A bit more dense of a read than I thought it was gonna be, and would liked some proposed practical alternatives to capitalisim. I do feel this book does a good job at looking at debt as a civilization parallel in the management of labor, energy and time. You can't understand debt without understanding what society is trying to accomplish. The book explores history, economics, ethics, psychology and philosophy to define how debt has changed over time.
Motivations to Read
When I graduated from high school the financial collapse had begun, when I was leaving college the euro-zone debt crisis had be spiraling. Now year's later we are exiting a zero-interest rate period and the country and personal debt crisis is exploding. I wanted to learn more about the history of debt and it's place and purpose in society.
3 Reasons to Read
- Look at the world differently through the lens of debt.
- How time and money are related.
- The evolution of banking.
Notable Quotes
“In this sense, the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.”
“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”
“As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.”
“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.”
“The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and borrower. One can only imagine the tensions and temptations that must have existed in a community—and communities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love, will always also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion—when it became clear that with sufficiently clever scheming, manipulation, and perhaps a bit of strategic bribery, they could arrange to have almost anyone they hated imprisoned or even hanged.”
“For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.”
Notes for this book are still being transcribed.
