Taking a very long view on the debt crisis

About this blog: With all the bickering over the nation’s debt and how to manage it, one can easily lose sight of the big picture. The bickering feels so immediate – so much in the present tense – and the crisis seems so urgent that few people stop to consider the long history of the issue – and that doesn’t mean the deficit under President Clinton or President Carter. One person with a different perspective is David Graeber who takes the long view in his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” published this month by Melville House. Graeber, an anthropologist at the University of London, reminds us that for thousands of years the battle between the rich and the poor has often expressed itself in a conflict between creditors and debtors. The history of debt, he says, is also a history of morality and culture.