Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

david graeber's book is great, although i too take a lot of the anti-money tone with a grain of salt. If you're in a marginalized subcommunity, a concrete ledger of debts is far better than an informal ledger of debts, as a position to stand on to defend your ground.

You may like "the great wave: price revolutions..." by david hackett fisher for the role of economic conditions on local revolts and global revolution.




To me, the problem with Debt is that while it indicts compound interest as harshly as it deserves, for all its hidden downstream consequences, it does not propose a real alternative to it. He proposes just not paying debts, but this means nobody accumulates capital, even literal seeds.

It is as though he proposed the alternative to sugar be starvation. While those are both equally invalid choices, and are arguably the economic models of capitalism and communism respectively, there is no balance to be struck between the two, and they both lead to death, be it from malnutrition or diabetes. It is only barely better to strike a balance[0].

What we need, really, is bread and fasting, and what this would entail is missing from that book.

[0] Before insulin injections, diabetics, universally having developed the deficiency late in life, were indicated to eat very little, and lived ~5 years at most after diabetes developed, IIRC.


to be fair (and possibly to graber's discredit for not identifying this), we kind of do have a rolling debt jubilee in that events fall off your credit rating every seven years and you can declare bankruptcy.

Also, a lot of the systemic problem with our debt system (like incrementally stealing value from the labor class) derive from its centralized nature; it's been about 150 or so years since decentralized debt economies (free banking in the US and Sweden) have been around and one wonders if with modern technology - mostly in the field of communication and ease of financial transactions - would enable a more robust, resilient, and just economic system.


How does the debt system steal from the labor class?


that reminds me of the recent article on indonesia using postcards in their rice-distribution program

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/07/10/6273559...




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: