The main point that Graeber is
trying to make, I think, is that the economics profession has built its entire
theory on a simplistic model of humanity that is completely wrong. Mainstream
economics posits that there was a time in our early history when people
bartered with each other: “You have some eggs and I have a pair of moccasins,
let’s trade.” Even in early hunter-gatherer societies, the economists say,
everyone was looking out for their own self-interest.
Graeber says this image of human
societies doesn’t match anything that anthropologists or historians have
discovered. It’s a complete fantasy, and has led economists to propose some
very strange theories.
Usually when I have read a
history on a particular topic like this, the book has turned out to be very
European-centric. This one is not that way at all. China and India are
addressed as much as the West, and, in fact, he talks about how backwards
Europe was in the Middle Ages compared to China and the Islamic world.
What becomes clear is that human
beings have had a sophisticated grasp of money for many thousands of years. For
example, people in ancient Sumer were creating debt instruments to finance
trading expeditions, long before currencies were invented.
What also becomes clear is that
there are alternatives to our modern form of market capitalism. In China during
the Middle Ages they had markets but no capitalism—the Confucian ethos underlying
Chinese society said that making money from money was wrong; the moral use of
money is to produce something useful.
In the same era, the Islamic
world created the “first free-market ideology.” But this system was based on the
assumption that markets were a form of mutual aid—markets existed to benefit
the entire society—rather than the capitalist assumption that markets are based
on the self-interest and profit of the individual. Islamist theorists
understood the need for competition, but stressed that the foundation for an
economy was cooperation. Islamic laws strictly forbid usury, even with
commercial loans, but this did not stop commerce from thriving, or stop the
development of complicated credit instruments.
I was disappointed when I got to
the modern era, however. In the first chapter Graeber had given a succinct
critique of the Third-World debt crisis of the 1980s and 90s (the basis for the
social justice movement), and I really expected that he would bring this same
kind of analysis to the contemporary, post-2008 financial-collapse world
economy (the book was published in 2011). But instead the book just peters out.
He merely says someone needs to
come up with a new idea for how economies should work. His only specific
suggestion is a biblical-style jubilee—a general global debt-cancellation.
If you are interested in
economics, and would like an alternative to the capitalist dogma that currently
serves as mainstream economic thought, this is definitely a book worth reading. [This is a short version of my review, to read the full one click more]
