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A review by ethanhedman
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
“Capitalism’s inveterate propensity to imagine its own destruction has morphed, in the last half-century, into scenarios that threaten to bring the rest of the world down with it”.
Graeber wrote this book in 2008/09 during the global financial crisis, a time when more people than ever questioned dollar hegemony, money as a concept, and debt as something more than a nebulous concept (student loan mvmt). By dissecting and rebuking the crux of Adam Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” and the ‘common sense’ idea that all primitive communities through the Axial age resorted to bartering before the invention of money because they had no other options, Graeber is imploring us to ask large questions about the moral, social, and economic relationships that are associated with usury, debt, and money lending from the smallest scale to the largest. RIP.
Graeber wrote this book in 2008/09 during the global financial crisis, a time when more people than ever questioned dollar hegemony, money as a concept, and debt as something more than a nebulous concept (student loan mvmt). By dissecting and rebuking the crux of Adam Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” and the ‘common sense’ idea that all primitive communities through the Axial age resorted to bartering before the invention of money because they had no other options, Graeber is imploring us to ask large questions about the moral, social, and economic relationships that are associated with usury, debt, and money lending from the smallest scale to the largest. RIP.