You Owe Me, Buddy
Fascinating interview with anthropologist David Graeber about the historical origins of money and debt, and the implications for our present predicament. As a bonus, he explains the literal origin of the term “clean slate.” Surprise: the standard fable that money arises only after barter becomes too complicated to manage has no historical basis. Next thing you know, it will turn out that private property does not originate historically from some individual dude mixing his labor with a piece of vacant land. Oops! Too late!
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Comment by Jack Crow —
August 26, 2011 @ 9:27 am
Perhaps the most fascinating non-immediate piece I’ve read in months. Thank you.
I’d read elsewhere that coinage was almost always martial, but the idea that debt arose before coinage is fascinating.
Implications?
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
August 26, 2011 @ 10:26 am
The author’s own biases are apparent– his fetishization of democracy in particular– but the story is plausible; we evolved in smallish groups, after all, and informal debt-bonds are a central feature of the way people still act in those groups.
On a somewhat-related note, has your opinion of Georgism gotten any more positive over the years? For all its difficulties, it still strikes me as the most workable way to retrofit landed property title to keep its many practical and moral advantages while correcting for the effects of arbitrary and/or violent exclusion from the commons.
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
August 26, 2011 @ 10:59 am
This ties in with some of the stuff Mish Shedlock has been saying for a while. His big point was that inflation or deflation have to be measured with respect to the money *and credit* supply. If credit really preceded money like David Graeber is saying, it makes that idea fairly obvious. But if you believe that credit was something invented long after money, it would be easier to think that money supply was all that mattered.
~Jon
Comment by Thoreau —
August 26, 2011 @ 11:03 am
Glad to see you blogging again, Jim!
Comment by Barry —
August 26, 2011 @ 11:45 am
Same here – I was about to hold a blogmorial service for Jim ‘Once a blogger, back in the Long Long Ago’ Henley.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 26, 2011 @ 12:09 pm
I want to be in shape for both Republican Thanksgiving next month and the blog’s 10th anniversary in October . . .
Comment by Thoreau —
August 26, 2011 @ 12:17 pm
I eagerly await your 9/11 blogging, Jim.
Also, dude, Republican is not the preferred nomenclature. Real American, please.
Comment by Wonks Anonymous —
August 26, 2011 @ 2:50 pm
This idea actually has been getting play in economics for some decades, under the phrase “money is memory“.
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
August 26, 2011 @ 5:55 pm
Jim,
Didn’t even realize it was you and not Thoreau blogging! Welcome back!
I’m glad that I am not usually drinking anything while reading your blog–when I finally got your Republican Thanksgiving joke, I would’ve been replacing a monitor…
~Jon
Comment by Glaivester —
August 26, 2011 @ 7:36 pm
Next thing you know, it will turn out that private property does not originate historically from some individual dude mixing his labor with a piece of vacant land.
If you expand the concept of property to include possessions, not just land, the concept of private property is at least as old as the Ten Commandments.
Comment by matthew h —
August 26, 2011 @ 10:08 pm
It has since been discovered that human beings did not generally pick apples and other fruits by allowing gravity to pull them off trees. Thus, all these theories of gravity affecting agriculture and transportation and life in general are simply the imposed ideological notions and thought experiments of early modern English theorists.
Comment by matthew h —
August 26, 2011 @ 10:25 pm
And let’s not forget that this year, Republican Thanksgiving comes less than a week after Democrat Halloween.
http://tiny.cc/zqbk6
Comment by matthew h —
August 26, 2011 @ 10:49 pm
The idea that money = debt sounds like common sense whatever the historical origins. Money = future delivery. Future delivery = credit. The idea that money = commodity also makes sense considering that money is an accounting tool, for debts of labor or goods, and therefore can be equated with either labor or goods. The idlea of gifts and obligations loosely exchanged as the underlying basis for economic transactions is spelled out in fiction in Erik Frank Russell’s pacifist libertarian (there’s that word) story And Then There Were None, of a planet where things are exchanged more or less in that informal sense of mutual obligation, which serves as the basis of peaceful and prosperous interaction, and built in that (admittedly fictional but anthropologically accurate on money and exchange apparently) case around an individualist sense of rights and property.
Comment by Killing in the Lame of —
August 29, 2011 @ 8:08 pm
NO FIAT MONEY! FERRARI MONEY!
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
August 29, 2011 @ 11:26 pm
Matthew,
When I saw your “Obama playing dressup for Labor Day” picture, it made me shudder. The only thing worse than Obama dressing up like the Village People is the thought of him, Biden, and a couple of Cabinet members singing YCMA. That really is pretty terrifying. Democrat Halloween it is!
~Jon