> It's an anthropology of debt.
It makes very, very clear arguments about debt and how that should be handled. Claiming its only a history is just not accurate. He is clearly promoting his politics with this book.
> 'll give an examples of something I learned from it that I personally found incredibly interesting:
And I'm telling you that this is a straw-men about economics that was never true.
Economics did actually think about these things but he had no interest researching that. He is totally misinterpreting the history of economics on this question.
The whole point about barter being impractical on small scales is exactly WHY we do not find societies in the small using barter. Its not that people starter bartering and evolved beyond it, its that the impossibility of barter forces your society to come up with something else. Economist were aware of this. Garber loves to claim how much smarter anthropologists are and how they understood social credit, gift giving and extraction, but of course non of this was new to economics.
Graeber literally didn't even know the history of economies about this and he didn't research it.
Read this from a economics text from 'Geld' 1892 and this is not some fringe economist, but one of the most famous of his time:
> Voluntary as well as compulsory unilateral transfers of assets (that is, transfers arising neither from a ‘reciprocal contract’ in general nor from an exchange transaction in particular, although occasionally based on tacitly recognized reciprocity), are among the oldest forms of human relationships as far as we can go back in the history of man’s economizing. Long before the exchange of goods appears in history, or becomes of more than negligible importance…we already find a variety of unilateral transfers: voluntary gifts and gifts made more or less under compulsion, compulsory contributions, damages or fines, compensation for killing someone, unilateral transfers within families, etc.
But apparently economists were totally unaware of any of this according to Graeber. Graeber himself claims that anthropologist (who are much smarter and not pawns of capitlaism). Graeber reference about anthropology date to 4 decades beyond this essay.
We can go on to the question of currency emerging.
We know that coins were first used in modern Turkey to pay mercenaries, and there was no government there that forced that currency to be used to pay taxes. These mercenaries were from outside of that territory and it was a store of value that can then be traded.
The problem with Graeber is that he collects all the example that prove his point, and ignores anything that might not agree with it. He goes at great lengths to find examples where to different cultures traded doesn't look like traditional long distance trade, and ignores many other more common examples. But he presents it as 'I have looked at everything'. Currency emerging from long distance trade between strangers is simply historical, if he likes it or not.
The dumb things he says in general are just mind blowing. He believes economies believe this:
> money is simply a mathematical system whereby one can compare proportional values, to say 1 of these is worth 17 of those.
Literally not even economics 101 level of understanding. How he seems to believe the Marginal Revolution of 1870s has never happened.
How about his claims about long distance trade:
> You don't cross mountains, deserts, and oceans, risking death in a dozen different ways, so as to show up with a collection of goods you think someone might want, in order to see if they happen to have something you might want.
What? Has he not heard of caravans, the silk road and the millenniums old history of long distance trade both on sea and on land. How did tin get from mountains of northern Iran to Greece during the bronze age exactly? Quite clearly there were many different political entities that you had to cross. We have documents from traders at the time who were constantly risking changing needs and demands in different places, supply lines that constantly disrupted by wars in different regions, huge risk were being taken all the time.
How about Portuguese sailors who tried to sale to India? They had never traded directly with India before.
He just has an incredibly narrow view on both economics and the real world. In his world the only thing that matters is small tribes and centralized states. Graeber has promoted ignore anything that doesn't fit in my world view to an artform.
We could go on about how Graeber reading of Adam Smith is totally wrong and many other things but dealing with Graeber to much ruins my day, I don't need to dredge up all this stuff again.