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

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 no need of your roses? — that, to this day, nobody has found anywhere it actually existed. “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there has never been such a thing.” Yet the myth is continuously perpetuated in economics textbooks, from Adam Smith to Joseph Stiglitz. Why? Because it positions economics as a discipline whose foremost concern is competitive advantage, facilitated through the division of labour. All deeper human motivation — passion, adventure, curiosity, sex or death — is neatly erased.

Money, Graeber concludes, has “no essence”; it is “something that can be turned into anything.”

In fact, Graeber and Smith aim at the same thing: an economics narrative originating in innate human needs and impulses. By arguing that money derived from innate…