I disagree with a lot of it but it provides interesting points and historical arguments for things. That's why I was curious to hear peoples' thoughts. Often when I write about money I get an email like, "but have you read Graeber?" and I'm like, "oh here we go again" because it takes time to addr...

I took out of it the idea the idea credit style human relationship money is foundational to him- and that totally anonymous money is correlated to violence and large scale slavery type societies where the individual is ripped from their social relations. I felt it was thin on the details on the soc...

It was the first big book read on what is money when it came out. It started the rabbit hole. Parts were slow and boring but it laid the foundation of questioning everything you thought you knew about money.

It's on my reading list

Debt predates money and has been a fundamental feature of human societies for thousands of years. I appreciate his critiques of modern economic systems and the ways in which they contribute to inequality and social unrest.

Interesting book in that it helped me understand the reasoning behind the predominant modern narrative concerning money and the financial system. But I don’t know enough about the subject to have any thoughts on the actual merits of the arguments in the book.

I think his idea that debts/grievances/guilts are innate to human societies, that they pre-date money and markets, and in some important ways bind us all together, is a fascinating concept. That was the biggest takeaway for me. The perspective makes sense considering he's an anthropologist but I tho...

That’s a seriously long amortization schedule.

Can't imagine writing a history of money and deliberately not mention bitcoin. I bet it has something to do with his background. However, busting the myth of barter at scale was valuable to me.

Haven’t read it…

I read it. What I liked: dismantling the Econ 101 myth of "in the beginning, there was barter everywhere". I think it fell short on many fronts. It could have gone deeper on the idea of the necessity of "measuring" as a precondition for trade, especially between people who don't have a lasting rela...

Read it some years ago, found it interesting as a counter argument to the usual first they bartered with shells myth/story. Seems logical that in tribal societies there would be debts first between members (cows, bride price, whatever) that would be on a handshake basis or adjudicated with the chief...

Based on memory these are my main takeaways: - Debunking with empiricall evidence the presumption held by most economists, that money evolved out of barter. Barter is for strangers and enemies. In communities/tribes credit/ledger-based systems was the norm. - The strong role debt played in the brut...

For those who find the book too long. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b054zdp6

Sharing my, and others', response to Lyn's question #[0]

Readable, but selective account of monetary history with communitarian bias. This "historical" approach to money is always distorted by the fact that "quantitatively" for most of human history and cultures, monetary phenomena were linked to cult-based and tribal social relations, whereas "qualitativ...

Haven’t read it, working through Dalio’s ‘Principles for a New World Order’. There is a lot of discussion about the debt cycle in there. He also has a book on the debt cycle in detail, but obviously you would have read those. Curious how you see them compare to Graeber’s work, sounds like ...

Great read. But when I started researching it the core message appeared not to be true. Typically Graeber

Local money, of the people, for the people and by the people, ideally, is the future of money. It can be issued by the local government or by an Association or DAO. The local money may have features like UBI or oxidation. It may be exchanged with other local money, Bitcoin or Fiat with different...

I’ve read summaries and I find the thesis ass-backward. I’d rather look at evidence of proto-economies in our primate cousins, like the monkeys in Bali that hold tourists’ stuff ransom for food: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/14/balis-thieving-monkeys-seek-bigger-ransoms-for-hi...

As with much of Prof. graeber's work it took very dry, polarized and over trodden subjects, back to their human fundamentals. His thoughts are not so much something to build a society on as to measure a society against. Especially in the light of Austrian fundamentals he reminds us that if the like...