oh and some are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture from my conversations with great minds and joined by anthropology professor and author dr david graver will 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 the non-existing job growth was 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 graber i should graber teaches anthropology at goldsmiths university of london and has written a 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 harper's 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 a u.c. berkeley his latest book debt the first five thousand years chronicles how the concepts of debt and credit of defined human history and what this means for our current credit crisis and 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 could 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 anarchistic and a wobbly i didn't know the wobblies were anarchists and but you know some thoughts on. the oblique aren't an anarchist in but actually moves while police are americans. down in their hearts ok. you you write that there's no such thing as a free market but rather that cultures and societies organize marketplaces for a very very specific reasons can you elaborate on that and what does that mean for us now. one of the things that really surprised me when i was researching the book

is that you know all throughout the twentieth century we've seen this kind of contest between states and markets and it's all politics are about choosing sides you know what do you really believe in the market or government is able to say social problems so we're used to thinking this is opposed principles but actually if you look at it historically you know societies that don't have states generally don't have markets markets first seem to arise as a kind of side effect of bureaucracy this and for that 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 you talked about how the u.s. debt is really a war debt in fact you you believe you explicitly call it that there was a graph also in there that compared the accumulation of us to to to our military spending. you know what i mean the u.s. got originated the cost of fighting the revolutionary war and it's pretty much

always been a word 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 seven hundred seventy six is if we were to get rid of debt with. you know the national but actually even even before we get to that let's let's talk about you know what debt is a word where did this concept of debt as a an economic construct and as a social construct a regime. well that's another really interesting thing because we're used to thinking of dad is as simply a matter of morality you know i mean good people pay their debts being a decent person is a matter of filling one's obligations obligations that same thing. but there's a strange kind of. if you look at world history this strange kind of double think about it is on the one hand people say about our relatives just paying your cats on

the other hand there's almost no human society that couldn't 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 debt 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 for them when there's doubt but what you know when we talk about debt we mean something to be precisely quantified is adding money to the other and you can only really quantify debt when you're in a situation of at least potential violence. and that violence the relationship between that violence and is what. what shifts over time but i mean to give an example a standard version of where money comes from and we all live in the same school but

once upon a time it was border people used to exchange things directly one to the other and that proves inconvenient because you know you say i'll tell you what i'll give you twenty chickens but that cow the other guy maybe doesn't need chickens right now if you've got a problem then surely settle on one thing everybody's going to want to invest money then once you have money 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 talking mounted 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 borders usually 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. i don't know but it makes sense that that story wouldn't work because well imagine

a community everybody's friends of each other harder story assumes that we're all going to be saying like right i'll give you twenty seconds for that cow your neighbor now he doesn't want your chickens you can't make a deal but you know you're his neighbor build what really happens and this is what i propose as observers you say wow that's a really nice cow and the guy says they really want it oh it's on you don't worry about it even think about giving anything back and of course that's as a pretense really you owe him you owe 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 on daughters in love with your song or something who knows it could be almost anything so there's people who each other favors now how does that actually turn into twenty seven of these it was for these which is what money can get won't normally what happens when people are really angry i mean if somebody returns a gift and return something inadequate you might say that it's really cheap but 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 ok and you know law codes in state lycidas a very detailed list of exactly how much paid for any type of injury than some people get exactly what i have 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 what a way 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 you know i've. used to do a fair amount of business in japan studied the language and culture. part of a book about it actually about two decades ago. and you talk in your book a lot about obligations societies and i don't recall running across geary and could

move those concepts in your book although i'm guessing that probably there the japanese concepts of you know the debt that you're born with the society the debt that you you know the japanese the debt that you're born to the emperor with it 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 in in america or in a western culture that is not an obligation or debt based society at that level that is only at a financial level how would you explain how that works. 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 work. well it comes on what sort of relationships

but i guess in a lot of the really important ones it's actually important to remain in debt to people because debt in a way is sociality it is socialism is community i mean there's plenty of societies where people are constantly giving each other gifts but you always get from back something a little bit more or a little bit less than they gave you because if you give them an exact equivalent you're saying why don't we want to have anything to do with you anymore you're paying them off transactions over so in a way transaction shouldn't be over everybody should be in fact even immediately wound 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 the 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 owe a debt to society or that your life isn't that owed to the gods now it's kind of another thing now to emerge is especially governments trying to promote that 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 despondent mental death to something larger than yourself it's quite interesting most world religions start with fact but then the kind of throw it away. lasting potlatch societies are a variation on this 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 in a way that was kind of the exact opposite of that it created some real disasters. or at least and this is the standings what can you have a little bit. oh sure well in part much the side is very interesting because i mean one of the things about gifts is that you know you you're 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 enter into competition often you want to get 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 border everybody acting exactly like they would in the market trying to get as much for as little as possible but in they'd just be doing without money so of course that being convenient they have to invent money in fact when anthropologist went out to see how people actually behave it's not the competition it doesn't exist but often the competition was 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 completely by giving him a gift he could never possibly write and there are stories in celtic. greek accounts of celtic societies that when nobles were trying to show off how generous they were it's like a chess game everybody's trying to outdo each other every now and then someone to be totally tracked mated they get a gift 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 altar bit repos. i thought also fascinating the relationship between dad 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 who it is actually actually it's not. in most stateless societies when you do have money it's not mostly used to buy a thing i mean sometimes it is but it's usually not as major function usually it's mainly used to arrange marriages to settle feuds as i was saying and sometimes this

is a lubricant of social relations you just show up visit your uncle you give him a little you get some everybody sort of it's a way of expressing friendship amity goodwill now. as a result marriages tend to be big alliance of families they get lots of the stuff away there's a huge debate actually in our anthropology because people that will these primitives are just buying brides and said know that even though you pay a lot of money to the family you can you know if you're buying a bride you could and resell it 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 wives so this purchase became well is it a purchase or is it not and then you have the fact that it 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 sort of separate who is the good girl and a bad girl and in a way this is how ancient 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 work at all and in fact all the laws the penalty the punishment is not on you know respectable women who don't wear veils this i assume to be so often worse make us but rather on the bad girls who actually do good it's vastly we're talking with dr david greene and we'll be back right after this. but drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions. made who can you trust no one who is human view and with noble mission to receive

where we had a state controlled capitalism is called sessions when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question more. talk about conversations with great minds tonight i'm joined by dr david gruber anthropologist author and professor. dr gruber you talking your book about how

the social and governmental banking compact as it were the fall of world war two was basically blown to shreds by ronald reagan and margaret thatcher. can you elaborate on what that compact was and and how it got boring to shreds and what that means for us now. sure well you know after world war two there was kind of a deal that seems it's sometimes called the keynesian deal. between we might say the wait working class of north atlantic countries and the people who actually were running the system mislead said look you guys have a history of joining radical social movements cut it out you know if you guys don't become commies we'll get 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 reason productivity would be met by reason wages and you can map that out from one hundred forty five to around one in seventy five seventy six a certain part that was the case productivity one steadily up in every bump and productivity will play a bump in wages now in the seventy's all 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 this is unfair. people in the global south more and more of them want to dream clude women want to be included in the

rise of feminism and the certain put 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 had set up and you know you have a crisis and the crisis we had all of you had financial shock you had this sort of vision that ecological catastrophe and you know what's every part of the world except america called new liberalism which sort of starts of reagan and thatcher. they basically said ok well deal is off we got a new deal. the new deal is no longer we'll raise the increase the productivity don't pay 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 got political rights now because it doesn't matter however. you get credit and what you see during that period is a huge outpouring of new forms that are everybody supposed to have a four a one k. they're supposed to buy stock they have mortgages considered very important

everybody's got a house. 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 certain point it reached a crisis of it including and that's what the meaning of the subprime mortgage really is they started extending this to more and more people including people they knew perfectly well couldn't really. sort of gambling with it the whole thing turned into a giant bubble and you know we get thrown back into exactly the same structural basis we had in the seventy's we have oil shock then financial rock you have business and ecological gosford be saying they're not true but the sort of mindsets exactly the same and i guess the question is what's next well and you just said the . the old deal which we could call f.d.r.'s new deal that deal with a strong middle class. was no longer viable by by 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 in 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 we were rich class. well yes exactly i'm not saying it is a myth about all the horror that they would have had to change the economic system and in fact not only did they have new british consul they had nuclear response which seemed to want more and more of a share of the pie which in fact since reagan and thatcher they'd 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 realise that we're no longer nearly as much land of opportunity as we used to be places like sweden actually have much higher possibility that we were in fact among the thirty four of the cd countries i think we're either at the bottom or the next to the bottom in terms of

class mobility in the u.k. if they're next to my living one yeah it's a oh i know it's so if the toward the end of your book with the 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 jubilees the biblical concept of rebalancing everything. you can afford with that you almost call for it when i 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 get it that was their reaction to this arab spring which a lot of it was really goes back to concerns about effects of microcredit kind of it 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 kind of goes back and forth there's periods dominated by credit money. virtual credit money we think it's a new thing but actually it's the original form there's periods were dominated by kaffir people assume gold and silver really is. oh periods dominated by credit markets such as the one we've really been entering into since the one nine hundred seventy one when nixon went off the gold standard template have institutions designed to protect outer space the problem is now once you accept that money is just a promise it's just an iou kind of set of social arrangements what's to stop the thing from going crazy and getting totally out of hand in particular think really what's to stop one or two percent of the population from essentially turning everybody else into debt it's 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 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 interest rates would not have. been to greeks 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 is breaking down. and jubilee was one of them to clean slate mesopotamian rulers used to just declare ok that freedom is go home all that's for council and you just 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 about absolute fixed rule it didn't stop the economy from developing i mean the ploughed along the way and in the middle ages they tried a different approach they got rid of interest bearing loans entirely and here but

there are always going to be something now i thought to do believe might be nice because it would knock home the reality that you know once we move into a period of virtual credit money money is a substantial promises it's not a pain 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. what we found out in two thousand and eight is if you're a id if you're bank of america of course they can renegotiate it they can make trillions of dollars of debt disappear well now that we know they can do it for the big players let's do it for everybody and start over and and. i've certainly sounds like an interesting idea if we were to simply is reboot i mean him the amount of money that the fed loans of the of the large banks hers was you know 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 and all the credit cards exactly exactly i mean

the in if they had paid off all the mortgage it would have happened same effect so they chose to pail 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 events do you see any possibility that that that kind of jubilee i mean in saudi society is is you know autocratic and 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 how this might actually be a viable idea for the united states. for the well we've got a long way to go obviously i mean at because you're right we have a total capture of the political system both political parties are effectively in the pocket of the banks the and the class of it fund managers corporations patrolling the financial business so in a way almost all large corporations are funding for corporations. it's a problem. in seems we needed some sort of bottom up social blueprint but one thing

hopeful i can say is that in the past that is what's always happened when you have periods of virtual credit money it will happen eventually if history rings true and you can see strings 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 then you need a conceptual break and a financial break would be the easiest way to get across in the people increasingly starting to call in the in the minute we have left iceland just twice now has voted not to pay off their banks or is that the kind of thing you're right. exactly and they're doing great i mean ireland decided to pay everything and they're going terrible for it iceland said no and they're going on and so we could say to the banks there's no our bankers are the i.m.f. and everybody else you know i'm sorry it just ain't gonna happen let's say you did kick them out of east asia latin america they kicked out the i.m.f. i mean we could do it yeah and argentina have to run two thousand one is very well

it's various 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 of great minds doug. coming up it's been one heck of a week in washington even though technically the city's big players are still on vacation some of the biggest topics are by battling just in tonight's big picture wrong. that drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who made decisions it's. through to be made who can you trust no one who has you view with global machinery see where are we heading state controlled capitalism is called satchels when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question more.

are you ready to run 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 to pass wolli you contributor at human events dot com jamie weinstein senior editor at the daily caller and joe madison most of the joe madison show on sirius x.m. satellite radio.