The excellent Gilliant Tett uses her Financial Times column today to review a new book by an anthropologist about debt. It’s David Graeber’s [amazon_link id=”B00513DGIO” target=”_blank” ]Debt: The First Five Thousand Years[/amazon_link], and one of the reasons it sounds so enticing is that Gillian – an anthropologist by training – cites some of my favourite authors on money.

One of them is Keith Hart, whose 1999 book [amazon_link id=”1861972083″ target=”_blank” ]The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World[/amazon_link] is a brilliant sociological perspective on the interaction between money, technology and power. He is the originator of the concept of the informal economy, dating from his early fieldwork in Africa. I loved The Memory Bank so much when I first read it that I got in touch with Keith, who like me hails from Manchester although he lives now in Paris, and we have met from time to time – most recently at Dave Birch’s annual and unmissable Digital Money Forum.

Another sociologist Gillian mentions is Marcel Mauss, whose interesting work is on gift exchange. His classic, [amazon_link id=”0415267498″ target=”_blank” ]The Gift[/amazon_link], also concerns the links between exchange and power – every gift brings its corresponding debt –  although I have to confess that I found it heavy going and I love him more for his name than for his writing style. (My husband had hysterics when I mentioned on holiday this year that Marcel Mauss was one of my favourite economic sociologists.)

Finally, Gillian cites Karl Polanyi. I didn’t like his famous [amazon_link id=”0807056790″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Transformation[/amazon_link], which falls into the romantic trap of rose-tinted nostalgia about pre-capitalist society, and is convoluted and pompous compared to Ruskin’s brilliant rant [amazon_link id=”1599868059″ target=”_blank” ]Unto This Last[/amazon_link].

The point is that at this time of crisis, the normally submerged but fundamental links between the financial system and the power structure of society has been brutally exposed. Brutal because it is not pretty. We’ve had a generation of rapacious exploitation of the many by the moneyed elite. It’s revealed in the unsustainable inequality of incomes in countries like the UK and US, as Raghuram Rajan spelled out in [amazon_link id=”0691146837″ target=”_blank” ]Fault Lines[/amazon_link], and in the many monopoly markets which enable the very wealthy to extract vast economic rents, whether they are East European oligarchs, Premier League footballers, holders of long-lived patents or ludicrously extended copyright terms, or investment bankers.

As for David Graeber, I think this sounds a must-read. It seems to chime with the argument I make in [amazon_link id=”0691145180″ target=”_blank” ]The Economics of Enough[/amazon_link] that the social underpinning of the economy is currently unsustainable. Gillian’s review concludes that the west must now start thinking about widespread debt forgiveness – wiping the slate clean, as literally occurred in ancient Mesopotamia. She writes: “Those debts keep piling up in the west, creating social strains – and there is no real solution in sight. Looking back to the future – even 5,000 years – may not be as crazy as it seems. Not least because it reminds us that debt is fundamentally a social construct, not a cold number; even when it relates to your post-holiday credit card bill.”

[amazon_image id=”B00513DGIO” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Debt: The First 5,000 Years[/amazon_image]