Observations on Credit and Lending Practices in Ur III Mesopotamia (2004) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Observations on Credit and Lending Practices in Ur III Mesopotamia (2004) [pdf]

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87 pointsthrow0101b34 comments

Its fascinating that script seems to have been invented to serve as a credit contracts database and to support associated accounting and taxation functions.

The central role of bean counting in pushing information technology repeated in rennaisance with paper ledgers and was key also in early commercialization of computers (IBM).

Somehow the thread has been broken as of recent, with blockchain almost a parody of progress. We mostly still emulate age old patterns. A visitor banker from Ur III would very quickly find their way to the bad loan books.

> I find his description of the typical money lender especially attractive [...] a professional, often associated with the royal sector, who held a suku allotment and had the resources, in barley, silver, and draft animals, to cultivate his allotment and to pursue the control of additional allotments (Steinkeller 2002: 117). What this individual lacked, according to Steinkeller, was the necessary labor to work the land that he could acquire.

I'm pretty sure I've seen a similar characterization of nobles in England: They possessed land, resource-privileges, and capital equipment, but had to seek out labor.

I suppose it should be no surprise, given the asymmetry between being able to own those things versus not being able to own labor in the form of slaves. (Though serfs can come close.)

It's weird to imagine an opposite reality, a planet where ownership of land/capital/resource-rights is impractical or anathema, but slavery is normal and expected.

This is central to the theory that modern financial markets (and certainly capitalism itself) originated in the wake of the labor market reorganization and mass migration symptomatic of the black death. The plauge had a multitude of effects on Europe, but chief among them was the severe contraction of the labor markets and the subsequent restructuring of of local and regional economies.

Of course, events like the reformation and the thirty years war are just as influential, but relate less directly to the political economy.

The beginning of the Luddite revolution

This is fascinating. It's interesting that most of their loans don't seem unlike payday loans i.e. advances to produce a good or service.

Indeed - I did a double-take at the notion that creditors often wanted a borrower to default so they could then collect payment in the form of the debtors labor, basically debt-slavery.

As you said, fascinating stuff.

Debt-slavery which interestingly was banned under Ceasar if I'm not mistaking.

Solon, long before Caesar was ever born in Rome, abolished debt-slavery in Athens.

There's a good book on Athenian banking:

Cohen, E. 1992. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

He goes into interesting evidence for bank money (ledger entries not backed by coins, as opposed to metal currency), fractional reserve lending, and inflation in ancient Athens.

> There's a good book on Athenian banking:

For a wider net, on the general legal framework(s) of that time, see perhaps Ancient Greek law in the 21st century, Perlman, Paula Jean, editor:

* https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477315217/

It turns out one of the largest banks in Athens was owned/run by some slaves: finance was not a 'respectable' profession—with farming/agriculture being the most 'noble'—so it was left to the lower classes and other riff-raff. Lots of slaves ran businesses, and the question often came up whether any associated debt belong to the business, the slave, or the slave's master (important when slaves were bought and sold).

In Rome debt slavery was abolished almost 300 years before Caesar (not sure if it applied only to citizens or to all free people though)

Sounds terrible: get the money then do the work?

These days we work, THEN get the money.

Maybe capital has gotten smarter about when to pay labor - only after the fact.

Has capital gotten smarter, or labor gotten dumber? I'm sure all the people The World's Richest Man, Elon Musk, is currently refusing to pay what he owes them would rather have gotten their money in advance.

Debt slavery was not life-long. Leviticus 25:8 requires that slaves be freed on Jubilee years, which occur every 7 years. That's the origin of modern laws on discharging bankruptcy after 7 years (bankruptcy comes with a penalty, because you can't borrow easily if you default on your debts, so it puts you into a kind of slavery).

Jesus was the redeemer (one who buys off your debts) because he was going to cancel your moral debt of sin: the language of the gospels uses concepts familiar to his audience.

According to Graeber, the jubilee year was introduced by Nehemiah (who had just returned from exile in Babylon, where he learned about it) not out benevolence, but because too many slaves meant the state had too few taxpaying farmers.

>According to Graeber, the jubilee year was introduced by Nehemiah (who had just returned from exile in Babylon, where he learned about it) not out benevolence, but because too many slaves meant the state had too few taxpaying farmers.

Given the paucity of surviving texts from that place and era, that sounds like a chain of unsupported assumptions worthy of an evo psych paper.

He's got several references at the back of his book "Debt", on the topic of the jubilee. But you have a point: there's lots of room for interpretation.

Still, the idea just seemed too delicious to pass up: debt cancellation does not arise from benevolence but from fiscal necessity.

Where does he say that? He spends the end explaining that clearly most of the lenders had no interest in such a thing, many of the debtors wouldn't be good for labor, and lenders and always tried to take repayment in cash etc.

You seem to be describing working capital (business focused) rather than payday loan (consumer focus).

Difference between the two probably only appeared when fixed salaries became a thing.

In their defense: the OP's deployment of the term "payday" is sloppy when discussing a world which predates salaries, bank transfers, and indeed... weeks[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_units_of_...

Does the shortage of labor discussed imply that some class was complaining "no one wants to work anymore" during the Ur III period at the end of the third millennium BC?

No! Maybe, but seeing Sloth as the ultimate sin is definitely a mania that’s very heavily based in modern corporate capitalism. Consider some alternate (still very boomer) takes:

“The gods have taken away the good workers!”

“Women are taking the young men’s attention away!”

“This is a bad year for work.”

I was idly wondering, today, if the capitalism was supercharged by the Protestant notion of idle-hands are sinful-hands? The refrain for most of history was that land owners couldn't get any (read: excess) work out of peasant labor: once they had hit their sustenance & rent requirements they just stopped. The Protestant ethos would be to be as industrious as possible; and, I think, capitalism capitalized on that zeitgeist.

I dunno... if I still had a Reddit acct, I'd Ask Historians.

>I was idly wondering, today, if the capitalism was supercharged by the Protestant notion of idle-hands are sinful-hands?

German sociologist Max Weber was wondering the same question about a century ago and wrote a whole book about it called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". The part where he talks about the Protestant notion of calling comes very close to what you described.

I read it a decade ago so the details are a bit fuzzy but I think the gist of it was it's super difficult to get into the heaven in Protestantism (it's actually pre-determined in Calvinism I think) and one needs to devote themselves to some task to avoid sinful earthly distractions. Also charitable works are kinda meaningless because only through faith you can be saved. So you have all these people who work all the time and who do not spend that much on poor people or themselves which helps with capital accumulation. Also with that mindset business becomes an end into itself that should be pursued for its own good so Weber thought this fostered the separation of personal affairs and business iirc.

> German sociologist Max Weber was wondering the same question about a century ago and wrote a whole book about it called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism".

Some criticisms on the idea, and especially this observation that the 'ethic' may have originated earlier than Protestantism:

> Andersen et al found that the location of monasteries of the Catholic Order of Cistercians, and specifically their density, highly correlated to this work ethic in later centuries;[37] ninety percent of these monasteries were founded before the year 1300 AD. Joseph Henrich found that this correlation extends right up to the twenty-first century.[38]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...

Sounds like it's related to Graeber's book, "Debt, The First 5000 Years".

Another book in this vein is The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor if anyone is looking for one.

See also Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358103-money

And The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (2e has an intro from Volcker):

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold

With all the talk of the US dollar losing its status (highly unlikely due to no realistic alternative), How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present, and Future on the history of various previously predominant currencies is also interesting:

* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177007/ho...

There's no obvious alternative but there's nothing stopping other countries from using other currencies than dollars to do transactions, just the infrastructure that supports it. It feels like the dollar is more stable than other countries currencies, due in large part to our strong economy and strong military. China is big enough that they can probably do transactions in their currency, but any week they can significantly devalue it.

> China is big enough that they can probably do transactions in their currency, but any week they can significantly devalue it.

There are roughly as many CAD and AUD transactions as RMB/CNY:

* https://data.imf.org/?sk=e6a5f467-c14b-4aa8-9f6d-5a09ec4e62a...

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/247328/activity-per-trad...

Wow, thanks for posting that. I wasn't away RMB was not used that much up to now. US + Euro is 9/12 of that trading on the imf.org link. 9/12, 75%! Maybe a little of that could switch to rmb in trading with china, but as china is such a huge economy in the world, close to the US in many ways (ignoring their current problems/shrinkage), isn't the minuscule amount of RMB transactions just another sign that everyone is using dollars.

How much is the total US transactions with China, would like to compare to the charts to see theoretical maximum.

Is that worth reading for someone casually interested in economics and its history? Or is it pretty dense and technical

I found it to be good for casual people economic history. Wasn’t overly “economics” in the technical sense.

It is not technical at all. But it is more dense than a typical non-fiction book you read these days. Also heavily referenced like a scholarly work.

I would highly recommend reading it, as it exposes you to the many biases in the orthodox framework of economic thought prevalent in the world today.

There are single sentences in that book that have half a dozen factual errors.

So, you decide if that is worth reading.

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