On Topic: What debt really means, and the high cost of herring

Just when you think you've figured everything out, some smart aleck comes along to tell you you're mistaken.

Ben Franklin “discovered” electricity by flying a kite outdoors during a storm? Wrong.

You can see the Great Wall of China from outer space? Nope.

Money was “invented” so vendors and their customers wouldn't have to haul cumbersome and sometimes still-squawking items for barter to the market?

David Graeber, author of the entertaining “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” just released in paperback, writes that, well, it's just not true.

Graeber is not some dry economist, mind you, but an anthropologist - he teaches at the University of London's Goldsmiths College. He contends complex systems of debt and payment have been part of human commerce for a long time - as long as there have been farms and people who want to trade for the goods produced on them.

He notes, for example, that Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century philosopher, pointed out that the German word “schuld” means “debt” as well as “guilt.”

So when you were behind in your financial obligations, you also were considered by society as guilty. That's why it was acceptable in earlier times for debtors to be physically punished - so much in arrears for that grain you took home a few weeks back now equals one finger, or damage to your good eye.

(Jail time for debt wasn't made illegal in this country until at least 1831.)

Sin, it seems, needed redemption. So ways to calculate repayment were contrived.

Today we call that money.

The trick became how to agree what was worth what. Shop owners in 1664 London, for example, created their own IOUs, Graeber writes - which was fine as long as his customers didn't try to use the coins in other merchants' stores.

And what to do about even larger marketplaces? If you're Roman Emperor Tiberius, you have your face stamped on the coins and they're good for credit - regardless of how much silver they contain.

“One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces in a given time and place by what sorts of things were acceptable as currency,” Graeber suggests:

In much the same way that colonial Virginia planters managed to pass a law obliging shopkeepers to accept their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fees and customs duties … actually payable in wine, cheese, peppers, chickens, eggs and even herring ….

Graeber's book also details a fascinating history of humankind's getting and spending - from the Catholic Church's opposition to usury to how Cortés viewed his conquests of land, property and people all through the lens of cost-benefit analysis. He also touches on Homer, the prophet Nehemiah, King Nebuchadnezzar, Shakespeare, William Jennings Bryan and Richard Nixon - the last of whom removed America from the gold standard in 1971 and made money essentially a promissory note from the U.S. government.

What is debt? Graeber concludes it's a promise - but “a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”