And Forgive Us Our Debts: A lesson from our forefathers: we have the obligation to remit debt.
Our economic system is built on a range of implicit premises. One example is the idea that supply and demand will generally constitute a self-regulating system: more demand can drive supplies or prices up. More supply can lower prices or be used to stimulate demand. We don’t just buy the goods we require to survive, but also consume luxury items. All of this happens within the so-called “market,” a metaphor that has its origins in the physical marketplaces of earlier times.
A comparison to the physical marketplace also reminds us of the wider context of economic activity: adjacent to the market were City Hall, pubs, and churches - the bedrock of a town’s social and political life. Trading was usually done in the shade of their walls.
The anthropologist David Graber has recently published a book - titled “Debt: The First 5000 Years” - in which he explores the setting and conditions of human economic activity. According to classical economics, people flocked to the marketplace to do business with each other mainly by trading. Potatoes were swapped for shoes, et cetera. Soon, money was invented to facilitate trading and to account for the fact that supply and demand did not always neatly match up: the person who needed potatoes did not necessarily have shoes to offer to the potato seller - but someone else might. Instead of trading physical goods, people started exchanging goods for money.
Graeber challenges this explanation of early human economies with anthropological observations and explanations. At first, this might strike us as bizarre: why would an anthropologist have something to contribute to economic discourse? But it’s good to remember that the premises of economic theory are premises about humans. Economy cannot be divorced from anthropology.
Graeber’s ideas are worth considering: he challenges the economic premise about the relationship between trade and money. The metric of money - the estimation of value and the comparison of different goods across a monetary scale - is an age-old mechanism.