Summary Of Chapter 2 And 3 Of Debt By Greaber

Greaber; Chapter 2 & 3 of Debt

Greaber explains in detail the very importance and ‘origins’ of money. In order for him to explain the causes and problems surrounding credit and debt, he starts by elaborating the reason why money came into place and the ‘informal way’ in which it took place in our lives/culture. He cites other anthropologists’ in order to make his point as much comprehensible as possible. Indirectly aiming towards the assertion that money HAD to be invented in order to prevent people from going through the struggle of barter, Greaber elaborates the way this whole process (initially found among the ‘savages’) was considered to be the first form of money (where we’d consider goods like metal, arrows, fur and whatsoever as money). I personally think that Graeber’s main focus throughout the chapters following “the myth of barter” is to give the best depiction as possible of ‘What is debt’ and bring up some of the past eras’ philosophes’ thoughts to expand on such question and make his readers try to picture morality as debt in terms of money. Moreover, Graeber thinks that the way money cam to be what it is today is simply an imaginary implementation of economists in order to make our current monetary systems
For instance, Smith is taken by example to show that money mostly arose in times when it was started to be valued as precious pieces of metal, as we call today coins, grew with time to be the most prevalent form of currency and one of the key