Debt: The First 500 Posts (a thread for discussing David Graeber)

is the joke-teller a person and is their friend a bank and is the thief the government and is it that when the government finds that the person it aims to tax has only $25 it is happy to give a huge sum to the bank in order that it can be loaned to the person thereby increasing the government's taxation income ? idgi either

The point he's making in the book is that who owes what to whom - whether something is a loan or a liability - is (or can be) dependent not on simple economics but on the balance of power (and the threat of violence). But - I just don't get it as a joke! I love Steven Wright but if I heard that in a set I'd just go... what?

Some years ago I was in a band and we made a record, which entailed expenses for studio time and mastering and CD pressing and sleeve printing.

At the time I was a wealthy person and I paid for a bunch of these things up front, but I still wanted to be reimbursed. There were a bunch of different expenses and incomes involved, because we also had paid gigs.

The keyboard player was a mathematician, and did some wizard shit where he like, turned to the guitarist and said, "okay, you give her $16 (pointing to the bassist). I will give you $4. Now everyone gives Puffin $22."

To this day I don't quite understand what happened, and it's possible that someone got screwed, but in the moment I just went with it because he sounded really confident.

The joke up to the part where he repays George as they’re being robbed is pretty standard Borscht-belt comedy. The coda about the $1000 is Wright pushing the joke into slightly surreal (and less funny) territory IMO.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a gem

at the beginning of this book, he mentions the barter thing and instead posits that what came first was a "gift economy" -- which sadly reminds me first and foremost of Burning Man -- but fortunately the book is mostly about anarchists and organizing as opposed to an economic argument I am somewhat skeptical about.

Gift and status and subsequent understandings were something conquistadors got heavily confused by in several stories I've heard.

Partially through having an overconfident idea of their own status

I need to read Matthew Restall's work on the interaction between Spain and Mesoamerican infrastructure because he talked about that in interviews i heard a couple of months ago.
Montezuma etc giving great wealth as gift to show how very wealthy they were and conquistadors seeing it as an act of fealty not something with an expectation of being matched and possibly increased.

& part of the gift giving economy was to escalate the value of the gift given leaving the other party needing to match it or be in debt I think. Think I saw Gaeber hismelf talking about that in a talk from around teh time Debt came out.

yeah ... that's part of the awkwardness I felt around that term. Like, there are obligations and cultural assumptions around the value of the gift in these cultures, at least that's how I read it. And then you have the term appropriated by Burning Man (and contemporary things like it) where the "gift economy" is just supposed to be about "giving" and not as part of a transaction. So I feel like it is something often misunderstood.