David Graeber’s ‘Debt’ Shows Us How to Think About the Post-Pandemic, Climate Crisis Economy

Ten years after its publication, the late anthropologist’s deconstruction of economics is more valuable than ever

Margaret Heffernan
Marker

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In the beginning was debt. In David Graeber’s sprawling epic on the history of money, he charts its shape-shifting from credit to coinage, to credit again, then bullion and finally to virtual currencies. Throughout, debt is the constant and Graeber makes a ferocious case that it is the lens through which economics might be better defined.

Debt has recently been re-issued, ten years after its original publication in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. That event prompted much soul searching about money and a raft of books purporting to explain how we got into such a mess. Most were fast, facile and now forgotten — but not this one. Graeber dug deep, taking it upon himself to do what economists mostly avoid: trace what money has meant to societies from prehistory to the present day and from the Nambikwara of Brazil to the IMF.

He kicks off with a convincing demolition job on economists’ origin myth that money grew out of the barter. But barter is so obviously unworkable — what would you do when you needed milk but your neighbour with the cow had…

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