Where Did Money REALLY Come From?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ย. 2024
- Professor David Graeber, anthropologist and author of "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," discussing the history of money and credit. The economics profession tends to teach that money arose from barter. However, anthropologists have been searching for 200 years and found absolutely no evidence for this.
Instead, it seems that early human societies were had reciprocal gift exchange, whereby one person would gift something to their neighbor, and that person would be tacitly indebted for something of similar quality.
Barter has only been observed between groups that didn't frequently come into contact, and sometimes between outright enemies, or among people that are already used to money but for some reason have no access to it.
Watch the whole talk here: • Debt: The First 5,000 ...
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My income is like that cup of coffee, I get to hold it, but never take a sip...
My landlord takes a massive sip. After utilities it's almost an empty cup
Drove me nuts.
We will be missing David, one of the brightest public minds and just such a positive and very unique person.
What happened to him?
@@juliuspaolocabarles9941 He passed away very recently sadly..
So funny too. Will be missed.
RIP, David Graeber.
Rest In Power
Drinking game: Every time he picks up his coffee then puts it down without drinking you have to take a shot.
why is he doing this?
@@Mpivovitz it's a tick I believe.
The man's thirsty, but the talk must go on
By the sound it makes on 15:50, it looks empty :/
Lactose intolerant and they gave him one with Milk ??
@12:12 the first recorded word for freedom was in reference to debt. Freedom from debt peonage.
Fascinating stuff.
"Return to mother" could mean to be free from military service and therefore free to go back home, or freedom from slavery, or also, as implied here by Gaber, freedom from debt. So maybe not "was in reference to freedom from debt" but more precisely "could have been, among other things, also related to freedom from debt"?
@Nihil_G that doesn't support the utopian narrative
This guy wrote an amazing book. 5000 Years of Debt. so grateful to read it .. Kudos D.G. and RIP!
Is it an accessible reading? Is a person with no formal education able to understand its content?
@@ericklopes4046 I'm a little bit late, but hopefully not _too_ late.
Yes, the book is incredibly accessible, in fact, it spends like 1 o 2 chapters just making sure the reading understand what he's trying to argue against, and why.
It's a brilliant read I recommend anyone that's remotely interested precisely because I found it so accessible.
So please, do read it.
@ericklopes4046 Not sure if you will see this but yes it is accessible but it is pretty long and rather dense. Dense in that I took it pretty slowly or you’ll miss a lot. No crazy language or anything like that. David was a very good writer.
Money was not invented by any single person. There is no specific inventor of money who can make such a claim. Money emerged organically through experimentation, effort, and conflicts, primarily to fulfill human needs. Over more than 5000 years of history, money has been created by humans, for humans, evolving through various stages including testing, wars, and societal developments.
“Gold, for some reason “ Love it!
Tells you more about the real world than all 'economists' put together.
he is just making up a story based on a clay tablet in mesopatamia from 5000 years ago. he has no evidence for any of this. this is so stupid.
Not all - much of David's work on investigating the history of debt came from the work of economist Michael Hudson, who was a close friend of David's and has his own book series on debt history.
The issue is it is a very narrow view on a very wide system. He doesn't mention resource surplus, population increase, extended working years, or the increased efficiency of moving goods.
As per usual with most everyone, only the lens that makes us feel the worst about ourselves.
Gifting economies! So glad he touched on this as it serves the basis for understanding human behavior at its best.
Someone get this guy a fresh coffee :)
I don't understand why he keeps picking it up and setting it back down?
LOL!!!
My new favorite teacher on the history of economics ✅
@Dirk Knight he never claimed that david is an economist
@Dirk Knight oh, my fault!
The amount of times he picked up that cup but didn't drink from it... lol
The more you learn about how money and debt work thanks to brilliant minds like David Graeber and Michael Hudson, the more the world makes sense.
0:00 What is Money?
0:45 Classical Theory of the Origin of Money (Supporting Barter)
3:13 Problem with the Classical Theory (the Evidence)
4:00 Problem Continued (the Theory)
4:47 True Origin of Money (Penalties)
9:07 Credit, then Money, then sometimes Barter
13:10 Coins - Military Relationship between Government and Money
25:52 Modern High Age of Money (1450-1971)
26:10 Return of Credit - Gone Wrong (1971-present)
thanks
Thank you so much very helpful!
Where did he take a sip of his coffee tho?
What a great lecture. Sorry to hear of his passing. He did give me some real support for the idea of simply ABOLISH THE STOCK MARKET. Like the opposite of canceling debt,
let us just cancel all wealth of corporate holdings. Public trading corporations become owned by their employees. Done. Problem solved, no more shareholders or financial speculative gambling traders. Just wipe out the wealth AND wipe out all debts, student debt, credit-card debt, the cc companies cease to exist. Perfect and right in line with history.
The real way to wipe out credit is to wipe out the creditor
You have bent his words to support your own. In this video, he does not propose anything like that.
@@GT-tj1qg I did not say he did, you must not understand english when someone says "support".
The world has lost such an enjoyable and insightful and creative mind. Drat!
The most blue balled coffee cup in history.
Basically kings/governments created money to measure, add, substract and in general facilitate collecting tributes/taxes/fines from the common people. The institution of money in turn creates the market, a place where the common people must exchange/trade/buy/sell goods and services so they may eventually come up with enough whatever type of money was imposed (it could be salt, cacao, horseshoes or even metallic coins) to pay the imposed tribute/tax/fine amount.
Yep. Money is a topdown creation imposed on people rather than coming up naturally.
Well no taxes was basically a way to recollect money from people to pay military guards who will defend the king. That was kind of circular situation.. Happening over and over again.
@@KoDeMondo Before the introduction of money or currencies, taxes were collected "in kind". Money was used by States to simplify and facilitate the measurement/counting and management of these "tributes". Thats why most ancient "coins" had the same name of their correspodent civilization's weight systems: the mesopotanian shekel, the egyptian talent, the greek obol, among others. And yes, taxes have been used historically to fund armies and pay guards, administrative and civil servants, among others.
Money is a social construct for trade that has been abused through unfettered capitalism and politicians working towards oligarthic rule at the behest of those who they really work for while holding the title of public servant.
Yeah it's like the commenter didn't watch the video at all.
MoNey is A SoCiaL COnSRuct......+ other standard Marxist horse-hockey.
Hope you have become less clueless in the 3 years since you made your comment.
Money was not invented by any single person. There is no specific inventor of money who can make such a claim. Money emerged organically through experimentation, effort, and conflicts, primarily to fulfill human needs. Over more than 5000 years of history, money has been created by humans, for humans, evolving through various stages including testing, wars, and societal developments.
Kings and their military armed guards (which happens to be the case today) simply understood what money was and how to use it to gain control over the masses, impose their laws, enslave the population by exploiting the labour sacrifice at their convenience.
For those who have not yet understood that today the system has remained the same, because as today are still the same bloodlines families that have followed one another for millennia now, you have not understood the meaning of this video.
Bless you Dave wherever you are. Douglas Adams had an interesting take on money. The Golgafrincham crash on earth. While setting up their society they decided on tree leaves. This worked fine until a budding economist starts a forest fire to hedge off inflation. The second problem was autumn. The nice green leaves in people’s pockets turned color and then crumbled into dust. Oh well. Maybe rocks.
Great lecture. Very informative.
@9:34 the sumerian king Graeber tries to remember is Entemena
8:59 "The association of money and violence is a constant."
Yes and is still today the same. Simply because money was not invented by any single person. There is no inventor. Money arose organically through the experimation of people suffering,war,violence, revolte, history ..but finally once this concept was understood and it finally recognised that gold and silver are money then kings and their guard did everything they can to removed from the people hands. By replacing with any kind of substitute, which can be paper currency or cheques or other forms of play money
An enlightening talk
RIP, brilliant man.
I love this guy
I really enjoy how he explains things, but I vehemently disagree with the basis of his statement. He's proposing that the barter system didn't really exist (which I guess I can get behind), but instead, people used a form of social indebtedness? That's an alarming theory to propose. To suggest that I'd distance myself from a posession because I 1. Never really cherished it enough (cow example), or 2. Assume I'm going to need something from said neighbor in the future (and that they'll certainly have that thing) is naive to say the least.
Living in a small farming community is interesting. Capitalism is for everyone we don't know. All of our neighbors just give. We coordinate our gardens and skills. Cam grows garlic and lettuce, we grow berries and mushrooms, Bob and Sue do meat birds. We help old people for little or nothing and kids help with neighborhood chores. We really only need money for fuel, coffee and taxes.
It is silly to say barter don't exist. absence of proof is not the proof of absence.
Barter exist today, I had to use it a few time.
Like working a bit for someone in exchange for accommodation while I traveled or worked for free in exchange for training and experience.. etc..
Someone help me understand- in the example he gives about taxes and the minting of money from governments he says this enables armies to be capable of feeding themselves. I'm not clear how a state issuing currency helps an army feed itself any differently than without.
RIPower, David. 🖤🚩🏴☠️🏴❤️
Hmm, seems like everytime debt becomes money, it ends up in unlimited money creation and debt spiraling out of control and you have inflatino and deflation cycles and then the whole system fails, I wonder why, it's a Scooby-Doo mystery...
Excellent video
Check is not an Arabic word, it's a Persian/farsi word
Everything start from there
i am adding another comment on DG's coffee, because i am stupid enough to not notice more important things from his lectures.
Help me! Please! I'll repay you, or not! If you don't help I'll do bad things to you. Violence pursues! Fear drives economy. Getting someone to do stuff for you empowers you. Violence.
Even out here on open pastures of Africa the fear of death drives action.
Instinct of survival.
when he is going to take a sip from that cup?
cool!
SILVER WAS A RELIGION FOR THE MING DINASTY
All you have to do is look at Craigslist to see people offering chickens for a cow.
28:52
I don't understand his comment about Aristotle. Where he says Aristotle would consider it a legalistic distinction.
Slavery.
He’s essentially talking about wage slavery. Having to sell yourself into slavery to pay off a debt isn’t that different from having to work to pay off a mortgage and student loan etc.
16:10 sorry for being stupid, I came here from his book, but still don't understand this point
How is the problem of food solved by the army getting money that they have to pay back?
The government (or king or ruler of some kind) introduces a tax liability payable in gold or gold coins and the soldiers either get paid with gold or loot gold and can spend it to provision themselves (buying food).
@@trixn4285 du bist aber auch überall ^^
@@wolpadinga5995 *laseraugen*
It is not the army, which must pay back the money. The king demands a tax from the farmers and he pays his army. Now the farmers must get the money the army has because the farmers need it to pay the tax.
To get the money from the soldiers they need to give to the soldiers what they want for the money, eg. food.
please someone correct me if I'm wrong.
so money is basically a thing that records debt and has units for exchange to keep tally
so anyone holding a record of debt(government approved money) has a valuable.
what gives money its value? the fact that someone is in debt and needs to work for money because money records that debt, as soon as there is nothing to record there is no debt right?
thank you for reading
Yes, that's certainly along the right lines. I like to think of it this way: the money _is_ the debt. We have debts to each other. These debts are transferable: if you're in debt to me, I can sell that to somebody else in exchange for, say, labor. Some debts are more widely accepted than others in these transactions. The government's debts are particularly widely accepted. The debt is an intangible relationship, but sometimes we use objects to help us keep track of these debts. These are essentially a recording or memory device. That's what paper and electronic money are - records of debt. The money is extinguished once the debt is repaid, because the relationship is over. In the case of most (though not all) private debts, the debt is to deliver something. In the government's case, the debt is a get-out-of-jail-free card: you can pay your taxes using that debt, and the government won't punish you for tax evasion.
@@deficitowls5296 Money extinguish the debt. We never suggest barter was primarily used within the Dumbars number. Beyond that, this whole debt narrative is completly out of luck.
That video was a bunch of nonsense propaganda. A bank ledger records debt and credit.
Money: a commodity that is generally used as a medium of exchange
There are four functions to money.
1. A medium of exchange
2. A unit of account
3. A store of value
4. A standard of deferred payment
The free market created money thousands of years ago before people started documenting things like that. The first markets were most certainly created when farming became popular around 12,000 years ago. This guy is just pushing for big government and government control of the monetary system. The attack on free markets never ends.
@@tjkoch408 pushing for big govt? A little delusional are we?
@@tjkoch408 No sane person attacks free markets. Sane people attack modern notions of the "free market", namely capitalism. Capitalism is not about economic freedom, it is about economic privilege. Free markets existed long before capitalism, and the idea of anarchists/libertarian socialists is to implement actual free markets. Sane systems do not need governments to use violence to enforce itself, and capitalism largely comes from governments assigning artificial property rights to privileged actors. If you believe this is a "Free market", you have been bamboozled, and yes, I will always attack this notion of "Free market".
Why does money necessarily appear in civilizations ?
RIP
Is there any good shortened version of Dr Graeber lecture about "Where Did Money REALLY Come From? " As a non-native English speaker I am having hard time following his complicated sentences.
I don't know what's your mother tongue, but you can always check his book "Debt: The First 5000 Years" which as been translated in many languages.
His book Debt is available as a free pdf in English; It’s long but very readable and informative
@@kdmarrison8845 Thanks, good suggestion.
Did he ever debate Yuval Noah Harari?
in agriculture, labourers get paid by giving some of the grain or whatever. Isn't that barter? It is and has been extremely common.
he didn't say the barter doesn't exist, it said that primitive societies were not based on that but on some sort of credit system
Does he ever drink that coffee??
he keeps picking it up lol.
SIP PLEASE
So - like this is something that some haven't understood for centuries?
We never suggested that barter was used primarily within the Dumbars number. Beyond Dumbars number, this guy is out of luck.
@@Tenebrousable so you just copy-pasted this under every so for comment? A literal bot lol
@@fakename287 It fits everybody because everyone of the opposition is copycats of eachothers. Defending moneyprinting people are like robots.
9:30 "A political document by a king [..] he says they've been occupying this land for 20 years [..] I calculate that they would actually owe us 13 trillion shekels."
What is a shekel?
Bitcoin
it's for exchanging products and services
I think counterfeiting should be legal.
Counterfeiting IS legal. Central banks do it all the time, as do governments and large banks, stock markets, bond markets, derivatives markets etc etc.
@@catonicme2896 So, all existing money is counterfeit money? They you shouldn't use it! Using counterfeit money is illegal!
The mechanism you set up "so that things don't go crazy" is called debtor's prison.
Isn't that exactly "things going crazy"?
Wouldn't money have also been the result of greatening city populations, where resources dwindle as they get more and more spread out between members of the folk and thus are behooved to be gathered in fewer and fewer hands? I don't think this is only a military thing, there're many more factors at play. If we only believe that it's a military thing, then when there's a shift in or loss of capitalism, we'll be all shocked when, with the immense population of the earth, there will be debt- and market-systems arising again.
Graeber doesn't say that it is only a military thing but that it historically arose from there and then becomes a more general thing. That of course doesn't rule out that it couldn't come about in a different way but that is arguably an explanation that aligns with what we know abut history. Its about discovering how monetary systems come about and evolve. In the beginning you may have had a system that was intended to provision the soldiers but it gradually becomes much more than that.
_"Wouldn't money have also been the result of greatening city populations, where resources dwindle as they get more and more spread out"_
You could also consider it the other way around. Maybe it was the expanding kingdom where soldiers spread out and only then the population does it because the monetary system to allow for that is in place through the provisioning system of the soldiers. You can not presuppose that people "just spread out" and only then the monetary system arises through a sudden need for that. This is the same backwards argument that Smith made when he presupposed a barter economy when there really wasn't one to begin with.
Inconvenience is not enough motivation something is missing
that is not true, barter did happen first, just not with the communities you people think about.
Excellent understanding of the origins of money, but you are only half way to fully grasping what money really is. You are actually the most knowledgeable of anyone I have ever heard of in regards to money. "We still have time to get it right" yes, but you need to listen to someone that knows
Why, what do you think it is?
Deficit Owls
That would be a long answer, but suffice it to say, it's not easy to grasp when all written history promotes the current dogma. Buddha was an enlightened individual, and he indicated that becoming enlightened only required "waking up" as if it would be an easy thing to do... but he devoted his entire life and decades to achieve an awakened state! Understanding money requires "waking up", which means your current understandings of money are like a dream/brainwashing which makes it impossible to grasp while dreaming.
The current dogma, widely held by both economists and the public, is that money is defined in terms of its functions: medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. Fiat money is when an object with no intrinsic worth performs these functions, and the widely held view is that this can happen because of trust: I trust that so-and-so will accept this paper money, so I'll accept it too.
On the other hand, we promote an alternative view. Money is an IOU of its issuer. When the government spends money into your hands, that is the government going into debt to you. The government redeems that IOU, ending the debt, when you use the money to make a payment to the government. (There's a parallel story for bank money). The value of the money comes, at least initially, from the fact that people need to make payments to government, and the government will only accept those payments in the form of its own IOUs. The reason people need to make those payments is because the government has imposed taxes on them, only payable in its own currency. In short, we like to say, "taxes drive money." So, money isn't actually a _thing_ per se - it's a social relationship, a debt relation between issuer and holder, and the physical object like the piece of paper is only a recording medium for that relationship. Essentially a memory device, to help us remember who is in debt to whom. The relationship, the _money_, is intangible.
Deficit Owls
What you've described is the approved smokescreen professors teach future bankers and political leaders, but it has no relationship to the truth. The truth is that only a hand full of people in this world are privy to what money really is. It has been passed down through generations of time from one individual to the next without a single dissenter, which is why no one in academia has ever fully understood the origins of money. Money was created for the sole purpose of control and enslavement... nothing more! It has an ability to propel a fully developed society into a utopian mega power within months... not decades, but wresting power away from our "owners" would prove to be disastrous while corrupt politicians stifle the shift, which would need to transition within a single day, or else a full collapse would ensue causing the demise of millions within days, and in the end... we would all come crawling back to the owners with our spirits crushed. Of course none of this is possible with an ignorant society and no one aware of how money is supposed to actually work leading the shift. What we have a a situation where the blind lead the sighted because universities control the narrative, and for a good reason... it keeps the "owners" in power!
Well, I described two different, conflicting things... one of which is clearly dominant, and the other the new rebel.
Money is gold, and gold is money. Simple. What the brilliant Mr Graeber is talking about isn’t money it’s credit and interest. Gold has no counter party risk. Interest bearing loans do. It’s a shame he won’t address this subject because we (the world) needs a mind like his on this important subject.
Gold isn't money dude... gold is gold lol money is money
No. Try again libertarian incel
as dumb as they come
@@markcorrigan3930 commie asshole
In conclusion:
th-cam.com/video/k-COG4YTn6M/w-d-xo.html
people are money. its a political decision to use dollars etc for a certain amount of labour. class dismissed.
So, I can buy, say, a car in return for some people? Where do I get those?
@@pillmuncher67 start a business, hire people & get them to build a house .. then sell the house at a profit. A bank will lend u money if u have a sound business plan.
@@pillmuncher67 ... Buy the car w the. Profit on the house. Simple. People are money. QED
@@douglasmaclean5836 So, I can have sex with profit and sire more profit? Just by having an orgasm? Awesome!
@@douglasmaclean5836 Oh, and another question: Isn't owning people illegal in the US since 1865? If profits are people, isn't so profit then?
capitalism doesn't work if you can relieve debt. what you gonna do, wipe out masses of profit?
Why not? It's mostly just numbers, anyway.
Capitalism doesn’t work without the option of bankruptcy, which is precisely the cancellation of debt.
@@losttango Bankruptcy doesn't eliminate all debt. It liquidates assists to payoff the creditors. As for personal debts , not all of them fall under bankruptcy laws.
@@pillmuncher67 ... Money has two specific roles in a capitalist economy. One is as a vehicle for trade. The other is a place to store value. The two work together.
Debt is a reflection of value. Debt is a way of reaching into the future. The value, in the form of money, is created today. But the value is added through future production. As in you get a loan now and then , over time, you work producing, to pay it off.
If you forgive the debt that means value was never added to the market. It becomes pure fictious capital. Which adds contradiction and chaos to the money supply.
@@ronnyron007 Except that the risk of default is already priced in: Besides the desired profit, the interest rate also covers both the opportunity costs of not having as much liquidity, as well as the risk of not getting the money back. It is just a fact of life that not all credits are paid back.
the function of money is not as a quantified debt but as a medium of exchange. this is easily seen in the fact that money must clearly be exchanged but not all quantified debts are exchangeable. the money-ness of an object is in its exchangeability and in the nature of its utility to its holder. graeber obscures this when he asserts that the typified story of money’s origin in econ. textbooks is a statement of historical fact and not a parable explaining the failings of a barter and therefore the usefulness of a money system, and when he asserts that barter is ONLY a “spot trade” and not any sort of direct exchange (including non-monetary credit), which is what makes a barter system the opposite of a monetary system on the first place. also it’s just plain stupid to claim a monetary system didn’t come a barter system based on anthropological evidence when we observe other primate species bartering, suggesting that money is an OLD invention
Money is usually defined as something that has these three functions:
1) being a medium of exchange
2) being a store of value
3) being a unit of account
Take even one away and it's not money anymore.
The Magic of Money: The idea of lending money and charging interest has its roots in the ancient city of Babylon, some 600 years before the birth of Jesus. Practitioners of the craft were known historically as “money changers”, as in “change the money from your hand to mine”.
Today, adepts in the monetary black arts go by the sanitized term - banker, practising the same evils as their forefathers with increasingly more sophisticated methods of robbing from the poor to give to the rich, a modern day sick and twisted Robbing Hood.
Money is “created” in a debt-based monetary system. Money only comes into being when credit is established.
You walk into a bank, borrow $250,000 for a new Ferrari, a mark is made on the bank’s ledger, and VOILA! $250,000 exist where it didn’t exist before, simply by virtue of the fact you signed your name on a piece of paper promising to pay back that sum of money.
And now, by the magic of “fractional reserve banking”, the fraudsters can now loan out 10 times that amount to other unsuspecting victims. If you deposited $1,000, after roughly 28 cycles of the fractional-reserve process, the banking system has created 9,000 dollars from the initial deposit. A thing of real beauty, isn’t it?
Bull
What’s his point? Money isn’t needed because we could just be nice to each other ... oh but then people did get violent? And so we then do need money?
It’s complete nonsense!
I don't think he's really trying to make an exact point, but just saying that we should think of money differently to how we do normally. Really he's just arguing that Adam Smith's theory of the origin of money isn't accurate.
We never suggested that barter was used primarily within the Dumbars number. Beyond Dumbars number, this guy is out of luck.
that's odd i literally had teachers teach us that people in villages would barter before they invented money and its still what most people get taught im sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@sch4891 What's odd? That you were tought some bullshit that austrian school of economics fundamentally disagrees with? To me, that's a most naturall thing. K trough 15 is mostly about miseducation. Because it's a government project.
@@Tenebrousable for the last few decades the US edu system has taught neoliberal economics and thats their version of history. so most americans havent even heard of gift economies. i wish that we were taught this subject through many different schools of thought. sadly, that wont happen because as you said the edu system is 'a government project'
Holy moly, this guy is absolutely unbearable to listen to. The sharp breaths, the mouth smacking, the self-satisfied chuckling, and the ponderous rambling that even after being cut down for this video would still put me to sleep were it not for every irritating mannerism above.
Most of that is all fine. The teaching that I'll draw from that? If you want me to sell you food? Payment in bitcoin only. No debt slavery possible nor promises broken.
@Dirk Knight Means of exchange? For the moment? Sure. Store of value? Lol no. I will be keeping the balance of my accounts in bitcoin. I can get the dollars in the moment just fine. God knows, there's no end to them as long as fools like this drive the policy.
@Dirk Knight Haha, you put an emoji after your insult so that means it's fine, you ignorant, poor shmuck? :) The 10 year track record looks extremly, decidedly, in my favor. If you care about evidence over long periods of times, that is. The MMT crowd typically does not, I give you that.
Reality is, All the big money entrepeneurs know that fiat cash is trash. It's a melting icecube in your hand. They can't wait to get rid of it. Buy something, anything else with it. And debt debasement policies make it worse. And the policies are going to get worse. That includes USD. Most none of them dare to say that about BTC. And they infact personally own it.
These academics wouldn't know how to create or preserve wealth to buy their way out of wet paper bag. That's why they work in universities.
@Dirk Knight Because the USA prints dollars without limits and backup, making the dollar losing it's value over time. $100 in 1900 is worth $3,098.57 today. So trade based on dollars is not a good decision.
In the Old Testament and in the Gemara there are fines for damages.