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Debt: The First 5,000 Years is my preferred introduction. Critically this New Yorker account is missing the word 'usury' which was largely agreed to be evil by

Debt: The First 5,000 Years is my preferred introduction. Critically this New Yorker account is missing the word 'usury' which was largely agreed to be evil by early religions and societies that experienced its effects...

JackFr 7y ago
"Debt: The First 5,000 Years" is a book length op-ed. It's not useful with respect to economic history.
- vishnugupta 7y ago
  I for one quite enjoyed reading, and learned from, that book. Could you please suggest good books about economic history. I'm looking to expand my knowledge in that domain.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    More popular history: https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177 https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/... https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Exchange-Trade-Shaped-World/dp/0802144160/ https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Exchange-Trade-Shaped-World/... https://www.amazon.com/Cash-Nexus-Money-Modern-1700-2000/dp/0465023266 https://www.amazon.com/Cash-Nexus-Money-Modern-1700-2000/dp/... https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Speculation/dp/0452281806/ https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specula... Academic but readable: https://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financial/dp/1137525754/ https://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financi... https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Financial-Capitalism-International-Monetary/dp/0521457386/ https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Financial-Capitalism-Internation...
- pradn 7y ago
  I don't think that's fair. The majority of the book is a straightforward history of money that doesn't accept received wisdom. Near the end, the author's more anarchist leanings color the narrative. The last two chapters are not as informative, but that doesn't mean one should discount the majority of the book. A few takeaways I have from that book: 1) In rural/traditional societies, debt (measured and stored in people's heads) and other reciprocal social obligations were enough to run an economy. Simple example: you give your neighbor some grain when the harvest comes, and you neighbor repairs your tools the whole year long. The classic economy-textbook idea that we invented currency so we don't have to barter with the goods we produce has never been observed in history. 2) Governments induce the creation of currency. Any government can change the currency by requiring the repayment of taxes in that new currency. Often this is for the purposes of paying armies. 3) Traveling merchants need to use currency because they can't rely on social obligations at each place along where they travel. Money allows anonymity.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    > The classic economy-textbook idea that we invented currency so we don't have to barter with the goods we produce has never been observed in history. http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp.pdf http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp... Cigarettes were the numeraire for all transactions for the sake of efficiency.
    - sdenton4 7y ago
      That's addressed in the book: the cigarette economy is aping an existing cash+capitalistic economy, and thus doesn't provide a template for the evolution of a monetary economy from scratch.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    > I don't think that's fair. Maybe I suppose. I read the book, though I was pretty familiar with the material already. To me it seemed immediately he adopted a hectoring, moralizing tone that was quite unnecessary and distracting. From the outset, he seemed unable to see past the framework of political power structures, and because of that basically missed the point of modern financial capitalism.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
throw0101a 7y ago
> ... is missing the word 'usury' which was largely agreed to be evil by early religions and societies that experienced its effects... It should be noted that the reasons we borrow money today is different than why it was done in the past. In the past, the "average" person was usually a farmer, and if they needed to borrow money, it was probably because their crops had failed and they needed to money to buy food to feed themselves. It was unseemly to lend money to someone who, without it, would die. Borrowing money nowadays is usually for mortgages and consumer spending. Very different situations, with different moral contexts. Of course some people do still need money to survive, which is where payday loans tend to come in, and I think a lot of people find them distasteful--and the fact that people in our society may need to use them also a sad reflection on our society. So "usury" was/is considered morally wrong not because of the charging of interest, but of the moral context under which it used to be done. There are of course 'usury laws', but they reflect the idea that charging more than x% interest unseemly because there should be no need for it (to produce a reasonable ROI).
- panarky 7y ago
  > It was unseemly to lend money to someone who, without it, would die. "Medical debt is a uniquely American phenomenon, a burden that would be unfathomable in many other developed countries." "Nearly 60 percent of people who have filed for bankruptcy said a medical expense 'very much' or 'somewhat' contributed to their bankruptcy." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/hospital-bills-medical-debt-bankruptcy/584998/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/hospital-...
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    I live in Canada.
    - panarky 7y ago
      Congratulations, I'm happy for you! Not sure that changes the relevance of the usury discussion, even if you personally are insulated from medical bankruptcy.
vmurthy 7y ago
An interesting trivia: the concept of bill discounting was accepted as a workaround to the usury laws of the time. Source : Niall Ferguson’s “Ascent of money”
Symmetry 7y ago
I read that book and mostly enjoyed it than I got to the last chapter and found it was riddled with errors I could easily spot like the in following sentence: Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages. Reading around, it seems like the rest of the book is similarly accurate.
- epistasis 7y ago
  That's a shocking amount of inaccuracy to pack into a single sentence!
  - ci5er 7y ago
    It is! I've been trying to think of a more compact/dense incorrect sentence for a bit now, and I can't really think of an alternative. (Although some of the political screeds from the election of 1800 might have been close, and I have yet to go mine twitter for examples)
    - yellowstuff 7y ago
      This is a close competitor: > For those who don't know how the Fed works: technically, there are a series of stages. Generally the Treasury puts out bonds to the public, and the Fed buys them back. The Fed then loans the money thus created to other banks at a special low rate of interest ('the prime rate')... Also from "Debt, The First 5000 Years".
- pcardoso 7y ago
  I was reading the book and enjoying it until I got to this part. It was so wrong in so many ways that I put the book down, not able to trust anything else in it.
- bliss 7y ago
  That seems more similar to the plot of that Halt and Catch Fire show on Amazon Prime
dondawest 7y ago
The word “usury” is almost solely employed as a coded anti-semitism dog whistle these days, so I really don’t take issue with the terms exclusion
mymythisisthis 7y ago
Samuel Pepy's journal is a fascinating account of how money functioned in the 1660s. There was very little actual money, everything was done in IOUs. He worked in the Navy, purchasing food and rope. The King gave him an IOU, he then wrote IOUs to people he bought things from. People seemed to know exactly how much you had. One time a friend of his hurt a servant, the next day everyone went to cash in their IOU with the friend fearing there would be a rush to do so. The friend was ruined and lost everything having to pay out the IOUs. Respect was everything in such a society.
- xrd 7y ago
  When I read this, I thought: this sounds like the same plot from Dumb and Dumber!

JackFr 7y ago

"Debt: The First 5,000 Years" is a book length op-ed. It's not useful with respect to economic history.

vishnugupta 7y ago
I for one quite enjoyed reading, and learned from, that book. Could you please suggest good books about economic history. I'm looking to expand my knowledge in that domain.
- JackFr 7y ago
  More popular history: https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/0143116177 https://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/... https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Exchange-Trade-Shaped-World/dp/0802144160/ https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Exchange-Trade-Shaped-World/... https://www.amazon.com/Cash-Nexus-Money-Modern-1700-2000/dp/0465023266 https://www.amazon.com/Cash-Nexus-Money-Modern-1700-2000/dp/... https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Speculation/dp/0452281806/ https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specula... Academic but readable: https://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financial/dp/1137525754/ https://www.amazon.com/Manias-Panics-Crashes-History-Financi... https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Financial-Capitalism-International-Monetary/dp/0521457386/ https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Financial-Capitalism-Internation...
pradn 7y ago
I don't think that's fair. The majority of the book is a straightforward history of money that doesn't accept received wisdom. Near the end, the author's more anarchist leanings color the narrative. The last two chapters are not as informative, but that doesn't mean one should discount the majority of the book. A few takeaways I have from that book: 1) In rural/traditional societies, debt (measured and stored in people's heads) and other reciprocal social obligations were enough to run an economy. Simple example: you give your neighbor some grain when the harvest comes, and you neighbor repairs your tools the whole year long. The classic economy-textbook idea that we invented currency so we don't have to barter with the goods we produce has never been observed in history. 2) Governments induce the creation of currency. Any government can change the currency by requiring the repayment of taxes in that new currency. Often this is for the purposes of paying armies. 3) Traveling merchants need to use currency because they can't rely on social obligations at each place along where they travel. Money allows anonymity.
- JackFr 7y ago
  > The classic economy-textbook idea that we invented currency so we don't have to barter with the goods we produce has never been observed in history. http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp.pdf http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp... Cigarettes were the numeraire for all transactions for the sake of efficiency.
  - sdenton4 7y ago
    That's addressed in the book: the cigarette economy is aping an existing cash+capitalistic economy, and thus doesn't provide a template for the evolution of a monetary economy from scratch.
- JackFr 7y ago
  > I don't think that's fair. Maybe I suppose. I read the book, though I was pretty familiar with the material already. To me it seemed immediately he adopted a hectoring, moralizing tone that was quite unnecessary and distracting. From the outset, he seemed unable to see past the framework of political power structures, and because of that basically missed the point of modern financial capitalism.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

throw0101a 7y ago

> ... is missing the word 'usury' which was largely agreed to be evil by early religions and societies that experienced its effects... It should be noted that the reasons we borrow money today is different than why it was done in the past. In the past, the "average" person was usually a farmer, and if they needed to borrow money, it was probably because their crops had failed and they needed to money to buy food to feed themselves. It was unseemly to lend money to someone who, without it, would die. Borrowing money nowadays is usually for mortgages and consumer spending. Very different situations, with different moral contexts. Of course some people do still need money to survive, which is where payday loans tend to come in, and I think a lot of people find them distasteful--and the fact that people in our society may need to use them also a sad reflection on our society. So "usury" was/is considered morally wrong not because of the charging of interest, but of the moral context under which it used to be done. There are of course 'usury laws', but they reflect the idea that charging more than x% interest unseemly because there should be no need for it (to produce a reasonable ROI).

panarky 7y ago
> It was unseemly to lend money to someone who, without it, would die. "Medical debt is a uniquely American phenomenon, a burden that would be unfathomable in many other developed countries." "Nearly 60 percent of people who have filed for bankruptcy said a medical expense 'very much' or 'somewhat' contributed to their bankruptcy." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/hospital-bills-medical-debt-bankruptcy/584998/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/hospital-...
- throw0101a 7y ago
  I live in Canada.
  - panarky 7y ago
    Congratulations, I'm happy for you! Not sure that changes the relevance of the usury discussion, even if you personally are insulated from medical bankruptcy.

vmurthy 7y ago

An interesting trivia: the concept of bill discounting was accepted as a workaround to the usury laws of the time. Source : Niall Ferguson’s “Ascent of money”

Symmetry 7y ago

I read that book and mostly enjoyed it than I got to the last chapter and found it was riddled with errors I could easily spot like the in following sentence: Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages. Reading around, it seems like the rest of the book is similarly accurate.

epistasis 7y ago
That's a shocking amount of inaccuracy to pack into a single sentence!
- ci5er 7y ago
  It is! I've been trying to think of a more compact/dense incorrect sentence for a bit now, and I can't really think of an alternative. (Although some of the political screeds from the election of 1800 might have been close, and I have yet to go mine twitter for examples)
  - yellowstuff 7y ago
    This is a close competitor: > For those who don't know how the Fed works: technically, there are a series of stages. Generally the Treasury puts out bonds to the public, and the Fed buys them back. The Fed then loans the money thus created to other banks at a special low rate of interest ('the prime rate')... Also from "Debt, The First 5000 Years".
pcardoso 7y ago
I was reading the book and enjoying it until I got to this part. It was so wrong in so many ways that I put the book down, not able to trust anything else in it.
bliss 7y ago
That seems more similar to the plot of that Halt and Catch Fire show on Amazon Prime

dondawest 7y ago

The word “usury” is almost solely employed as a coded anti-semitism dog whistle these days, so I really don’t take issue with the terms exclusion

mymythisisthis 7y ago

Samuel Pepy's journal is a fascinating account of how money functioned in the 1660s. There was very little actual money, everything was done in IOUs. He worked in the Navy, purchasing food and rope. The King gave him an IOU, he then wrote IOUs to people he bought things from. People seemed to know exactly how much you had. One time a friend of his hurt a servant, the next day everyone went to cash in their IOU with the friend fearing there would be a rush to do so. The friend was ruined and lost everything having to pay out the IOUs. Respect was everything in such a society.

xrd 7y ago
When I read this, I thought: this sounds like the same plot from Dumb and Dumber!