It's not about you!

Why we need a broader lens to address the issue of debt in individuals.

- Anne Cabot-Alletzhauser

In 2011, three years after the Global Financial Crisis, a rather remarkable publication reached the commercial bookshelves. The book was called Debt, The First 5 000 Years. What made the book a “must read” was that it looked at the issue of debt from a totally different perspective: that of an economic anthropologist with a keen interest in how the concept of debt has evolved in societies around the world over the last 5 000 years.

But David Graeber was more than just a noted academic who taught at both Yale (until he was denied tenure) and the London School of Economics. He also had become one of Time Magazine’s 2011 Persons of the Year for his role in nudging Wall Street towards what he called “a fresh vision for the financial services industry”. It was a movement that came to be known as Occupy Wall Street.

Graeber’s central thesis was that the concept of “debt” had evolved from one that had initially been the natural glue that kept societies together, to one that had become an instrument for power dynamics. One of his more important contributions was the concept that debt existed long before the concept of money – a fact that appears to have escaped most economic classrooms.