miscellany

Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in 2011, shortly before the encampments in Zuccotti Park took root. This was a disquisition on western political economies after the financial crisis in the guise of a sweeping historical account of the debtor-creditor relationship.

The book was also a call to arms. Not long after it was published, Graeber helped to establish a group called Strike Debt, which launched a “rolling jubilee,” buying up hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of medical debt and then abolishing it.

Several books followed, including an insider’s account of Occupy Wall Street, a treatise on the scourge of bureaucracy and, most recently, Bullshit Jobs, an analysis of the meaningless work that proliferates in modern economies.*