An hour and three quarters, hugely relevant to our problems today, strongly recommended.
Modern Money and Public Purpose: The Historical Evolution of Money and Debt
L. Randall Wray and Michael Hudson present at the Modern Money and Public Purpose seminars. L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Michael Hudson Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri (Kansas City), and President of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends (ISLET).
This video is an hour and three-quarters long โ Wray begins, then Hudson takes over at 43:00 โ so I suggest you listen to it over your Sunday morning coffee
instead of NPR. (And if youโve been taking note of all the โtally stickโ jokes in the threads lately, Iโm guessing this video is where that comes fromโฆ)
Click for Source Page, Video Embedded There
Transcribed portion below the line.
Hereโs an interesting passage that I hope Iโve transcribed with reasonable accuracy from Michael Hudsonโs talk. Of Sumer:
[HUDSON 52:10] The original money was a price schedule to enable pepole to pay in kind. And the barley, obviously people did not go around with barley in their pocket because it really doesnโt last very well. People didnโt use money, actually to pay. What they would do during the crop year, they would so essentially what somebody would do in a bar today: Theyโd run up a tab. And they would run up a tab with the ale women for money that would be due on the threshing floor at the seasonal harvesting time. And in fact almost all the barley debts, and we have the contracts from Mesopotamia were due on the threshing floor at barley time, the silver debts were due at another time, and this was the principal that lasted until about 1200BC.
Time passes, there is a dark age, and until 750BC we to Greece and Rome.
[HUDSON] Thatโs when civilization began to go down hill. Itโs usually considered the start of Western civilization, but what people think is the start of Western Civilization was the falling apart of Near Eastern origins of civilization, of this economy that had been put together in a very well-organized economy, and all of a sudden instead of the public institutions, you had local chieftains occurring, and in Rome, very soon you had the aristocratic families overthrow the kings, and the functions that were in the public sector in the Near East all of a sudden were taken over by private families โ letโs call them the Mafia, because thatโs basically what the Roman oligarchy was.
And there was a complete change in policy from the Near Eastern Bronze Age to classical antiquity: When a new ruler would come to the throne in Mesopotamia, the first thing they would do, on their first full year on the throne, was to proclaim a clean slate. And thatโs because a lot of the debts that were denominated in barley couldnโt be paid. โฆ
And there was a general understanding that the debts tended to grow faster than the means to pay. โฆ [Scribes] had two basic contrasts: The doubling time of debt
So the rulers, when they came in, would cancel the debts for a very good reason. โฆ One of the Roman historians was given an explanation by the Egyptians for why the Phatroahs cancelled the debts: They said, if we donโt cancel the debts, then the debtors are going to fall into bondage to the creditorsโฆ and then nobodyโs going to fight in the army and weโll be defeated. โฆ
What happened by the time of Rome in 133BC is that you had a Milton Friedman philosophy of free markets by the oligarchy. What they realized, in Rome, was exactly what President Nixon and Hnery Kissinger realized in Chile: You canโt have a free market for creditors if you donโt murder everyone who disagrees with you [laughter]. If you donโt kill everyone who wants to cancel the debts, if you donโt kill everyone one knows history, if you donโt kill the labor leaders, you canโt have a free market, oligarchy style. โฆ So there was a 100 year social war in Rome, and the result was the by the time the empire got going, one quarter of the population was in debt bondage or outright slavery.
History does rhyme, doesnโt it?
* * *
So, this is a great series, I wish them well, and maybe Iโll be lucky enough to make my way down to Manhattan to listen to one or two of them, not least because the very concept of โPublic Purposeโ seems to alien to most contemporary discourse on political economy.