Debt: The first five thousand years
blog.longnow.org
Debt: The first five thousand years
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#2What an intriguing idea is fostered by the longnow.org. I've heard of slow food but this moves it all on to a much longer time frame. Thanks for shining a light on these endeavours.
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#3The Long Now's museum/offices at Fort Mason in San Francisco are well worth the trip, if you ever get the chance. They have all sorts of models of the mechanisms for their 10,000 year clock, as well as copies of the Rosetta disc documenting the world's languages. After reading Anathem, getting to see the binary adder at quarter scale was... almost a religious experience. :)
Anyway, they raise an interesting question here--one that I never considered at such scope. Not sure if I agree with their conjecture about violence creating markets, yet.
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#4This was quite interesting.
One error (omission actually) I noticed. He talks about the checks and balances on debt caused by canceling debts every jubilee (7 years). But does not mention that in practice what actually happened is that people would refuse to lend money the closer it got to the jubilee.
And this refusal actually caused social ills, because people needed loans. So in the talmud they instituted something called a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruzbul which allowed people to collect debts after the jubilee by turning the debt over to the court.
It's still quite interesting though, just thought I'd share some more info on the subject.
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#5This article had great perspective. We tend to believe our current fiat money is something "new" and "modern" when in reality metal/virtual currency seems to move in cycles (as the author points out). We also tend to believe this most recent economic crisis was a modern contrivance as well, when in reality it bears striking similarity to many crisis from previous centuries. Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart wrote about the similarity between the current economic collapse and previous valuation bubbles and currency crisis in their book "This Time It's Different" which might be good further reading for anybody who was intrigued by this article.
http://www.amazon.com/This-Time-Different-Centuries-Financia...
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#6These two lines seem somewhat obvious, but are actually quite insightful to me now that I think about:
> This is not because [kings] are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it’s much easier to encourage markets and then buy them.
> This actually helps explain the rather puzzling behaviour on the part of royal courts: after all, since kings usually controlled the gold and silver mines, what exactly was the point of stamping bits of the stuff with your face on it, dumping it on the civilian population, and then demanding they give it back to you again as taxes? It only makes sense if levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around.
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#7These two lines seem somewhat obvious, but are actually quite insightful to me now that I think about: > This is not because [kings] are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it’s much easier to encourage m…
The second point seems to be akin to the velocity of money, or Money supply * Velocity. In there way the kings may have been trying to encourage people to circulate the money to create economic activity, to what end I'm not sure. It's possible elites understood even then that prosperity was key to placating the population and preventing social upheaval.
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#8Very interesting. Under the section on the Middle Ages, there's a brief reference to the Chinese adopting paper money and such; does anyone happen to have a good resource for learning more about this period? It's always interesting to go back and look at such a drastic shift, as I'm assuming that likely was.
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#9"Biblical prophets instituted a similar custom, the Jubilee, whereby after seven years all debts were similarly cancelled.... As economist Michael Hudson has pointed out, it seems one of the misfortunes of world history that the institution of lending money at interest disseminated out of Mesopotamia without, for the most part, being accompanied by its original checks and balances."
Seven years of slavery for you, your spouse, and your children seems like a fairly high ceiling for punishments. Are the author and Michael Hudson implying that the maximum punishment today -- bankruptcy -- is even more severe?
Re: Debt: The first five thousand years
#10These two lines seem somewhat obvious, but are actually quite insightful to me now that I think about: > This is not because [kings] are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it’s much easier to encourage m…
> This actually helps explain the rather puzzling behaviour on the part of royal courts: after all, since kings usually controlled the gold and silver mines, what exactly was the point of stamping bits of the stuff with your face on it, dumping it on the civilian population, and then demanding they give it back to you again as taxes? It only makes sense if levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around.
And that's still a very good story for the "backing" of our modern currencies. Apart from the effects of having stable equilibrium, i.e. everyone excepts currency because everyone else does--which is probably the much bigger effect in anything but the very long term.