Debt: The First 5000 Years

Ah, the airport bookstore. As monetary theorist and history buff, I could not resist this tantalizing title: Debt: The First 5000 Years. The book is authored by anthropologist David Graeber, a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. But what grabbed me was the summary on the back cover, which states (among other things) that every economics textbook is wrong in the way it explains the emergence of money, which goes something like this: "Once upon a time, there was barter. It was difficult. So people invented money." [p28].

I think we (economists) have to score one for the anthropologists here. I remember being taught that story and it took me some time to figure out it was wrong. What makes barter difficult? We are taught that the difficulty stems from a "lack of coincidence of wants." Consider, for example, an island populated by three people, Adam, Betty and Charlie. Adam wants breakfast, Betty wants lunch, Charlie wants dinner. Adam can deliver dinner, Betty can deliver breakfast, and Charlie can deliver lunch. There are no bilateral gains to trade (no voluntary trade would occur between any arbitrary pairing of individuals). And yet, there are clearly multilateral gains to trade.

The solution, we are told, is to introduce a monetary object and endow it to Adam, who may then purchase his breakfast from Betty with cash. Betty then uses her money to buy lunch from Charlie. Charlie then uses his money to buy dinner from Adam, and so on.

As anthropologists have pointed out for a long time, there is really little evidence of trade taking this form in primitive communities (see: Famous Myths of Fiat Money, by Dror Goldberg). Instead, these societies operated as "gift giving" economies, or informal credit systems. The principle should be familiar to all of us: it is reflected in the way we trade favors with friends, family, and other members of social networks to which we belong.

What then, explains monetary exchange (really, the coexistence of money and credit)? According to Kiyotaki and Moore, Evil is the Root of All Money. "Evil" here is interpreted as the existence of untrustworthy (noncooperative) people. Untrustworthy individuals readily accept gifts from the community, but cannot be trusted to fulfill their implicit obligation to reciprocate in-kind when an opportunity to do so arises. However, we know from game theory that a system of "cooperative" exchange might still be sustained if untrustworthy people can be compelled to behave properly, say, by the threat of punishment for noncompliant behavior (e.g., ostracism from the community).

The punishment/reward system that implicitly exists in gift-giving societies requires (to the extent that some community members are untrustworthy) a communal monitoring of individual behavior. In small communities, "everybody knows everything about everyone" and so this is arguably why "communistic" societies can be sustained in small groups. It also suggests why the arrangement breaks down for larger groups. The virtual communal data bank -- a distributed network of computer brains -- is simply not capable of recording all the information necessary to support an informal credit system in a large population. In a large population, people can remain anonymous. We necessarily become strangers to most people. And its tough to trust a stranger (a person you are not likely ever to meet again).

Nevertheless, multilateral gains to trade may still exist even among strangers. And if credit is difficult, or impossible, then the solution is money (see: The Technological Role of Fiat Money, by Narayana Kocherlakota). According to this theory, money serves as a substitute for the missing communal memory. Contributions to society are now measured not by virtual credits in the collective mind of the community; instead, they are recorded by money balances (this assumes, of course, that money, like virtual credit, is difficult to counterfeit/steal).

So, in a nutshell, economic theory suggests that we use informal credit arrangements to govern exchange among people we know (family, friends, colleagues, etc.) and we use money to facilitate exchange with "strangers." The emergence of money then seems tied to the emergence of strangers. An obvious explanation for this is population growth (and the associated rise of large urban areas).

One thing I learned from Graeber is that the relative importance of money and credit seems to have waxed and waned over time. Money (in particular, coinage) emerged around 800BC and remained significant until about 600AD, an era associated with many great empires, and the associated need to pay transient professional armies. With the collapse of the great empires, new states emerged, increasingly under the regulation of religious authorities. Coinage declined in importance, with credit systems taking over (600AD-1450AD). This latter observation is consistent with the general decline of urban areas in western Europe, but Graeber points to many other factors as well. Monetary exchange waxes once again with the age of the "great capitalist empires" (1450-1971AD).

Having said this, I confess to having rolled my eyes several times in the course of reading this book. Many of the critiques (especially about economists) are annoying, not because they hit the mark, but because they do not. The presentation is not as clean as it could be, the analysis is sloppy in several places, and some of the conclusions are, in my view, rather weak but, heck, it's still a very interesting read. If nothing else, it encouraged me to interpret various aspects of history in ways that I am not accustomed to.