The value of a human life?

For the last politics book club, we read David Graeber's influential book of economic history Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This book is 400 pages long plus notes, and I must admit that I did not finish it by the day of the book club, so I unfortunately had to skip it. I did, however, finish reading the book eventually, because it was really good.

 

By now, the very basics of Debt don't seem as groundbreaking as they did 10 years ago, because of how influential the book has been. The "Debt came before money" thesis was also presented in Varoufakis' Talking to my Daughter About the Economy, which we read last year. 

 

This book sometimes seems to go all over the place, doing Cool Anthropological Anecdotes of the sort that Body Ritual Among the Nacirema makes fun of, but they are indeed cool, and they certainly do support the basic point that the neat progression of the history of money presented in most mainstream economics textbooks is a just-so story that doesn't even seem to take place anywhere in particular. I enjoyed them, even if they did wander a bit away from the actual central analytical theses about how debt and money function *now* and what that means.

 

The stuff that is more immediately politically relevant is... well, it's very, very politically relevant. Even if you don't agree with all of Graeber's politics, this is the stuff that makes the book a must-read, just as a way of looking at debt and economics completely differently from how it's usually discussed in mainstream economics. He ties debt and debt moralizing into not just neocolonialism, which a lot of leftist writers have been pointing out for a while now (and they are ALL CORRECT), but also national debt and monetary policy and the military-industrial complex and a bunch of other stuff. I cannot really do the insights here justice at the moment, since I have been absolutely slammed both at work and in activism and have gone so pudding-brained that I just told someone I live in a different neighborhood than I actually do, so intelligent commentary on Graeber's cycles of history is a bit beyond me right now.