Graeber's disappointing conclusion

I skipped ahead to the conclusion of  "Debt: The First 5000 Years". Graeber writes:

Much of the existing economic literature on credit and banking, when it turns to the kind of larger historical questions treated in this book, strikes me as little more than special pleading. True, earlier figures like Adam Smith and David Ricardo were suspicious of credit systems, but already by the mid-nineteenth century, economists who concerned themselves with such matters were largely in the business of trying to demonstrate that, despite appearances, the banking system really was profoundly democratic...

If things went bad in the mid-nineteenth century, it wasn't because of J.S. Mill and economists of his caliber. More likely it should be attributed to a business ethic; to a view shared by people who thought they would make money by promoting that view; by bankers and other lenders.

Perhaps it should be attributed in part also to our natural willingness to use credit. But it is difficult to say, because our natural willingness has been enhanced by people who promote the use of credit and, even more, by economic policies that promote the use of credit.

Debt dominates David Graeber's thinking in the book, just as it dominates mine here on the blog, and just as it dominates all our lives, almost all our lives, out in the world. Graeber promotes a "choose not to pay your debt" view. I found that a terribly disappointing end to his book. He thinks we should take a moral stand and say debt is wrong, debt is somehow wrong, we object to debt, and we refuse to pay:

And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

That is his concluding thought: No one has the right to tell us what we owe!

He is indeed an anarchist. And apparently he doesn't care if the economy falls apart. You can't have an economy where people run up debt and then don't pay it. That cannot work. And for sure it won't work if you take government out of the picture. 

The trick is to not run up debt in the first place. But we cannot defy policy. We have to change it.

Hey, Graeber says we need "debt amnesty" or a "biblical Jubilee". I think something like that is a good idea -- but only because we have an economy where we ran up debt until we couldn't afford to pay it. Debt jubilee isn't a solution. It's a temporary fix. The problem is that we have an economy that thrives on running up debt until we can't afford to pay it. That is the problem. That has to change. Just forgiving debt doesn't do it.