I was, to be frank, prepared to be bored by this - “debt” is a dry, intuitive concept which seemed little deserving of 500 pages of exegesis. The book seemed vaguely Important and not a bit hip, but not…interesting. Then he got me, in the first chapter arguing with some woman in a garden party. She said “surely, one has to pay one’s debts” in response to learning about the IMF enforcing loan repayment from impoverished third world countries; he has half a dozen arguments as to why morally, economically, historically that just doesn’t make sense. As a one who generally has probably trended towards the mindset of having to pay one’s debts, it was a bit, revelatory? Not judt that he presented persuasive arguments, I was not far from being persuaded, but it was an incredibly clear, efficient encapsulation of a point of view, incredibly easy to digest.

The rest of the book I also found incredibly clear, efficient, easy to digest, and full of amazing and illustrative examples. It was on the other hand not quite as persuasive - I’m just not sure what constitutes “proof” here. In this book, as with Dawn of Everything, Graeber overwhelms with a plethora of sources, from everyone everywhere and cultures I did not know the name of, and with each story there is another datapoint in which the prevailing narative could be wrong. And I prefer the narative he tells, because it feels more human to me. But in the end he argues that economists are too obsessed with their mathematical models to make sense of the rhythms of history (sounds reasonable to me) and that historians on the other hand are too “empirical to extrapolate at all” and that only anthropologists therefore can make sweeping judgements about history, because they know things that historians don’t? Which I don’t buy. In the end the book is almost entirely just a series of stories which can be told in a way to support his views.

But he goes back across time and space and talks about debt throughout history, examining economic life through the lens of debt. He frequently manages to invert how I had been thinking about things, coming at it from an entirely different and human angle. Through anecdotes and stories of life and its ways all over the world and over (it’s in the name) the last 5,000 years, he synthesizes an overarching vision of How It All Comes Together.

And like, I’ve read a bit of Marx, I’ve read a bit of Keynes, I did pretty well on my AP Macro Economics course 12 years ago; this feels like the best explanation I’ve gotten about how the modern economy works.

Which, as you may note, is not necessarily the highest praise. I have not made all that much of an effort there. The economy just like happens and probably poorly.

In the end, I think probably no one can make sweeping judgements about history, it is even messier than 500 pages I would guess. But also I think everyone should make sweeping judgements of history. It is how we situate ourselves and project/become our future. And Graeber’s judgements are empathetic, enlightening, and (importantly) entertaining.