Debt: The First 5,000 Years | David Graeber | Talks at Google

The theory of a barter economy as the origin of money has been debunked by David Graeber: [this video] (I find his talk fascinating). He gets into what money is around minute 19. Whether you buy his arguments or not, modern money works like this: The state requires payment of currency (fees, fines, taxes, etc), the state spends currency (of course it must spend it before it can ever collect it). The money derives its value via the demand for it from the soverign. I like this analogy that Warren Mosler uses in his "Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy": [link] The story begins with parents creating coupons they then use to pay their children for doing various household chores. Additionally, to “drive the model,” the parents require the children to pay them a tax of 10 coupons a week to avoid punishment. This closely replicates taxation in the real economy, where we have to pay our taxes or face penalties. The coupons are now the new household currency. Think of the parents as “spending” these coupons to purchase “services” (chores) from their children. With this new household currency, the parents, like the federal government, are now the issuer of their own currency. And now you can see how a household with its own currency is indeed very much like a government with its own currency. Let’s begin by asking some questions about how this new household currency works. Do the parents have to somehow get coupons from their children before they can pay their coupons to their c

Yup! Fortunately you don't even have to read it from cover to cover to get the meat of it. Here [this video] is a talk 80 mins long Graeber gave at Google. Then once you've done that listen [link] to Robert Paul Wolff talk about the problem Ricardo, Smith, and Marx tackled. This one is a bit longer and it is tougher going but the pay-off is immense. –– What this New York Times article and the recent Bloomberg [link] (“Why Wages Aren't Growing”) article that hit the front page here have in common is that they both refuse to recognise that Marx's critique of capital was correct in his day and it _remains_ correct. The next part is important. We _must_ separate the critique from his proposed solution. To be very clear I can agree with Marx's critique but I do not have to agree that central collectivisation is the solution. The very simple observation is this. For-profit capitalism over time will cause (a) workers to be exploited to the point where they can't actually take part in the society they're a part of (which hurts the capitalist too!) and (b) wealth gets concentrated inefficiently. What the New York Times and Bloomberg (and many others) outright refuse to admit is that _Marx was right_. Universal Basic Income. What is that but an alternate solution to collectivisation? Same applies to profit-sharing. It's the reason why charities are non-profits because we all recognise the alternative would be unseemly. The Tobin tax (taxing certain international financial transactions) is a

I guess the implicit question is why such obsession on fighting and weapons on the coins. Anthropologist David Graeber has a fascinating perspective ( [this video] ). He posits that our present assumptions about money (first there's barter, then coins and fiat money, then credit) is actually backwards. And that primitive societies rather had interlocking systems of informal credit between everyone instead, since everyone knew everyone and you only really needed to settle the difference very infrequently. And coins only really came into play as a supply logistics mechanism for traveling armies. Since a band of people traveling through town can't participate in the informal credit system. And so the taxation system created in such a way that the food producers needed to acquire an "external" currency the army had. And that this was shown archeologically where concentration of coins were denser around militarized border regions of various societies around the world.