Whirring the fact

Notes on the Graeber interview

I listened to the PBS interview of David Graeber repeatedly and transcribed some chunks of it.

The first Q&A, which begins around 0:45...

Q: "What were the first debts, as we understand debt today?"

A: Well
That's an interesting question
is its how moral debts -- the sense of obligation, promises (because debt is really just a promise) -- turning into something that can be quantified and transferred
and for that reason you can transfer them from one person to another
and in a way that's exactly what money is, they're debts that we can transfer.

Debt is not "just a promise". Debt is a promise to pay. Money is the payment.

Perhaps money started out as debt. I don't care.

The dining room table started out as a tree. I don't go around saying the table is a tree. That would be wrong.

The second Q&A, which begins around 1:15...

Q: When did debt become a negative?

A: It's hard to trace
It seems to go back to the very beginnings of written history
but there's always the terrible ambivalence about it
because if you look at history on the one hand
not paying your debts is the essence of immorality but
people who lend money are almost universally also considered to be evil
that's one of the mysteries I was trying to resolve
there is a sense of moral confusion about debt
it seems like in a way both parties to a transaction are at least in terrible moral peril
and probably actually both sinners and bad people.
So there is a sense that people are constantly
whirring the fact that basic economic relations causes everyone to be bad

That is interesting, both the borrowers and the lenders are "sinners". Reminds me of Benjamin Franklin's "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

Interesting, but completely beside the point, if you want to understand the economy. Mysteries and moral confusion. To understand people maybe it is relevant.

I don't know what word "whirring" is supposed to be. Makes a good title, though.

The third Q&A, which begins around 1:52...

Q: What kind of things changed debt over time"

A: The most significant pattern that I found was
whether the predominant form of money is virtual money, is credit money, what we have now
or whether people are actually using gold, silver, bars, coins
in everyday transactions.

For most of human history virtual money -- it's nothing new -- virtual money has actually been the predominant form.

Now when people recognize that,
that money is just a promise that we make to each other
then money doesn't seem quite so ineffable
it doesn't seem quite such a moral absolute
if i owe you money
well if there's a problem, we renegotiate it...

It doesn't matter whether money is made of precious metal or paper or electronic blips. It matters if there is an extra cost associated with using it. The DPD graph shows that when that cost gets too high, we get a depression. It's very simple, really. Nothing about moral absolutes or effability.

The economy is transaction, and the problem is always cost.


Fragments, after I got tired of transcribing:

Around 3:28 she asks about the debt ceiling. Graeber calls it "a moral myth".

Around 3:43 he says: "When people start talking about debt they're not really talking about economics they're talking about morality."

Not me. When I start talking about debt, I'm talking about a cost problem. But yeah, Graeber was talking about morality at 3:28, and at 1:15.

Around 4:00 Graeber says "dollars ARE debt".

The table is a tree.
The table is a tree.
The table is a tree.

I think I just discovered what "whirring the fact" means.