Why doesn’t your immediate answer-“Look, the consequences of forcing these countries to pay their debt are babies dying of malaria and starvation”-suffice?ĭG: Obviously my immediate answer wasn’t enough or she wouldn’t have said what she did. The book is a sort of rejoinder to her and to people like her, but it’s a very long-winded answer, in that you appeal to 5,000 years of history and anthropology. Why is that?ĭJ: You launch the book with an anecdote about debating an attorney who was an otherwise decent person but who insisted that countries indebted to the IMF must pay back their loans.

For the most part, decent people tend not to think killing lots of babies is justifiable under any circumstances. People have got to pay their debts, come on!” That common-sensical notion not only that it’s moral to pay one’s debt, but also that morality essentially is a matter of paying one’s debts can bring people to justify things that they would never think to justify in any other circumstance. So many times you’re talking to people about the depredations of the International Monetary Fund in the third world, telling these horrible stories about the thousands of babies dying of preventable diseases because people aren’t allowed to maintain malaria-eradication campaigns or basic health services due to austerity measures and debt servicing, and people respond, “Well, yeah, but you can’t say they don’t owe the money. To read part 2 of the interview, click here.ĭavid Johnson: What inspired you to write your latest book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years?ĭavid Graeber: It came out of the strange moral power that debt has over people.

Graeber debt