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Debt: The First 5,000 Years: Difference between revisions
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The best thing to do is just pick out some challenging points. | The best thing to do is just pick out some challenging points. | ||
===Everyday communism=== | ===Everyday communism=== | ||
Playfully, Graeber introduces the notion of “everyday communism” — | Playfully, Graeber introduces the notion of “everyday communism” — he could, less provocatively, have called it “communalism”, but where’s the fun in that — as an alternative to an economic life of sterile, impersonal, perfectly quantified transactions. By this he did not mean Bolshevism, but something more prosaic: our general disposition help each other out without question where the relative personal cost is not great. This stance: to be a [[good egg]] — to co-operate and not defect — is deeper and more critical to interpersonal relationships than are the outcomes of economic transactions which, rather, ''depend'' on that basic layer of probity. “If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, ‘Hand me the wrench,’ his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?’” | ||
Yet monetarist orthodoxy cannot see it, and therefore treats it as imaginary. | |||
Graeber would say, with justification, that his was not the radical view here. The idea that we can atomise these vital, ineffable social interrelationships — {{author|James C. Scott}} might have called them “[[Legible|illegible]]” — to a binary pattern of quantifiable economic transactions is pretty absurd. But that — “there’s no such thing as society” — has been orthodoxy in our lifetimes. | Graeber would say, with justification, that his was not the radical view here. The idea that we can atomise these vital, ineffable social interrelationships — {{author|James C. Scott}} might have called them “[[Legible|illegible]]” — to a binary pattern of quantifiable economic transactions is pretty absurd. But that — “there’s no such thing as society” — has been orthodoxy in our lifetimes. | ||
The distinction between a [[debt]] — quantifiable obligation to pay a sum of money on a certain date; which in its [[fungibility]] and transferability is an impersonal thing — and a personal obligation in the wider sense (rather similar to the one yours truly draws between a [[liability]] and an [[obligation]]): | The distinction between a [[debt]] — quantifiable obligation to pay a sum of money on a certain date; which in its [[fungibility]] and transferability is an impersonal thing — and a personal obligation in the wider sense (rather similar to the one yours truly draws between a [[liability]] and an [[obligation]]) us profound, and we lose something important when we ignore it. | ||
This, it seems to me, goes deep. It resonates strongly with observations by a diverse range of impressive writers – James Scott, Jane Jacobs, Rory Sutherland, W. Edwards Deming Nassim Taleb — that far from being indicators of of weakness qvulnerability, looseness, slack and redundancy are in fact vital to the durability and flexibility of any enterprise. | |||
Graeber’s point: there should always be something left on the table. It builds trust, it strengthens ties, it reinforces the sense of relationship and personal obligation. The reductionist yen to convert all of this to to a ledger of account — to comprehensively ''monetise'' it — is folly. You literally cannot put a value on “doing the right thing”. The economic equivalent — “discharging one’s obligations” is to do the bare minimum. It is is a ”“cheapest to deliver” option. when the bare minimum fully discharges your contract jewel obligation, your relationship is is moot. As we have observed many times in these pages, the ''potential'' forward value of a business relationship necessarily exceeds the present value of any transaction. | |||
Of course, the smartest firms perfectly realise this; only, over their accountants’ objections, whose ledger does not. | |||
But the point goes even deeper than that, for we cannot, even if we want to, fully articulate the financial value, or risk, of our commercial situation, imperfect as our information is, and shifting as the dynamics of the landscape necessarily are. | |||
===Exchange and cancellation of debts=== | ===Exchange and cancellation of debts=== | ||
An ongoing relationship implies a complicated web of reciprocal obligations (in the wider sense): these are not an imposition of a cost to the relationship, but its fuel: in a sense a relationship is a preparedness to grant, and accept, indulgences over time. That one is “obliged” is a ''good'' thing: literally, to be in a relationship is to be ''bound'' to one another. Thus, to exactly reconcile one’s outstanding obligation to another exactly — to leave nothing on the table — is to indicate that one wants the relationship to end: one wants the freedom to leave. | An ongoing relationship implies a complicated web of reciprocal obligations (in the wider sense): these are not an imposition of a cost to the relationship, but its fuel: in a sense a relationship is a preparedness to grant, and accept, indulgences over time. That one is “obliged” is a ''good'' thing: literally, to be in a relationship is to be ''bound'' to one another. Thus, to exactly reconcile one’s outstanding obligation to another exactly — to leave nothing on the table — is to indicate that one wants the relationship to end: one wants the freedom to leave. | ||