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David Graeber has a nice way of explaining money arising from IOU's in Debt: the first 5,000 years. It makes a lot of sense and basically explains why the barte

David Graeber has a nice way of explaining money arising from IOU's in Debt: the first 5,000 years. It makes a lot of sense and basically explains why the barter myth is so impractical that it could never have been a reality in any sizable community.

searine 7y ago
I think I've been through that book twice now and it's still a fresh read. Highly recommended.
- QuesnayJr 7y ago
  The last chapter is quite poor. The rest of the book is interesting, but I would be interested to hear an evaluation by experts in the historical periods he covers.
- Nicholas_C 7y ago
  It has a compelling premise but the reviews for it are not too kind so it remains on my to read list.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    I picked it up because it is so frequently recommended on HN, and it is much less...academic(?) than I was hoping for. It gets recommended as a great explanation of debt, but it read a lot more like a very biased opinion about debt coupled with what felt like rather cherry picked history. I'm going to try reading it again, but the first time didn't go well...
    - searine 7y ago
      >I'm going to try reading it again, but the first time didn't go well.. All history is viewed through the eyes of the author's politics. I accept that, and set my personal politics aside and considered his history. One of the major positives of this book is its ambitious scope. The narrative spans millenia of history and I respect that ambition. I don't agree with everything Graeber says but he proposes new ideas (to me at least). Those new ideas are fun to consider and think about.
      - ksdale 7y ago
        I agree completely with your first sentence. I feel like when reading history, though, there is what happened, and there is the story about what happened. Sometimes it's basically impossible to have one without the other, but sometimes it's not, and I think what's compelling about Graeber is the story he tells about debt, but it didn't feel to me like he tried very hard to disentangle his facts from how he felt about them. But like I said, I do need to read the book again.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    A lot of the negative Amazon reviews, at least, comprise complaints that Graeber doesn't address or defend points that he actually does, usually a paragraph or two after they're raised. They don't claim the points are poorly defended or explained, but that they're not, when they 100% for sure are. The book's very well-constructed that way, actually—make assertions that the thinking reader will have objections to or questions about, proceed to directly call out and address same in following paragraphs—but apparently some people's eyes go so red on reading something they don't immediately agree with that they totally miss the explanation and defense that follows. In short, many of them accuse the book of specific sins it did not commit. Others don't provide enough specific criticism to be analyzable, usually accusing it of the same sorts of problems but without enough details to tell whether the reviewer's just a bad reader like a lot of the other people dumping on it. Possibly there are good negative reviews out there, but a good percentage of them seem to be folks who are, bluntly, not literate enough to read the book—though it's far from a challenging read.
maliker 7y ago
I liked his explanation of state-controlled currency evolving as a technology of war. I.e. the king needs to pay his soldiers something portable, dense with value, and hard to counterfeit, and precious metal coins fit those requirements. And then to guarantee that the coins are accepted for payment and hold their value, he imposes taxes that have to be paid by everyone using those coins. Pretty elegant and a system that, even as as a taxpayer, I hadn't thought carefully about.
- deleted 7y ago
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- hnick 7y ago
  Yes, the idea that taxes and debt existed before money to grant that money value was very eye opening, and an obvious model in hindsight. Another example of someone in power saying "Hey, see this problem we created? Well, we also have the solution..."
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Taxes certainly existed before state-issued currency, but the purpose was obviously not to grant value to the currency. (It can't have been -- this was before the currency existed.) Ancient taxes were assessed in kind, most commonly in grain or labor. The reason was that the government wanted the grain or labor. The main benefit of taxing in metal is that grain is perishable and voluminous, not that it creates demand for more metal. Consider a stylized section of Chinese history: State-issued currency: copper coins (low value, accepted most places); paper notes (high value in the capital, hard to spend elsewhere) Means of exchange: raw silver valued by weight Form of taxation: silver
    - hnick 7y ago
      I was replying to the specific use case of creating a tax to grant value to a freshly invented currency by giving it to occupying soldiers as payment while requiring merchants to pay taxes using it. It was intended to speed up adoption because the merchants needed to get the coin for taxes so had to accept it as payment.

searine 7y ago

I think I've been through that book twice now and it's still a fresh read. Highly recommended.

QuesnayJr 7y ago
The last chapter is quite poor. The rest of the book is interesting, but I would be interested to hear an evaluation by experts in the historical periods he covers.
Nicholas_C 7y ago
It has a compelling premise but the reviews for it are not too kind so it remains on my to read list.
- ksdale 7y ago
  I picked it up because it is so frequently recommended on HN, and it is much less...academic(?) than I was hoping for. It gets recommended as a great explanation of debt, but it read a lot more like a very biased opinion about debt coupled with what felt like rather cherry picked history. I'm going to try reading it again, but the first time didn't go well...
  - searine 7y ago
    >I'm going to try reading it again, but the first time didn't go well.. All history is viewed through the eyes of the author's politics. I accept that, and set my personal politics aside and considered his history. One of the major positives of this book is its ambitious scope. The narrative spans millenia of history and I respect that ambition. I don't agree with everything Graeber says but he proposes new ideas (to me at least). Those new ideas are fun to consider and think about.
    - ksdale 7y ago
      I agree completely with your first sentence. I feel like when reading history, though, there is what happened, and there is the story about what happened. Sometimes it's basically impossible to have one without the other, but sometimes it's not, and I think what's compelling about Graeber is the story he tells about debt, but it didn't feel to me like he tried very hard to disentangle his facts from how he felt about them. But like I said, I do need to read the book again.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  A lot of the negative Amazon reviews, at least, comprise complaints that Graeber doesn't address or defend points that he actually does, usually a paragraph or two after they're raised. They don't claim the points are poorly defended or explained, but that they're not, when they 100% for sure are. The book's very well-constructed that way, actually—make assertions that the thinking reader will have objections to or questions about, proceed to directly call out and address same in following paragraphs—but apparently some people's eyes go so red on reading something they don't immediately agree with that they totally miss the explanation and defense that follows. In short, many of them accuse the book of specific sins it did not commit. Others don't provide enough specific criticism to be analyzable, usually accusing it of the same sorts of problems but without enough details to tell whether the reviewer's just a bad reader like a lot of the other people dumping on it. Possibly there are good negative reviews out there, but a good percentage of them seem to be folks who are, bluntly, not literate enough to read the book—though it's far from a challenging read.

maliker 7y ago

I liked his explanation of state-controlled currency evolving as a technology of war. I.e. the king needs to pay his soldiers something portable, dense with value, and hard to counterfeit, and precious metal coins fit those requirements. And then to guarantee that the coins are accepted for payment and hold their value, he imposes taxes that have to be paid by everyone using those coins. Pretty elegant and a system that, even as as a taxpayer, I hadn't thought carefully about.

deleted 7y ago
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hnick 7y ago
Yes, the idea that taxes and debt existed before money to grant that money value was very eye opening, and an obvious model in hindsight. Another example of someone in power saying "Hey, see this problem we created? Well, we also have the solution..."
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Taxes certainly existed before state-issued currency, but the purpose was obviously not to grant value to the currency. (It can't have been -- this was before the currency existed.) Ancient taxes were assessed in kind, most commonly in grain or labor. The reason was that the government wanted the grain or labor. The main benefit of taxing in metal is that grain is perishable and voluminous, not that it creates demand for more metal. Consider a stylized section of Chinese history: State-issued currency: copper coins (low value, accepted most places); paper notes (high value in the capital, hard to spend elsewhere) Means of exchange: raw silver valued by weight Form of taxation: silver
  - hnick 7y ago
    I was replying to the specific use case of creating a tax to grant value to a freshly invented currency by giving it to occupying soldiers as payment while requiring merchants to pay taxes using it. It was intended to speed up adoption because the merchants needed to get the coin for taxes so had to accept it as payment.