Name: Debt, Tenth Anniversary Edition: The First 5,000 Years
Price: 48.49 NZD
Availability: InStock
Author: Thomas Piketty
ISBN: 9781612199337

portada Debt, Tenth Anniversary Edition: The First 5,000 Years

Debt, Tenth Anniversary Edition: The First 5,000 Years

Type

Physical Book

Author

David Graeber

Introduction by

Thomas Piketty

Publisher

Melville House Publishing

Year

2021

Language

English

Pages

560

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

22.6 x 15.0 x 4.8 cm

Weight

0.95 kg.

ISBN13

9781612199337

Synopsis "Debt, Tenth Anniversary Edition: The First 5,000 Years "

The classic work on debt, now is a special tenth anniversary edition with a new introduction by Thomas Piketty Before there was money, there was debt. Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems--to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There's not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods--that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like "guilt," "sin," and "redemption") derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history--as well as how it has defined human history. It shows how debt has defined our human past, and what that means for our economic future.

David Graeber

(Author)

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David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist, writer, and activist, known for his studies on anarchism, economics, and political anthropology. He was a professor at the London School of Economics and a key figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. His works have influenced debates on labor, debt, and social organization, establishing him as a critical thinker of capitalism and power structures.

Among his most notable books are Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), where he examines the history of debt as an economic and social institution, Bullshit Jobs (2018), a critique of the uselessness of certain modern jobs, and The Dawn of Everything (2021), co-written with David Wengrow, which rethinks the history of humanity from an anthropological perspective.

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Thomas Piketty

(Introduction by)

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Thomas Piketty (Clichy, 1971) is an economist, PhD in Economics, and expert in economic inequality. He is currently the head of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and a professor at the École d'Économie de Paris. He has published several books, among which stand out Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Capital and Ideology (2019), and A Brief History of Inequality (2021). Throughout his career, he has been recognized with various awards, such as the Best Young Economist of France and the Yrjö Jahnsson Award.

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