4 ms·

Was it "formal" debt though, or more like "I'll give you some of my extra grain, because you seem kinda friendly, and you might repay me the favor if I happen t

Was it "formal" debt though, or more like "I'll give you some of my extra grain, because you seem kinda friendly, and you might repay me the favor if I happen to be in trouble in the future"?

karatestomp 7y ago
Things like tally sticks for tracking debt were used, absent and before currency, it seems. Pretty widely. IIRC (it's been a while since I read Debt) the book asserts that very small tribal or family economies likely worked the way you describe, with informal, mental tallies of debts, and as communities got just a bit larger physical tallies took over, persisting for some time. A consequence of this is that debt isn't surely "less real" or less essential/natural than money, nor even newer, but in fact more real, more essential or natural (so to speak), and older.
- nybble41 7y ago
  Even in small groups you still need a currency (unit of account) before you can keep a tally, though—unless you're going to keep separate tallies for each kind of good, which quickly becomes impractical since even similar kinds of goods may not have equal value. Also, you need some standard good with broad marketability as a means of settling debts which can't be paid in kind (i.e. legal tender or equivalent).
  - bildung 7y ago
    They certainly had a unit of account (bushels of grain, for example) to quantify debt, but they didn't have a currency, which has additional necessary criteria besides unit of account. What these cultures had, according to Graeber, were essentially ledgers for keeping track of debt.
jerf 7y ago
'"I'll give you some of my extra grain, because you seem kinda friendly, and you might repay me the favor if I happen to be in trouble in the future"?' I think one way of looking at this is that humans are generally embedded in larger contexts, because we always come in communities. (The exceptions are, broadly speaking, historically uninteresting.) So it isn't just that Alice and Bob are sitting there at this isolated moment when Alice has grain and trying to work out if it's worth asking Bob, whom she has never met before, to trade the grain for a future favor. Alice and Bob know each other, and are embedded in a community. They have access to a reasonable approximation of each other's reputation. Alice knows whether or not Bob tends to default on his debts. Alice can make Bob pay for defaulting with his reputation, which can theoretically become so bad that nobody wants to trade with him, which in many historical circumstances may be a literal death sentence. (We are very wealthy, and casually trade with many strangers, and have a hard time internalizing the world they lived in.) Attempts to model Alice and Bob's interactions as if they are strangers meeting for the first time, who generally expect to never see each other again, may be of some mathematical utility but won't explain the real world very well. So, it's neither a formal debt in anything like the modern sense, but neither is it "maybe you'll repay me in the future"; there's not total assurance, but in the community context there's much higher assurance of future repayment than that.
FactolSarin 7y ago
It doesn't have to be formal. Everyone does this today, and keeps a kind of list of debts in their head. "Bob asked me to help him move this weekend, and I really don't want to, but he helped me move last year." If you don't repay your social debts, you're going to find yourself getting a lot less favors done for you, and having a lot less friends in general.

Was it "formal" debt though, or more like "I'll give you some of my extra grain, because you seem kinda friendly, and you might repay me the favor if I happen to be in trouble in the future"?

karatestomp 7y ago

Things like tally sticks for tracking debt were used, absent and before currency, it seems. Pretty widely. IIRC (it's been a while since I read Debt) the book asserts that very small tribal or family economies likely worked the way you describe, with informal, mental tallies of debts, and as communities got just a bit larger physical tallies took over, persisting for some time. A consequence of this is that debt isn't surely "less real" or less essential/natural than money, nor even newer, but in fact more real, more essential or natural (so to speak), and older.

nybble41 7y ago
Even in small groups you still need a currency (unit of account) before you can keep a tally, though—unless you're going to keep separate tallies for each kind of good, which quickly becomes impractical since even similar kinds of goods may not have equal value. Also, you need some standard good with broad marketability as a means of settling debts which can't be paid in kind (i.e. legal tender or equivalent).
- bildung 7y ago
  They certainly had a unit of account (bushels of grain, for example) to quantify debt, but they didn't have a currency, which has additional necessary criteria besides unit of account. What these cultures had, according to Graeber, were essentially ledgers for keeping track of debt.

jerf 7y ago

'"I'll give you some of my extra grain, because you seem kinda friendly, and you might repay me the favor if I happen to be in trouble in the future"?' I think one way of looking at this is that humans are generally embedded in larger contexts, because we always come in communities. (The exceptions are, broadly speaking, historically uninteresting.) So it isn't just that Alice and Bob are sitting there at this isolated moment when Alice has grain and trying to work out if it's worth asking Bob, whom she has never met before, to trade the grain for a future favor. Alice and Bob know each other, and are embedded in a community. They have access to a reasonable approximation of each other's reputation. Alice knows whether or not Bob tends to default on his debts. Alice can make Bob pay for defaulting with his reputation, which can theoretically become so bad that nobody wants to trade with him, which in many historical circumstances may be a literal death sentence. (We are very wealthy, and casually trade with many strangers, and have a hard time internalizing the world they lived in.) Attempts to model Alice and Bob's interactions as if they are strangers meeting for the first time, who generally expect to never see each other again, may be of some mathematical utility but won't explain the real world very well. So, it's neither a formal debt in anything like the modern sense, but neither is it "maybe you'll repay me in the future"; there's not total assurance, but in the community context there's much higher assurance of future repayment than that.

FactolSarin 7y ago

It doesn't have to be formal. Everyone does this today, and keeps a kind of list of debts in their head. "Bob asked me to help him move this weekend, and I really don't want to, but he helped me move last year." If you don't repay your social debts, you're going to find yourself getting a lot less favors done for you, and having a lot less friends in general.