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I’d recommend reading the late David Graeber’s “Debt” which does a good job illustrating exactly what you described, which is how currency is at its core an IOU
by weakfish 20d ago
I’d recommend reading the late David Graeber’s “Debt” which does a good job illustrating exactly what you described, which is how currency is at its core an IOU
- amunozo 20d agoI cannot recommend reading this book enough.
- Henchman21 20d agoSo… does it follow that the very wealthy basically hold a massive IOU to the general public?
- marcosdumay 20d agoIf by wealthy you mean people with a lot of money specifically, than no, the IOU is the other way around.
- DanielVZ 20d agoTo expand the sibling comment. In principle the money would reflect IOUs the general public owes them. But also following this logic the way I see it is they accumulated their money was by getting more IOUs through: people employment (being able to command a big pool of work and get a cut of IOUs from it), arbitrage (exchanging lower value IOUs with higher value IOUs), or simply stealing (eg. siphoning government resources).
- mitxela 19d agoThey hold IOUs from the general public.