Buddhist Nepal or Sumeria or aboriginal Australia, and what it means in modern western economies is completely tied in with governmental/religious/familial etc. structures that existed in the given time. He goes into great detail about many forms which debt has taken and - where it's known - gives some relevant context to help understand it. One thing he does point out, however, is that in recent decades, much of our debt has seemed to shift from a more useful tool for robust modern economies - as it was used in early 20th century for Keynesian stimulus and the likes - to more of a tool for subjugation, through new forms of debt peonage - e.g. with student debt in the USA or financial aid packages to former colonies - very similar to what we've seen in earlier times. I think it's a fantastic book, offering a very compelling narrative of how our social systems have evolved around these notions of debt since civilisation began. Also, if anyone wants to dig into the book right away, there are free versions of the book online[0], including an audiobook[1]. Since Graeber is an anarchist, I'm sure he doesn't mind if not everyone is paying for it ;) [0] https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf https://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf [1] http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years
- FartyMcFarter 8y ago
  The book, page 3: > and ask her to contemplate the justice of insisting that the lenders be repaid, not by the dictator, or even by his cronies, but by literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children. I'm still willing to give this book a chance, but it's not a good look when the third page already contains an emotionally manipulative and gross misuse of "literally".
  - kiliantics 8y ago
    I mean, this predatory lending did lead to a lot of starvation. That is not controversial. He may be using exaggerated narrative (and that part is only the introduction, setting the scene) but he is quite clear in the text about what the known or suspected facts are and what we might deduce from them.
jazzyjackson 8y ago
I'll give a crack at some cliffnotes: A debt is a very natural thing for humans, because we feel compelled to provide value to people who can't pay us yet. Even before money people had gifts and favors - we give with the expectation that we'll be given something in the future - or we say 'you owe me one' when someone has helped us through an issue without sending us an invoice. So the genius of fiat currency is that you get to represent these IOUs as a standard, fungible currency, such that I can take the debt you owe me and transfer it to someone else, so now you owe them. Being able to trade debt like this essentially turns debt into the currency. The benefit of this being that economic growth is not limited to how many gold coins we can mint -- we can become as indebted to each other as we like -- the more people go into debt, the more money we have to trade. Pretty neat.
- ssalka 8y ago
  The problem is that if everyone were to try to collect all the debts owed to them, there would not be enough currency to fulfill it all. We freely create debt, but the result is a deficit that can only be resolved by creating enough value to offset the debt. And if that is somehow infeasible, economic collapse occurs.
  - RobLach 8y ago
    Or society works because people do things for others without expecting repayment and there’s enough social pressure for the vast majority to not exploit that system. Problems really only arise if debt is systemically expected, like a housing market that works only on a foundation of mortgages.
    - ScrimptonDeluxe 8y ago
      there’s enough social pressure for the vast majority to not exploit that system What fucking world are you living in, pal?
  - talltimtom 8y ago
    Currency is debt. If you have a 20$ bill that means essentially that the government owes you the equivalent in value. If everyone converted all their debt to currency that just means the state buys all the debt and prints sufficient government IOU’s (bills) along the way. If there is not enough value to cover the debt, the notes just lose value as others refuse to trade them at their previous rate.
anonymouzz 8y ago
Shortest possible answer: debt is money. Or you could say it's dual to money - creating debt creates money, paying debt destroys money. There's literally less money in the world when you make your mortgage payment (bank just sends much of your payment to /dev/null), and there's literally more money in the world when you take a mortgage (bank pulls it out of thin air). If all debt would be repaid then almost all of the money as we know it today would disappear.
- Ir0nMan 8y ago
  That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
  - robertAngst 8y ago
    Don't just say No. You need to explain why. Also, I agree that the person you replied to was oversimplifying.
- Joeri 8y ago
  That’s not really how it works. The bank takes savings deposited and issues most of it as loans keeping enough on hand to issue to people withdrawing their savings (fractional reserve banking). The interest on the loans pays the interest on the savings (which is why one tracks the other). They also borrow money from the markets (or the central bank) at low interest rates to reissue as higher-interest loans. Nowhere in that system do they create money out of thin air or send money to /dev/null (although I get the impression they do some of that in derivatives markets).
  - anonymouzz 8y ago
    This is how the system works. There's a limit to that practice (the money multiplier), which is one of the reasons why banks need to rotate money as you said (another being cross-bank transfers). See this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_o... It's a very counter intuitive concept that underpins the entire economic system. It was even a subject of a (failed) Swiss referendum recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Swiss_sovereign-money_initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Swiss_sovereign-money_ini...

djrobstep 8y ago

While I'm very sympathetic to the themes of the book, I found it so verbose, unstructured and meandering as to be unreadable.

cribbles 8y ago
Me too. I gave up after a couple hundred pages. At times interesting, but too unfocused, not to mention daunting due to the extreme length. Note that none of the commenters here have been able to supply a much more thorough synopsis than “debt has taken lots of different forms in different societies throughout history, including our own today.” By contrast, I found Graeber’s follow up collection “The Utopia of Rules” startlingly provocative and a super fun read - one of my favorite books. I think Graeber’s divergent writing style and argumentative form work better in the essay format.
ThrowMeDown01 8y ago
Since this subthread is about personal anecdotes of reading experience, mine was completely different. I had no problem finishing the book in record time and I'm glad I bought (and read) it.
arminiusreturns 8y ago
I liked his talks as Morea easily digestible, but the book was full of useful tidbits. As an alternative to the real way debt is used today though, I suggest John Perkins books and The Tower of Basel