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A comment on The Anthropologist in an Economist World. Parent comment

Re:The Anthropologist in an Economist World by barry-cotter on Thursday September 17, 2020 @11:35PM (#24512712)
> Many times throughout the book, Graeber rails against the fact that the morality of "paying one's debts" functions as a mechanism for keeping debtors in bondage to creditors. But a few times, Graeber actually reverses the equation, and laments the power that debtors can sometimes exercise over creditors, quoting the old saw that "if you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you; if you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank." In other words, whether debt gives power to creditors or debtors, power is the bad thing, and debt is merely the mechanism by which power is expressed.

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...

> To start with, he makes several different historical claims, not all of them compatible:

> (1) Credit transactions preceded and dominated spot transactions in early human societies.

> (2) Media of account emerged before media of exchange.

> (3) Barter was unknown (or at least extremely rare) WITHIN early human societies.

> Notice that point (1) is incompatible with either (2) or (3). Early credit transactions must have involved barter (contradicting number 3) or media of exchange (contradicting 2). There is no other logical possibility. Yet because Graeber’s peculiar concept of barter excludes a farmer trading a pig for delivery of an ax in two weeks (to use Murphy’s example), his claim that barter was non-existent tends to become true by definition.

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Anthropologist in an Economist World by sudosysgen on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:15AM (#24515704)
Sure, there are a lot of possibilities that fullfill the three critera - you're imposing the modern conception of credit on early human civilizations.

To put it simply, early credit relationships were dominantly exchanges of services. So it wasn't barter, it's that you would do something for someone with the expectation that they would do something for you.

There, no media of exchange, and no barter. Solved. That's what you get for projecting definitions backwards through time :)

Now for the first time, I'm not sure how that is controversial, if you read that historically debt was a tool of bondage, then it makes perfect sense to frame the power of bondage as a social ill.

[ Parent | on HN ]