In this connection -- see also, Margaret Atwood: Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth for a journalist's readable perspective on debt.
Graeber, David. Debt-Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2014.
Chapter 1: {Intro: Debt as Moral Obligation} Moral obligation of repayment of debt trumps other moral and humanitarian concerns, to the extent that food or medicines for children is foregone in order to meet debt obligations. Why? Debt is flexible: Conquer a country and declare that they are indebted to the victors for their liberation.Not all debts are the same – rich debtors treated well, poor debtors treated poorly.Debt symbolizes age old struggle between rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. Dramatic difference in moral perspective of borrower and lender, creates widespread moral confusion. Powerful Lenders have invented many strategies to avoid being considered evil. Central Concern of BOOK: Conversion of moral obligations into financial debt. Changing a qualitative moral principle to a quantifiable impersonal obligation leads a violence, slavery, wars. These relations are no longer visible to us because they are buried too deeply in history.GFC 2008 is latest episode in history of war between creditors and debtors. The nature of debt and moral obligation to pay needed examination, since crisis centered on un-repayable debts. HOWEVER, this was bypassed, and creditors were bailed out to the tune of trillions, while debtors met with harsh treatment.This book will set the stage for a fresh approach to the last five hundred year dominated by capitalist empires by using history, to puncture series of myths forming basis of our commonsense assumptions about nature of economy and society and to allow us to begin to ask great questions.
Chapter 2: {The Myth of Barter} The standard economic story about origins of money states that all economies started out as barter economies; the tendency to trade/barter being part of the nature of man. Barter was inconvenient due to the requirement of "double coincidence of wants" and money emerged to remove this inconvenience. This is an IMAGINARY history, and real history teaches very different lessons about the origins of money. Real history shows that communities strive for self-sufficiency. Within primitive communities, there is no barter or exchange -- rather all are provided for using a variety of social mechanisms, based on gifts, and social obligations. Trade across communities is embedded within a wide variety of different social rituals to smooth out the inherent hostility and adversarial nature of the barter mechanism. Money actually emerges as a way of keeping track of debts. Thus the history of money is a history of debt. There is an important distinction between social obligations which are qualitative and debt which is an obligation that can be quantified in terms of money.