Only marginally related, but I highly recommend reading Debt: The First 5000 Years [0] by David Graeber. By examining and analyzing anthropological records, the

Only marginally related, but I highly recommend reading Debt: The First 5000 Years [0] by David Graeber. By examining and analyzing anthropological records, the author proposed a heterodox economic theory. Unlike the conventional economic model which says the human economic system comes from barter, currency, and finally debt/credit, the author argued that most historical evidence showed that the origin of the human economic system is actually debt/credit - The concept of debt came from the gift economy of early human communities: one friendly person shares one item to one's neighbor, and expect the neighbor provides something in return to help in the future. Barter was the extraordinary rather than the norm: it was only used with outside strangers (because they were not accountable under the human credit system of the local gift economy). Money and currency is actually a much later development as a method to quantify the debt, in this process, subjective human emotion is removed and replaced with an autonomous and objective economic machine. From this point, the author gave an alternative interpretation and analysis of human history. His conclusion is that the boom and bust of debt is an important driving force in human history, in this process, the debt bubble becomes bigger and bigger - until the unavoidable explosion of debt crisis. Then there will be a radical breakdown of social order, Finally, a new society is rebuilt, and all the debt from the previous society is canceled - this is a periodic cycle that occurs at a scale of 100-300 years. And the author argued, since the 1970, we have returned to (the beginning) of a new cycle. You don't have to agree everything that the author claims, but the author is good at telling a story, and it's a fascinating read. My summary is not exactly what the author said, the Wikipedia article the P2P Foundation Wiki [1] has a better summary, it includes transcripts of interviews. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years [1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_...