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>"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 an

• 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
      • watwut 8y ago
        Ability and willingness to oversimplify nuanced text does not imply understanding. Unwillingness to deal with details and nuance of long more accurate text is lazy too. Calling someone lazy and not understanding, because you want explanation for 5 year old and are not willing to engage with longer text and want him to do the work is hypocrisy and manipulation at its best.
      • lsc 8y ago
        >If you can't summarize it for a 5 year old, then you are either lazy or don't understand it yourself. I... kinda feel the opposite? if you feel like you can summarize something complex in 5 sentences to a person without any background, I think you probably aren't fully understanding the thing you are summarizing. I think this is especially true in fields like economics where even the people at the top of the field who have studied for years don't 100% understand everything.
        • anoncoward111 8y ago
          Everyone is entitled to their own use-case of course, but let me phrase it a little differently: If you recommend me a dish from a restaurant, but you can't describe the flavors, texture, and quantity in a few sentences, then why are you recommending it? "It's awesome, the flavor is spicy, salty, and smokey. It is charred on the outside and greasey and chewy inside. It is a very hearty and filling dish."
          • lsc 8y ago
            Actually, I think that's a really good example; I hang out with a lot of foodies, and that's another thing where I'm not very educated. I can understand 'Yeah, you'd probably like it' or "this is like that other thing" but... when they start going on about the various flavors? Yeah, I have a really hard time translating that into what a thing tastes like, because I lack the background, I lack the education.
      • kiliantics 8y ago
        As someone working in cosmological astrophysics, I think that is a very misleading summary of what the big bang theory is... However, luckily for us, people who go around misunderstanding the big bang theory because of bad tweet-length explanations (by experts or non-experts) are not a great danger to the rest of us. They aren't basing their politics or personal finance decisions on that misunderstanding. The thing with topics like the ones covered in Debt, is that they have been weaponised by our leaders to facilitate social stratification and very unjust economic disparities. I believe this has largely been made possible through simplification of these concepts and making bite-sized claims about how "basic economics" works, where all the detail and nuance has been thrown out. These kinds of 3 sentence summaries can be very dangerous.
        • anoncoward111 8y ago
          Lol then continue to keep your topic of study less accessible. "A car is a small vehicle that has a motor that turns energy into motion". "Ummm well ackshually there are smaller vehicles than that, and cars can be electric or oil, so clearly you don't understand the topic unless you start with the factory blueprints first instead of the dictionary definition."
        • posix_me_less 8y ago
          > a very misleading summary That depends on the person on the receiving end. For an expert on the topic, it may be misleading. For average Joe on the street, it is completely fine. Do you have a better 5-sentence explanation for what Big Bang is? Joe isn't going to read a book about it.
• 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...