Debt: The First 5,000 Years: Difference between revisions

The behavioural economist Uri Gneezy once ran a famous experiment on [[incentives]] at a chain of daycare centres in Haifa. In order to incentivise parents to be on time to pick up their kids, they introduced a small but meaningful “late fee” in some of the centres, for parents who were more than ten minutes late. Rather than this cutting reducing late pick-ups, average delinquency in those centres with the fine doubled. The fixed penalty put a value on the inconvenience: it converted a ''moral'' obligation into a ''financial'' one, and in doing so something meaningful was lost.

Now we denizens of the financial services industry should understand that David Graeber did not come at this question from what we would call a conventional place. He was an anthropologist, not an economist or a historian, and of the anarchist left: he was instrumental in establishing the ''Occupy Wall Street'' movement. But it would be a grave mistake to write off his book as a Marxist screed. There is so much of value here: in challenging conventional, lazy and simplistic ways we have at looking at the world. It is well researched and thoughtfully argued. Graeber perfectly understood the conventional wisdom. It is just that he was ... what’s the word? — oh that’s it: a ''contrarian''.

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?’”  

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 absurd. But that — remember “there’s no such thing as society”? — has been orthodoxy in our lifetimes. For many, it still is.