David Graeber: "DEBT: The First 5,000 Years" | Talks at Google

DEBT: The First 5,000 Years While the \"national debt\" has been the concern du jour of many economists, commentators and politicians, little attention is ever paid to the historical significance of debt. For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors\' children into slavery. By the same token, for the past five thousand years, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers; whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. Enter anthropologist David Graeber\'s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (July, ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2), which uses these struggles to show that the history of de