Mike Beggs read Debt, and he didn’t like it.[1] The book’s “main arguments,” he says, are “wholly unconvincing.”

That’s too bad. Debt is certainly not without its flaws, but I think Jacobin has missed a good opportunity to connect David Graeber’s opus with the broader conversation economics on the Left. Mike sees Debt as “a move in an interdisciplinary struggle: anthropology against economics.” But most of the key arguments of Debt are better seen as part of an intradisciplinary struggle within economics. Admittedly it takes some unpacking, but Debt’s key themes are in close harmony with the main themes of heterodox economics work going back to Keynes; while the “economics” that Beggs opposes to him represents only the discipline’s more conservative wings. A review of Debt by an economist in a venue like Jacobin could be an important chance for interdisciplinary bridge-building; it’s a pity it turned into an exercise in moat-digging instead.

Mike has a whole wagonload of criticisms of the book, not all of which I disagree with. These fall loosely under four heads. First, Graeber’s “blithe dismissal” of mainstream economics; second, what Mike sees as the book’s excessive focus on the cultural and political superstructure of different systems of money, as opposed to their economic logics; third, the book’s substantive claims about the distinction between systems of commodity money and credit money; and finally, the more specific claims about the early-modern transition to capitalism and the contemporary world.