Graeber's book is about how debts work in different societies and cultures and what they mean. i finished the book being more confused about debt and money than when i started. that said, it was an interesting read, i don't regret reading it.

in contrast, this brief blog post by Morgan Housel gives a small visual metophor and a rule of thumb about how too much debt might be fatal when operating a business. arguably it teaches you something actionable, but doesn't tell you anything about your society.

Graeber's book is not at all concerned with giving you actionable advice on how to best use (or avoid) debt to run a business within your society.

that said, Graeber's book may give you some actionable advice on how to get along better with your neighbours, family and community. the tip would be: try to have everyone in the village owe each other debts. the idea is everyone should feel they have some obligation to others that they can never fully repay, but maybe they can return some other incomparable favour or assistance in future. this encourages cooperation.

trying to fully repay or balance these debts would be frowned upon -- such behaviour is what one might do if one were seeking to not participate in society any more. not pro-social.

I feel like Graeber's book is another (left leaning) fad to glom on to, like Piketty's book some years back.

I found this book, The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor [1], very useful for understanding the development of money and debt over history. It's so detailed and clearly extensively researched.

[1]: https://www.harvard.com/book/the_price_of_time/

In a general equilibrium economy with no innovation or all innovation potential being exhausted, money demand and interest disappear. "Interest" isn't the price of time, it is the price of liquidity.

For some reason economists seem to gloss over that money doesn't abstract over just time. It abstracts over everything including location, trade partner, the specific commodity being traded and minimum quantities.

Since people involuntarily produce liquidity by bringing their goods to the market, people owning the rights to that liquidity (aka capitalists) can "reap where they haven't sown".

This leads to a paradoxical situation. Liquidity production is work like any other. In short, liquidity production demands to be compensated. Since the holders of liquidity can utilize the benefits of the liquidity services without paying they can either decide to use the liquidity benefits themselves or they can decide to monetize them by selling liquidity on the capital markets. The compensation for this liquidity service is known as risk free interest.

As I mentioned, liquidity demands to be compensated, but since the producer of liquidity does not get paid, they will eventually wisen up and cease producing liquidity in the national transaction network. This leads to production capacity in the economy being dismantled since it represents a commitment in time-commodity-quantity-person-space. Instead, future producers of liquidity await the holders of liquidity to effectively signal their demand so that they know to what production process they should commit to.

Since information acquisition is costly, it is perceived to be cheaper to avoid committing oneself or in more direct terms: interest measures the reluctance to lose control over ones capital.

Piketty's book (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) is most definitely not a fad. It is a result of serious research into historical economic data and anyone intellectually honest ought take it seriously. As anything in the social science of economics, it is subject to debate, but to call it a 'fad' is odd, to put it mildly.

I think it's popularity among layfolk, like myself, was a fad. I'd be incredibly surprised if it's flying off the shelves now like it was right after release.

But popularity doesn't validate or invalidate its content.

serious? sure, yet wrong

they made a few mistakes, and after correctiona their findings are not reproducible

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/1/11/23984135/inequa...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/th...

It's strange that you would trust a fund manager like Edward Chancellor over a trained anthropologist like Graeber on historical research. The price of time looks a at a small sliver of debt through the eye of interest rates and their impacts.

Chancellor's axe to grind is clear, that manipulation of interest rates by central governments has led to economic instability. Yet historically emperors, kings, and other rulers would periodically wipe the slate clear because debt enslaved too many people causing instability.

Read Graeber's book. It's better researched.

> Chancellor's axe to grind is clear, that manipulation of interest rates by central governments has led to economic instability

Have you read the book? Cause this is such a simplistic reduction of the book, I can't help to think that YOU have an axe to grind.

Thanks for the rec. I’ve wanted to read “Debt” for a long time but I recently read Graeber’s book “the Dawn of Everything” and it bent the truth so much every which way to get to his POV that I won’t read another book by him.

> I recently read Graeber’s book “the Dawn of Everything” and it bent the truth so much every which way to get to his POV that I won’t read another book by him.

Do you mind elaborating on why this is the case? I've read and liked some of his other work (Bullshit Jobs is a great one) and I have Dawn of Everything on my reading list -- was it due to his politics in general or because of disingenuous interpretations of the evidence?

Disingenuous interpretations of the evidence and stating things as facts that are very much still debated or denied by other experts.

A good example: Graeber posits that the European Enlightenment came directly from contact with Native American ideals rather than being a home grown movement. To support this, Graeber repeatedly references a book written by a French Army officer named Lahontan about his travels in North America in the late 1600s[0]. In this book Lahontan has dialogue with a fictional Native American named Adario that is more or less a disguised critique of European society. Adario bears similarities to Iroquois Chief Kondiaronk[1]. It's thought that Adario was a literary device for Lahontan's ideas but Graeber makes a very hand wavy argument that Adario was actually Kondiaronk and the dialogue was real. Graeber then uses this as his main piece of evidence to support his theory about the origins of the European Enlightenment.

I couldn't finish the book because I kept looking up the evidence Graeber was presenting and it usually ended up like the Kondiaronk situation.

Graeber is also very condescending when he's writing about ideas held by other anthropologists (like Jared Diamond), it was off-putting and came off as unprofessional for someone who was supposed to be a leading academic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Voyages_to_North_America [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk

Have you read any of his other stuff? His essay on Bullshit Jobs (https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) is a good example that isn't book-length (though he did write a book of the same name that came out later)

Here I definitely take his condescending / snarky tone with a grain of salt, but as a reader I understand it as largely a literary technique to build a narrative and suggest / propose an alternative, usually somewhat contrarian, viewpoint.

I can't at all disagree with you here re: Dawn of Everything, as I haven't read the book, but is it at all possible that -- given we're analyzing the reported history of indigenous societies and the book talks about a proposed alternative viewpoint -- some level of "matter of fact"-ness works in a similar way as a literary technique? In this context it seems impossible to truly make a definitive claim one way or the other, as we're talking about histories for groups of people (who were largely extinguished by invading colonialist armies; Guns Germs and Steel and all that...) that are no longer around in serious enough numbers to have an oral history, let alone a quasi-accurate one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything#Recepti... seems largely like reception was a mixed bag, and that while there are parts that are a bit of a stretch, most anthropologists and reviewers found it a refreshing read contrary to the "canonical" (imperialist) narrative(s) commonly taught in history class. Is it as "mixed" from your read as that Wikipedia summary says, or do you find the discrepancies/inaccuracies significantly more egregious than the way I'm characterizing them?

I honestly don't know your background. Do you have an education and training in anthropology and/or archeology? Maybe you do.

When I read the criticisms in the press and blogs about the work, I found it telling that most of the criticism about Graeber and Wengrow's book is from non-experts. While experts seem to find it a breathe of fresh air.

I personally don't have enough training and education in anthropology and archeology to properly interpret the evidence. I suspect most readers here do not. That's why it's such an important work, because it synthesizes the latest research. Turns out a lot of it is counter to a lot of contemporary works that don't rely on such depth.

Another poster here referenced the Wikipedia page for the book which has some good content under the “Reception” section. Not all anthropologists thought it was a breath of fresh air. And again, I looked up a lot of the evidence and it wasn’t as cut and dry as he made it out to be. He was trying to build a narrative to sell a book.

Just because I’m not an anthropologist doesn’t mean I have to take Graeber’s word for everything.

Did you read the same reception section as me? It seems to be very well regarded and even when there were some criticism, they were minor. For example,

> Anthropologist Durba Chattaraj said "elisions, slippages, and too-exaggerated leaps" when referring to archaeology from India, but stated that its authors are "extremely rigorous and meticulous scholars",

So yes, there are criticism of the book by experts in the field, but they seem minor compared to the whole picture and impact the book is having.

There is a reason this book is so positively received because Graeber and Wengrow are real scholars.

There are many other criticisms in the Reception section such as the below excerpt which is a good summary of how I felt about what I read of the book.

> The historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow's arguments about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accused the authors of coming "perilously close to scholarly malpractice."

They are real scholars but also trying to use their reputation to sling a narrative to sell a book for the masses. I don’t care that some of their Ivy League/anthropology buddies said it was a breath of fresh air, what I read and researched myself said it was a good amount of hot air.

Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to argue for his fringe political beliefs was Graeber's whole shtick. You're better off not reading Debt.

You are kidding right? Dawn of everything was a synthesis work. The amount of research it references is insane (a quarter of the book is references) How exactly would you write, an already long book, that doesn't look like cherry picking by those that disagree with the content?

> the book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” by David Graeber

Also would recommend Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing:

> Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century.

> At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin.

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/50358103

And The power of gold : the history of an obsession (and Bernstein's other books):

> Incorporating myth, history and contemporary investigation, Bernstein tells the story of how human beings have become intoxicated, obsessed, enriched, impoverished, humbled and proud for the sake of gold. From the past to the future, Bernstein's portrayal of gold is intimately linked to the character of humankind.

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/249245

> Money only works because we all agree to believe in it.

Respectfully, this is the type of true-that-sounds-deep statements that are absolutely shallow and pointless. Yes money the "paper" is not worth anything, but the same could be said of anything in an organized society. Ownership means nothing, it's just a title backed by the government which has a monopoly on violence. Ethics means nothing, it's just something we culturally decided was desirable because if you feel a-ok with murder any trip anywhere would turn into a blood bath.

At this point it should be a named fallacy (maybe it is), if we are discussing the merits of debt as a tool, saying "money isn't worth anything" as if it means something is not some ground breaking statement.

> Respectfully, this is the type of true-that-sounds-deep statements that are absolutely shallow and pointless.

And yet people still insist on the idea that money (or, quite commonly, gold) does have some kind of intrinsic value. The statement may be trope-y, but it's a psychological hurdle that many folks can't seem to get their head around.

RIP Graeber.

It is

This is a life changing book. It demystifies the biggest part of our lives, which is money (and debt) and helps you contextualize your world by looking into the past. It's the best researched book on the subject.