What Debt Teaches Us About Human Exchange

When I’m asked which book has most shaped my research vision across philosophy, economics, and beyond, my answer is not a classic economics text. It is an anthropology book that looks economics squarely in the eye.

The book is Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Graeber was an anthropologist who, later in his career, taught at the London School of Economics. The book became widely read well beyond academia. It has also been recognized within scholarly communities, landing the Bread and Roses Award and the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Gregory Bateson Prize. 

Reversing standard thoughts on economics

First a bit of background on the author. Born in New York City in 1961, David Graeber trained as an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, where he completed a PhD in 1996 based on fieldwork in Madagascar. He taught at Yale University before moving to the UK, with appointments at Goldsmiths, University of London, and later the London School of Economics. Alongside his academic work in economic anthropology, Graeber was a public intellectual and political activist, known to many readers for bringing anthropological perspectives to everyday economic life. He died in 2020.

Part of Debt’s appeal is that it does something many readers, economists included, find bracing: it argues with the standard story we tell ourselves about how economic life began. Graeber’s central reversal appears straightforward enough. He argues that long before coins or cash, human societies used credit systems and debt accounting, and only later did money in the narrow sense take center stage. In his telling, barter is not the primordial “origin” of markets so much as something that appears in specific circumstances, often between groups rather than inside tight communities. Whether one agrees with every historical claim or not, the book is a powerful prompt to revisit what we treat as obvious in economics.

If the book were only an argument about chronology, it would still be interesting. But what stayed with me was a deeper leitmotif: the capacity of money, as a single measure, to dehumanize relationships. Money can make interactions feel impersonal, abstract, and interchangeable. When we compress complex realities into a single price, we also compress what we know about the people and places behind that price.

Why I recommend reading beyond your field

I chose this book precisely because it sits outside my home discipline. In my experience, one of the best ways of opening your mind is to look beyond your field. It is one of the best ways of getting new ideas. When you read a serious critique from another discipline, you are forced to notice what your own field takes for granted, what it brackets out, and what it treats as “background noise.”

When I try to pinpoint a single passage that represents the whole book, I struggle, because it is not written that way. It is a wide-ranging history with recurring themes. Still, one idea is particularly useful. Graeber suggests that exchange encourages a particular way of conceiving human relations, because exchange implies equality, but also separation. And he pushes the reader to notice the space between the two, the period when obligations persist and relationships endure. If I could paraphrase Graeber’s analysis, it would be that markets become most “human” not at the instant a transaction closes, but in the ongoing ties that cannot be reduced to a clean settlement.

From a book to a research question: can we rehumanize exchange?

After reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years, I started asking myself a practical question. If money can dehumanize relationships by flattening them into a single metric, could we rehumanize exchange relationships, the situations where we buy and sell things, by providing more information about the human factors involved? By human factors I mean social realities, and also environmental dimensions, that are often absent from the price signal. This is not about replacing markets with moral sermons. It is about improving what market participants can actually see.

Why disclosure matters, and why it is hard

That line of thinking helped set me on the road to our recent HEC policy paper, Squaring Disclosure Regulation and Competitiveness. Disclosure is a deceptively simple idea: if you want markets to take social and environmental realities seriously, information has to be comparable, credible, and usable. But disclosure also raises hard questions about regulatory burden, competitive dynamics, and the risk of turning reporting into a box-ticking exercise. The challenge is to design disclosure that illuminates, rather than overwhelms, and that informs decisions rather than merely producing paperwork. 

I discussed this recently in the school’s Breakthroughs podcast. Titled Digital Scorecards for Sustainability Disclosure, I described my attempt to shift the focus of disclosure rules from companies to products - in the name of sustainability. Through a digital, standardized scorecard I believe we can fill in information and data gaps in this drive for smart product-level disclosure Europe should be aiming for. I would like to think this approach is in line with the more human approach to economy incarnated by David Graeber.

To conclude, I would recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years to anyone curious about the moral and social foundations of economic life. Read it not as a manual, but as a provocation. Let it challenge the idea that prices contain all the information that matters. Then ask yourself, in your own context, what kinds of human and environmental facts you would want to know before you call an exchange “efficient.” For me, that question has been a productive way to keep research anchored to what is at stake in real lives.