As most of the other reviewers have noted, this is a brilliant and revolutionary book. The author has synthesized a great deal of information from anthropology, history and economics over 5,000 years to come up with a compelling and original account of debt. The accomplishment is even greater, because he makes clear that debt is intimately related to money, capitalism, war and slavery; so understanding debt will change your view of all these things.
The bad news is the author made some inexplicable choices that may cause many readers to discount or misunderstand the book. The first is to continually emphasize abusive practices associated with debt: predatory or fraudulent lending, debt for consumption, debtors' prison and enslavement for debt. Only on the edges of the story, usually under the term "commercial debt," will you see what a debt defender would emphasize: informed and non-desperate parties agreeing voluntarily to a contract in which the lender supplies funds to buy assets expected to return more than the interest rate on the debt, and agrees that if the venture fails she will own the remaining assets but have no personal recourse against the borrower. If the venture succeeds, the lender gets repaid with interest and the borrower gets any additional profit as compensation for his efforts. If the venture fails, the lender takes a loss (or at least gets a lower rate of return than would compensate for the risk) and the borrower has nothing to show for his work. No courts, no violence.
Someone might argue that the violent practices are inherent to debt and abusive loans are far more common than loans of mutual advantage. But the author doesn't argue this. Anyway, the points would be irrelevant to his thesis. The book discusses the fundamental idea of debt and the conclusions apply equally to the best and worst loans. There is a lurid focus on the most egregious actions related to debt, in most cases of which debt merely provides some euphemistic terms for violence and robbery (like a carjacker "borrowing" your car or a bully "paying back" your imagined insult with a punch). I found the material exaggerated and unconvincing. Terrible things have been done in the name of debt, but the book presented little evidence that the terrible things wouldn't have been done anyway, nor was there any attempt to weigh the amount of debt abuse against the amount of mutual benefit from legitimate debt. The material is likely to mislead casual readers into thinking this is a hysterical anti-debt screed when it is in fact a brilliant and subtle examination of the nature of society.
Even more important is a key omission. Nowhere does the author mention the most important point about money and credit--that they stimulate extraordinary technological and cultural change. No nonspecialist would care about Neolithic exchange practices if they hadn't revolutionized humanity with the adoption of agriculture, permanent settlements, technological change and long-distance trade networks. The Athenian owl coin would be a minor curiosity except that it ended thousands of years of civilizations rising and falling leaving little behind but crumbling ruins and dead language texts. Every society that joined the money web since has had its language and technology preserved for other societies to build upon. This did not lead to steady progress but it did lead, for the first time in human history, to progress. Paper money in Reformation Europe led to technologies that conquered the world, and not just militarily.
Whether you like that progress is another matter. Or you may feel we could have had the progress without all the evils associated with money and debt--even that money and debt were effects not causes of the changes. Regardless, leaving technological progress out of the story makes an unbalanced account.
Finally, one of the author's key points is that debt can have the effect of ripping a person out of social context to be treated as a source of repayment rather than a friend, neighbor, son and so on. This is a brilliant point, well-argued and important. But it has an obverse side the author misrepresents. Some people run away from traditional societies and small towns for the anonymity of a city. They shed what they consider the burdens of social ties to create and join less personal organizations. Debt in its quantified and impersonal form was undoubtedly created by these types of people.
The author treats social refugees as either evil or deluded. If unsuccessful, they are caught in a debt trap that destroyed everything of meaning in their lives. If successful, they are addicted to the pursuit of money, which cannot buy them happiness. In fact, many people have at least some tendencies in these directions at some points in their lives. Some are mainly escaping intolerable or suffocating situations. Others are looking for excitement and adventure. Or they may want to pursue ideas that require wider contacts (and therefore relatively impersonal and rational human relations) than their traditional social ties can provide. Not everyone who flees the family farm is after world domination or mindless stockpiling of gold. You'd think someone who didn't understand this would spend his time arguing with his friends and teaching his children, not writing a book.
This is a great book, but it could reach a wider audience if the author spent less time bashing creditors (and Europeans, if anything bad happens in the book and a European male is within a hundred years and a thousand miles of it, you know who will get the blame) and more serious time on the people who like debt and the changes they cause in the world. Perhaps he disputes the conventional views of these things, in fact I think that's a near certainty, but ignoring them makes his insights hard to connect with anything else.
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Top reviews from other countries
René Michaud
One of the very best books I have read
Reviewed in Canada on November 7, 2014M. Mainelli
Community, Trust and Debt
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2011