It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. - David Graeber

The moment we begin to map the history of money across the last five thousand years of Eurasian history, startling patterns begin to emerge.

Even human relations become a matter of cost benefit calculation. Clearly this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. It is the peculiar feature of modern capitalism to create social arrangements that essentially force us to think this way.

Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it.