Debt: The First 5,000 Years Audiobook (Free)

Before there was money, there is debt.

Every economics textbook says the same thing: Cash was invented to displace onerous and difficult barter systems-to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to advertise. The problem with this version of background? There’s not a shred of proof to support it.

Right here anthropologist David Graeber presents a sensational reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, because the beginnings of the initial agrarian empires, about Personal debt: The First 5,000 Years human beings have used complex credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is usually, a long time before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that people also 1st encounter a society split into debtors and lenders.

Graeber shows that arguments about debts and debt forgiveness have already been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well while sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the historic works of law and religion (terms like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debts, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these fights today without knowing it.

Personal debt: The First 5,000 Years is a remarkable chronicle of the small known history-as good as how they have defined history, and what it means for the credit crisis of present and the future of our economy.