Back to the Future of CreditDespite its title this book is really a deconstruction of the idea of money. The economist's idea is that credit (loans, cash advances etc.) arises in a well-developed monetary or 'cash on the barrel head' society which in turn had been an improvement on the previous system of barter. Not so says Graeber and rather convincingly: credit, or more precisely the ledger of who owes what to whom, is the most primitive form of commerce which is only supplemented by either barter or immediate monetary exchange when social conditions deteriorate sufficiently to make credit arrangements impossible. Wars, revolutions, and various social upheavals are what cause the demand for cash, that is, the immediate settlement of commercial transactions. Cash only becomes king when there is no trust, either between parties to a transaction or in the stability of the social environment. Credit in a very practical sense is the fundamental invention and promoter of civilisation. Graeber's thesis is in fact confirmed by recent technological developments like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is in its simplest terms 'merely' an unfalsifiable ledger of who has 'rights' in the community and how much, essentially what members of the community are worth to each other. The Bitcoin ledger differs from bank accounts because (among other things) it cannot be interfered with either by criminals or governments. In other words the ledger can be trusted even when its members have no personal knowledge of each other. The social system is its own guarantor. If only Immanuel Kant (not to mention Leibniz) were alive to see it! He spent his life trying to find a way to guarantee the integrity of life's accounts, in every sense of the word. Double-entry bookkeeping was a start but not enough to warrant complete trust. With modern technology it looks as if we might be able to create enough trust to return to the most efficient commercial system possible: pure credit. Without the need for banks or their regulators. Or for that matter, their scams and frauds. Fascinating, provocative and stimulating. If you have an interest in uncovering the myths of economics and how those myths become part of what you then see in the world, this is a must read.-----------------An AddendumThis article appeared in my feed today. It is yet further support for Graeber's position and the superiority of an unmediated credit economy: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/in...

I would call this an interesting but dangerous book. As opposed to other books in which every moment was a learning and enlightening enjoyment this book was exhaustingly tense because I found it to be a very confusing mix of dangerous (but plausible) ideas written in a smart way, and interesting historical or world data. So, I'll start the review with the negative things, and then move onto the positive ones:- the author seems to have a clear agenda, of attacking capitalism & free market ideas, and to this end he's willing to use what I would call disloyal weapons. I'm happy to hear of opposing ideas when they are argued logically and without resorting to trickery, but the author uses a large amount of mixed and confusing philosophical debate to confuse, and imposes language with moral undertones to push his arguments: for example in his attempt to vilify clear quantization of values as we do through currency he calls the non-monetary solution "human economy" (the other one must be inhuman, right?). Similarly he perverts the concept of familiar/church/friends sharing which I haven't heard any free market/capitalist people deny (on the contrary they seem to more often have healthier family & social relationships while their opponents like Marx have broken families, suicidal children and other tragedies), aaa, where was I? yes, he perverts these positive relationships by calling them "comunistic", thereby bringing their positive aura onto a social/political system that has caused millions of deaths and huge suffering... I find such trickery disloyal - from the title and description I had assumed the book would be largely filled with historical data, but mostly i had to endure philosophical bla-bla-bla and a particularly non-objective style of exposition- i call this a dangerous book because I know there are a lot of people out there with soft logic abilities, and less historical knowledge or analytic abilities, and they might be tricked by the book, so i would recommend the book only if you've read at least another 5 historical and economics books with a more analytic lean, be it from the ruthless logic of Rothbard & Mises or the historical facts of people such as Sowell- I liken the authors style and method to Marx because like him his goal is to attack capitalism (did you know that not capitalists but Marx coined the term with the purpose of attack?), and they are both very smart people with high entertainment value/intelectual writing and both spend a lot of time attacking something while then being unsurprisingly blank at proposing anything better in a consequent matter so that others can poke holes at their position too, instead they are positionless and thus can't be attacked themselves. Also the author seems very tricky in his attacks... does he mean to attack the system whereby people save first and then use those savings? does he propose that debt spending is better? does he think that nothing can/should be quantized and we should all remain in a primitive society style (yes, he searches a lot in history and present for obscure examples of tribes to argue his points, but doesn't seem to notice that maybe there's a reason those were left behind). Instead he seems to define capitalism as everything he can cherry pick through history and present day that is bad, which of course makes it very easy to argue against them.There are howerever good things in the book too:+ while IMHO setting up straw many arguments and guilty parties he does seem to see some big problems, he sees how the system today will probably go through a historically recurrent reset of debt and maybe complexity+ he dares to talk about subjects such as the American empire, the support it gets from countries with troops stationed in their territories, and such things+ while with some biases he does bring forth very interesting historical data about debt & credit based system in the past+ if you have the right historical and economics background, particularly if you are versed in hard money ways of thinking it may provide some interesting alternative points of view which should improve your perspective as to possibilities of not just where we have been but where we might be goingOverall I'd say it was a useful addition to my mental library, but one filled with many logical, moral and ideological traps, which is why I wouldn't advise it to many people as I find the author to be brilliantly smart and subtle, and some of his propositions are expressed in such ways that few people will be able to uncover them, let alone respond and fight them.

This is a very thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between morality, debt, property, and money. Essentially, the author explores, through history and anthropology, the tension between the common beliefs that one should always pay one's debts and that to make a profit on lending money is wrong. In particular, this issue bears on our political unwillingness to change a situation where the vast majority of Americans will spend their lives paying off debts to a tiny minority who enjoy ludicrous profits from the work of the majority.I can't judge the scholarship, but at times an editor's hand would have been useful to tighten things up (there is a glaring factual error regarding the founding of Apple Computers and I just came across two sequential paragraphs which repeated the same information in slightly different form). My only major caveat concerns the last chapter, which covers the past 40 years, in which the author reaches a slew of conclusions which are poorly supported by the text. I happen to agree with many of them, but I wish this part had been fleshed out by convincing arguments. Even if, as the Clash put it, the future is unwritten, many of us will need persuading about which possible verses should come next.

This book demonstrates what an outstanding scholar can achieve. It is an archetype for academics in every university, in every nation. Graeber does the heavy lifting to provide a history of depth. He takes on the 'morality' of debt and the lie of barter. It is powerfully researched and magnificently written. This is a grand, expansive and powerful book.

I haven't finished reading yet, and I will try to write a more substantive review of this book once I've had time to wrap my head around the contents, but until such time has come, I would simply propose to consider this book the new answer to Douglas Adams's Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything. If you've ever wondered whether there is a connection between -- to name just a few things -- simple social obligations, the invention of money, slavery, taxation, coinage, the disappearance of honor societies, the possibility of (extended) wars, the rise and fall of the (West-)Roman empire, the relative stability of the Chinese empires, the emergence of the great world religions, and the current financial crisis, you might be interested in reading Debt.(For more, see e.g., this (shorter) or this (longer) interview with the author.)