Debt
The author shows that before there was money, there was debt. For 5,000 years humans have lived in societies divided into debtors and creditors. For 5,000 years debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates, laws and religions. The words “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption” come from ancient debates about debt. These terms and the ideas of debt shape our most basic ideas of right and wrong. source
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What Hacker News says
- 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
- It is also totally wrong. I got to the third block and quit, as this is just an LLM bullshit version of the 18th century bullshit fantasy of the origin of money (see David Graeber's Debt).
You can't describe how various forms of monetary value work in the modern monetary system as if it were a rural village with physical items, because it is fundamentally different.
- I'm not going to explain David Graeber's Debt to you, but yes, this exact 18th century fantasy of the emergence of money in caveman times contains the same kind of misunderstandings that also leads to most people having an incredibly misguided view of how the contemporary global financial system operates.
- Yeah, it's nice to overlay this with Graeber's Debt - there's cyclic chunks of history where no one has little bags of coins to buy the 10ft poles needed to explore the dungeon. (par example.) Sometimes because the monetary system collapses entirely, sometimes because the nobles have hoovered up all the available silver, and don't have the means to make more.
In those periods, people work more on credits and debts, which shade directly into systems of social obligation and caste when extended over time.
(As you note) It's also very historically recent that 'making money' was seen as any kind of reasonable choice for someone with power. The political and merchant classes are typically quite separate (the exceptions prove the rule); the merchants are picking up an under-explored source of power that is mostly uninteresting to the the ruling class.
- Great works on this subject, to my mind refuting your nebulous thesis, include Debt by Graeber, Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, and Mutual Aid by Kropotkin.
- I read a decent number of books every year, but I find myself reading the same topics and genres most of the time. I’d love to hear some of your favorite books, from any genre, language, or topic. The more diverse, the better, since I’m trying to get out of my reading comfort zone.
Some books I’ve liked recently or that are all-time favorites: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Debt by David Graeber, and The Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas.
