oh for asians are today. oh and so are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture from my conversations with great minds i'm joined by anthropology professor and author dr david graves discuss his latest book which makes the connection between human history and our current obsession with death and new job numbers are out today with our economy adding a grand total of net zero jobs last month so as president obama to blame for that on existing job growth or is this the result of republicans sabotaging job creation here in the united states.

for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by dr david gruber dr graber teaches anthropology at goldsmiths university of london and has written a half dozen books that examined issues of culture politics economics and history and is a regular contributor to some of the country's leading magazines and our prayers the nation and the new left review in two thousand and six he delivered the melon kosky memorial lecture at the london school of economics an annual talk that honors outstanding anthropologists who have fundamentally shaped the study of culture and this past spring he was honored by the anthropology department at u.c. berkeley his latest book debt the first five thousand years chronicles how the concepts of debt and credit a defined human history what this means for our current credit crisis in the future of our economy and i doubt our culture from new york times has described him as

a scholar whose books and articles are used in college classrooms around the world and an anarchist who is a card carrying member of the industrial workers of the world. and of quote i can graber thanks for joining us from our new york studios. thank you great to have you with us first of all of you for your to the book just that new york times to description an anarchist and i didn't know that the while these were anarchists and you know some thoughts on. the one please aren't an anarchist in but actually most what lead our inner critic to done in the arts. you you write that there's no such thing as a free market but rather that cultures and societies organize marketplaces for very very specific reasons can you elaborate on that and what does that mean for us now . well one of the things that really surprised me when i was researching the book is that you know all throughout the twentieth century leave seen this kind of

contest between states and markets and it's all politics for about choosing sides you know what do you really believe in the market or government is best able to save social problems so we're used to thinking these are the post principles but actually if you look at it historically you know societies they don't have states generally don't have markets markets first seem to arise as a kind of side effect of bureaucracy in this and for them much of human history there really is a side effect of military operations so the opposition really isn't there in fact i noted in in your book you talk about how the u.s. debt is really a a war debt in fact you believe you explicitly called it that there was a graph also in there that compared the accumulation of u.s. debt to two to our military spending to. get one in the u.s. that originated the cost of fighting the revolutionary war and it's pretty much

always been a war debt more or less and it's always been with us too the idea of getting rid of it seems remarkably unrealistic considering it's been here is essentially since i'm going seventy six is if we were to get rid of debt would. you know that the national well actually even even before we get to that let's let's talk about you know what debt is word word this concept of debt as a an economic construct and it's a social construct or which. well that's another really interesting thing is we're used to thinking of debt as as simply a matter of morality you know i mean good people pay their tats being a decent person is a matter of filling one's obligations obligations that same thing. but there's this strange kind of. if you look at world history does kind of double think about it because on the one hand people say that relative is just playing your cats on the

other hand there's almost no human society that can think money lenders were basically evil. almost impossible to find any positive representation of any money lender any time in world history. now how is that possible what i realized when researching the book is that. essentially. is when you take a promise and turn it into mathematics normally people do favors for one another they feel in one of the debt in this very broad sense you don't win the step but what you know when we're talking about debt we need something to be precisely quantified as adding money to the dollar and you can only really quantify debt when you're in a situation of at least potential by limbs. and bad violence the relationship between that violence and is what. what shifts over time but i mean to give an example the standard version of where money comes from and we all live in the

same school but once upon a time there was barter people used to have strange things directly one to the other and that proves inconvenient because you know you say i tell you what i'll give you twenty seconds for that cow the other guy maybe doesn't need chickens right now if you've got a problem eventually settle on one thing everybody's going to want. that money then once you have money you get credit actually you know what history shows is this is not only wrong it's actually backwards credit comes first money only develops maybe a couple thousand years after our first transactions that we have documented with you know things like compound interest rates and they're very sophisticated credit instruments going around and already in mesopotamia no actual physical cash. now and then finally when you do get bored or a huge leap because people are used to using money and suddenly the money goes away so the question if money doesn't come from not where does it come from what you know but it makes sense that that story wouldn't work because all imagine the

community everybody is friends with each other larger story assumes that we're all going to be saying like right i'll give you twenty seconds to that cow your neighbor now he doesn't want your chickens you can't make a deal but you know you're his neighbor what really happens in this is what anthropologist observer because you say wow that's a really nice cow and the guy says i really want to oh it's on me don't worry about it don't even think about giving anything back and of course that's as a pretense really you owe him that you will him something you know in the favor he might come to you and say nice pig or. whatever he might need three might say you know i'm totally in love with your son or you know some who knows it could be almost anything and so there's people who each other favors now how does that actually turn into twenty seven it is it was for these which is what money control won't normally what happens when people are really angry i mean if somebody's rich . it's a gift in return something inadequate you might say about really cheap if you're unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula to say exactly how cheap you think that person is on the

other hand if somebody gets in a fight with you and your eye is out and you know well codes in state with the site it's a very detailed list of exactly how much you pay for any type of injury that's when people get exact you know the law says i get forty seven heifers for that and if not that means war when there is that potential for violence that's when people insist on exact songs and in that context you know you have to say well i don't have twenty seven heifers and what i wear substitute that's kind of situation we have to create money so the violence is the is the enforcement mechanism basically for the end for the credit how does this i do i used to do a fair amount of business in japan to study the language in the culture. were part of a book about it actually about two decades ago and you talk in your book a lot about obligation societies and i don't recall running across the good mood

those concepts in your book although i'm guessing they're probably they're the japanese concepts of you know the debt that you're born with the society the debt that you you know the japanese to the debt that you're born to the emperor with the to the it which can never be repaid the the debts i mean in japanese society it's not unusual to keep very very careful track of every gift that is ever given to you because you have to repay it there you know it's all about balance and how do we how would you explain to somebody in a well in in america or in western culture that is not an obligation or debt based society at that level that is only at a financial level ha ha ha would you explain how that works and not just in japan in a fully industrialized country but also in tribal societies i mean one time was is this not how all human societies worked. well it comes on what sort of

relationships but i guess in a lot of the really important ones it's actually important for remaining debt to people because of that in a way it is sociality it is social relations community i mean there's plenty of societies where people are constantly giving each other gifts but you always get them back something a little bit more a little bit less than they gave you because if you give them an exact equivalent you're saying no i don't really want to have anything to do of you anymore you're paying them off transactions over so in a way transaction shouldn't be over everybody should be embarrassed even in medieval england it was like that i mean ninety five percent of all transactions appear to have been on credit most people didn't even really have physical money it was rare stuff so everybody owed money to everybody else and that was considered normal i was considered good as a matter of fact now that notion that you know you get to society or that your life is a dead to the gods that's kind of another thing now to emerge is especially governments trying to promote bad idea. and it's always met

a certain amount of resistance people like the idea that everybody knows everybody else that idea that you're sort of born in this fundamental depth to something larger than yourself it's quite interesting most world religions start with that but then we kind of throw it away. potlatch societies are also most native american societies the polish was the person who gave away the most got the greatest status and when the polish societies collided with european societies which operated in a way that was kind of the exact opposite of that it created some real disasters. or at least some misunderstandings you can refine that a little bit. oh sure well a part of society is very interesting because i mean one of the things about gifts is that you know you cut your supposed to give back a little bit more a little bit less and ideally you really want to give back

a little bit more and if you're entering a competition often you want to give back a lot more this is one of the things that always be puddles economists because their prediction is that society is about ash they're going to operate on barter everybody should be acting exactly like they would in a market trying to get as much for as little as possible but in they just be doing without money so of course i would be inconvenient to have to invent money in fact when anthropologist went out to see how people actually behave it's not the competition that doesn't exist but often the competition to see who could get the most not the least. you want to show off what a great man you are and sometimes your real objective is to put your rival by giving him a gift he could never possibly be back in their stories in celtic or greek accounts of celtic societies that when nobles were trying to show off how generous they were it was like a chess game everybody's trying to outdo each other every now and then someone to be totally checkmated they get a hit they couldn't possibly repay and the only honorable thing to do under that

circumstance is actually to kill yourself whereupon all the goods are showered on your followers the only ultimate repose down there. i thought also fascinating the relationship between it and not financial debt but this kind of obligation is. cultural. debt and credit for lack of a better word and the evolution of the institutions of both marriage and prostitution . oh yes that's really fascinating it seems that every time you get commercial money which is not money that's used to rearrange those related actually actions that. in most stateless societies when you do have money it's not mostly used to buy and sometimes it is but it's usually not its major function usually it's mainly used to arrange marriages to settle fields as i was saying and sometimes this is

a lubricant of social relations you just show up with your uncle you give him a little he gives some everybody sort of it's a way of expressing friendship amity goodwill now as a result marriages tend to be in the big alliance of families they get lots of the stuff away there's a huge debate actually an apology because people say well these primitives are just buying brides and said no that even though you pay a lot of money to the family you can you know if you're buying a bride you could then resell them of course you can't. however that all changes when you get a commercial economy and especially when you have a debit card what would happen all the time in mesopotamia as people have pointed out and they actually would start taking away their children and their wants so this purchase became well is that a purchase or is it not and then you have the fact that good appropriate moral sexual relations in traditional societies are one where the money has changed hands but what happens to that when suddenly you know you have prostitution and cash

being used for buying sexual services becomes a big problem and in fact it becomes really critical all of a sudden to sort of separate who is the good girl and a bad girl and in a way this is how it patriarchy seems to have emerged in reaction to the market is even the first accounts of veils in middle eastern society they say well respectable married women have to wear veils slaves and prostitutes are not allowed to wear veils and in fact all the laws penalty the punishment is not on you know respectable women who don't wear veils that was i soon to be self-important make us but rather on the bad girls who actually do good. we're talking with dr david greene and we'll be back right after this. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through get through it if you've made who can you trust no one who is your

view with the global machinery to see where are we heading state controlled capitalism is called sackfuls when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. about the magic conversations of the great minds tonight i'm joined by dr david greenberger anthropologist author and professor. dr gruber you talk in your book

death about how the social governments whole banking compact as it were that followed world war two was basically blown to shreds by ronald reagan and margaret that. can you elaborate on what that compact was and and how it got blown to shreds and about that means for us now. sure but you know after world war two there was kind of a deal it seems sometimes called the keynesian deal. between we might say the weight working class of north atlantic countries and the people who actually were running the system easily said look you guys have a history of joining radical social movements cut it out you know if you guys have become commies will give you health care will step in america will give you education for your children will give you social security welfare state and

basically citizenship rights were tied to certain economic rights and he did that was not only the recognition of labor unions but an understanding that raises and productivity would be met by raising wages and you can map that out from one hundred forty five or so that to around nineteen seventy five seventy six the start of our that was the case productivity what steadily up in every bump and productivity was my play a bump in wages now in the seventy's all of that fell apart and partly because there was what i call a crisis of inclusion essentially if you look at the political social struggles of that period after world war two through the seventy's more and more people wanted to go on the deal. for obvious reasons people said well what about me i already said well we've been left out of all this is unfair. people in the global south more and more of them want to include women want to be included in the rise of

feminism and a certain point the back of the thing broke they to simply couldn't provide a reasonable living standard to all those people according to the deal that they set up and you know you have a crisis and the crisis had all shop you had financial shock you had this sort of visions of ecological catastrophe and you know what's every part of the world except america called new liberalism sort of starts with reagan and thatcher. they basically said ok well deal is off we got a new deal on the new deal in is no longer we'll raise the increase the productivity increases in wages we'll do an assault on labor unions no longer will political rights mean necessarily having economic rights which meant everybody in the world without political rights now because it isn't we're not or however. you get credit and what you see during that period is a huge outpouring of new forms right everybody is supposed to have a for a one k. they're supposed to buy stock they have mortgages considered very important

everybody else. just cheap credit had to be provided and the same thing happened in the global south you know micro credit was going to save the third world now. again . at a certain point it reached a crisis of inclusion and that's what but i think beginning of the subprime mortgage really if they started extending this to more and more people including people they knew perfectly well couldn't really. started gambling with the whole thing turned into a giant bubble and you know we get thrown back into exactly the same structural crisis we had in the seventy's you have oil shock then financial strock you have visions of ecological catastrophe saying they're not true but the sort of minds that's exactly the same i guess the question is what's next well and you just said the. the be old deal which we could call f.d.r.'s new deal that deal of a strong middle class. was no longer viable by by a by the by the notions of reagan and thatcher basically. would it not be more

correct to say that it was because there was so many people who wanted to be included and it was breaking the back of the deal would it not be more accurate to say that it was that the deal was no longer viable if there was still to be a and rich class. well yes exactly i'm not saying is where they got all the little that they would have had to change the economic system and in fact not only do they have new british consul they have new birth cross which seem to want more and more of a share of the pie which in fact since reagan and thatcher they've been getting the division of wealth has been dramatic as specially in america the impact has been. a massive lowering cost mobility people don't seem to realize that we're no longer nearly as much land of opportunity as we used to be places like sweden actually have much higher a possibility than we did in fact among the thirty four e.c.u. countries i think we're either at the bottom or the next to the bottom in terms of

terms of cost mobility in the u.k. is there an extra nice being one yeah exactly if so if the india toward the end of your poor could be the essential call for action that i got out of the book. was was one not unlike herman daley's and some other economists who have looked at this and that's basically a call for jubilee the whole concept of rebalancing everything. you can afford with that you almost call for it going to explain what jubilee is how it came about and is there an application of it to modern day life. oh you know the saudis actually just did it that was their reaction to this arab spring a lot of it was really goes back concerns but effects of microcredit company just eliminated all day. yeah they cancelled the debts so it can be done i mean obviously they've got a lot of money but you know we can print money to make money for the united states

. now. what i found in the history was that the world just kind of goes back and forth there's periods dominated by credit money. virtual credit money you think it's a do thing but actually it's the original form of money there's periods were dominated by cash or people assume gold and silver really is no periods dominated by credit markets such as the one we've really been entering into since maybe nine hundred seventy one when nixon went off the gold standard for him to have institutions designed to protect others is a problem is it once you accept that money is just a promise it's an iou kind of set of social arrangements what's to stop the thing from going crazy and getting totally out of hand and particular really what's to stop one or two percent of the population from essentially turning everybody else into debt he is now. in a way that's the great social evil that everybody's afraid of throughout human history most people would start falling so deeply in debt they'd sell their wives

and children into slavery to sell themselves into slavery now now in a way american situation isn't that different renting ourselves out to the guys who are predators but perhaps not selling ourselves but i'm right here the ancient greeks would not have. been to greece would not have recognized that much of a difference so ok what they tended to do was set up some mechanism to make sure it didn't go crazy society didn't start just breaking down. and to billy was one of them to clean slate mesopotamian rulers used to just declare ok freedom is go home all debts are council and you start again. that was in the bible and so it was every seven every seven years and every forty nine years in the circus. yeah and that was an absolute pics rule it didn't stop the economy from developing i mean a plowed long way and in the middle ages they tried a different approach they got rid of interest bearing loans entirely and but

they're always gonna be something now i thought. do you believe might be nice because it would knock home the reality that you know once we move into a period of virtual credit money on is this some punch of promise this is not a thing it's a series of commitments we make to one another and if democracy is to mean anything it means that we can renegotiate it and after all what we found out in two thousand and eight is if you're a i.g. if your bank of america of course they can renegotiate it they can make trillions of dollars and purpose appear now now that we know they can do for the big players let's do that for everybody and start over and and. i've certainly sounds like an interesting idea if we were to simply is reboot i mean the the amount of money that the fed loaned to the simple large banks years was in a more than a hundred percent of g.d.p. it certainly would have been enough to pay off all the mortgages in america is that the kind of thing you're suggesting all the credit cards exactly exactly i mean the

in if they had paid off all the mortgage it would have had the same effect so they chose to pale out the banks without bailing out the little people even though if they had built up a little people that itself would have built up the backs do you see any possibility that that that kind of jubilee i mean in saudi society is a is you know autocratic and when it became you know whatever ideas and probably not run by the banks or is increasingly it seems like we are in the two minutes we have left here thoughts on and now this might actually be a viable idea for the united states. or for the wealth of it we've got a long way to go obviously i mean and because you're right we have a total capture of the political system both political parties are effectively in the pocket of the bank speak and the class of hedge fund managers corporation for all of the financial business so in a way almost all large corporations are coming from corporations. it's a problem. in seems we needed some sort of bottom up social group but one thing

hopeful i can say is that in the past that is what's always happened when you have periods of peripheral credit money it will happen eventually if history rings true and you can see stirrings of it if you go to europe and greece and spain there's people coming out to the plazas saying this is ridiculous we reject all political parties we need to start over and we need a conceptual break and a financial break would be the easiest way to get that across in the people increasingly starting to call in them in a minute we have left iceland just twice now has voted not to pay off their banks or is that the kind of thing is right. exactly and they're doing great i mean ireland decided to pay everything and they're in terrible shape iceland said no and they're doing fine and so we could say to the banks. our bankers are worth the i.m.f. and everybody else you know sorry it just ain't gonna happen that's it's yeah you just picked them out load the east asia latin america they kicked out the i.m.f. i mean we could do it yeah and argentina after around two thousand and one is or

its variants are doing quite well right now indeed dr david graber thank you so much for being with us tonight. my pleasure to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations with great minds go to our website conversations with great minds. coming up it's been one heck of a week in washington even though technically the city's big players are still on vacation i'll debate some of the biggest topics of my panel of guests in tonight's big picture ron. that drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to create through their through to be made who can you trust no one who is in view with the lobel machinery see where we had a state controlled capitalism it's called satchels when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question more.

are you ready to rumble it's time for friday night's big picture rob or i sit down with three expert political commentators to debate the week's top stories on our panel tonight lisa did pass quali contributor at human events dot com jenny weinstein senior editor of the daily caller and joe madison most of the joe madison show on sirius x.m. satellite radio.