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A review by clay1st
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
3.0
This book starts off by carefully establishing a premise that credit is the oldest and morst natural monetary system, contrary to traditional assertions of the primacy of barter and commodity money.
Then transition from 'human' to market economies is discussed, interestingly but a little less carefully, asserting the driving force behind it being state funded military activity.
After that, the book seems to lose purpose, it gets bogged down with long sections on largely irrelevant topics like the origins of tales of noble adventurer knights. This borderline rambling carried on for a very long time.
The emergence of corporate financing and maritime expansion in Europe is barely mentioned before suddenly we're doomsdaying 21st century modern monetary theory without much analysis.
This would have been a much better book if it had been titled 'the origins of debt' and finished after the first third.
Then transition from 'human' to market economies is discussed, interestingly but a little less carefully, asserting the driving force behind it being state funded military activity.
After that, the book seems to lose purpose, it gets bogged down with long sections on largely irrelevant topics like the origins of tales of noble adventurer knights. This borderline rambling carried on for a very long time.
The emergence of corporate financing and maritime expansion in Europe is barely mentioned before suddenly we're doomsdaying 21st century modern monetary theory without much analysis.
This would have been a much better book if it had been titled 'the origins of debt' and finished after the first third.