5 ms·

Indeed - I did a double-take at the notion that creditors often wanted a borrower to default so they could then collect payment in the form of the debtors labor

• gwern 3y ago
  Where does he say that? He spends the end explaining that clearly most of the lenders had no interest in such a thing, many of the debtors wouldn't be good for labor, and lenders and always tried to take repayment in cash etc.
• bboygravity 3y ago
  Debt-slavery which interestingly was banned under Ceasar if I'm not mistaking.
  • Telemakhos 3y ago
    Solon, long before Caesar was ever born in Rome, abolished debt-slavery in Athens. There's a good book on Athenian banking: Cohen, E. 1992. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. He goes into interesting evidence for bank money (ledger entries not backed by coins, as opposed to metal currency), fractional reserve lending, and inflation in ancient Athens.
    • throw0101b 3y ago
      > There's a good book on Athenian banking: For a wider net, on the general legal framework(s) of that time, see perhaps Ancient Greek law in the 21st century, Perlman, Paula Jean, editor: * https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477315217/ https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477315217/ It turns out one of the largest banks in Athens was owned/run by some slaves: finance was not a 'respectable' profession—with farming/agriculture being the most 'noble'—so it was left to the lower classes and other riff-raff. Lots of slaves ran businesses, and the question often came up whether any associated debt belong to the business, the slave, or the slave's master (important when slaves were bought and sold).
  • qwytw 3y ago
    In Rome debt slavery was abolished almost 300 years before Caesar (not sure if it applied only to citizens or to all free people though)
• dfee 3y ago
  Sounds terrible: get the money then do the work? These days we work, THEN get the money. Maybe capital has gotten smarter about when to pay labor - only after the fact.
  • runeofdoom 3y ago
    Has capital gotten smarter, or labor gotten dumber? I'm sure all the people The World's Richest Man, Elon Musk, is currently refusing to pay what he owes them would rather have gotten their money in advance.
• alejohausner 3y ago
  Debt slavery was not life-long. Leviticus 25:8 requires that slaves be freed on Jubilee years, which occur every 7 years. That's the origin of modern laws on discharging bankruptcy after 7 years (bankruptcy comes with a penalty, because you can't borrow easily if you default on your debts, so it puts you into a kind of slavery). Jesus was the redeemer (one who buys off your debts) because he was going to cancel your moral debt of sin: the language of the gospels uses concepts familiar to his audience. According to Graeber, the jubilee year was introduced by Nehemiah (who had just returned from exile in Babylon, where he learned about it) not out benevolence, but because too many slaves meant the state had too few taxpaying farmers.
  • HideousKojima 3y ago
    >According to Graeber, the jubilee year was introduced by Nehemiah (who had just returned from exile in Babylon, where he learned about it) not out benevolence, but because too many slaves meant the state had too few taxpaying farmers. Given the paucity of surviving texts from that place and era, that sounds like a chain of unsupported assumptions worthy of an evo psych paper.
    • alejohausner 3y ago
      He's got several references at the back of his book "Debt", on the topic of the jubilee. But you have a point: there's lots of room for interpretation. Still, the idea just seemed too delicious to pass up: debt cancellation does not arise from benevolence but from fiscal necessity.