Upon the recommendation of several
people, I recently acquired David Graeber's new book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. With a title like that, I assumed that it'd be a
conventional and somewhat tedious work of economic history. However,
since debt is ultimately at the root of the whole credit union
project, I figured that getting a long historical view of the
phenomenon would be worth the slog. As such, I brewed up a cup of
tea, hefted the substantial tome, and began to read.
Within the first twenty pages, my
expectations of a dry economic history narrative were completely
blown out of the water. Graeber, it turns out, is an anthropologist,
not an economist, and that perspective is powerfully evident
throughout the text. Instead of accepting the commonly held
assumptions of economists and lay people on the origins of money and
debt, he uses his encyclopedic knowledge of human cultures to refute
many of those premises with hard, specific evidence, and offers an
interesting new lens through which to view the development and role
of debt in both the historical development and the lived reality of
human societies. Indeed, Graeber's insightful argument covers so much
terrain that it would be virtually impossible to do it full justice
in a short book review. As such, I'll limit my observations to a few
key points and their implications for credit unionism.
