Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded

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.

As a result, he argues, divine providence has arranged us to have different abilities, desires, and inclinations. The market is simply one manifestation of this more general principle of mutual aid, of the matching of abilities (supply) and needs (demand)—or, to translate it into my own earlier terms, it is not only founded on, but is itself an ext

Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or, nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones. It can also only operate by continually converting love into debt. I know my use of the word “love” here is even more provocative, in its own way, than “communism.” Still, it’s impo

If medieval moralists did not raise such objections, it was not just because they were comfortable with metaphysical entities. They had a much more fundamental problem with the market: greed. Market motives were held to be inherently corrupt. The moment that greed was validated and unlimited profit was considered a perfectly viable end in itself, t

There is, and has always been, a curious affinity between wage labor and slavery. This is not just because it was slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations who supplied the quick-energy products that powered much of early wage laborers’ work; not just because most of the scientific management techniques applied in factories in the industrial revolution

It’s easy to see that “money” in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments.

As a result, we end up with a sanitized view of the way actual business is conducted.

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 co

Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to accumulate riches. The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add another element: war and plunder. After all, just about anyone w