Barter and Debt

Have any of you guys read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years?

In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around....The reason that economic textbooks now begin with imaginary villages is because it has been impossible to talk about real ones. Even some economists have been forced to admit that [Adam] Smith's Land of Barter doesn't really exist.

- Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber, pp. 40-43

Graeber argues that spot-transaction barter -- "I'll give you this for one of those" -- is extremely rare in simple/disorganized/local societies. Instead, relationships work by patronage, heirarchy, gifting, and long-term, nonmonetary accounting of debt. In a place where most people don't move very far during their lives, where scarcity is high and monetary institutions are weak, you don't walk up to your neighbor and offer five chickens for his cow -- or, at least, you certainly don't do that with the assumption that the main thing under discussion is whether a cow is worth five chickens. What's primary is your relationship to the neighbor, and it's far more likely you'd be:

• asking for a cow, which he gives magnanimously, which means that now you're on the hook -- you're his client, he's your patron, and you're going to owe him forever, and your relationship is going to be one of connectedness and asymmetry (you give him certain sorts of things, and he gives you other, distinct sorts of things) from now on -- like he gives you a cow, and tells you when it's time to take your gun and follow him into battle
  

asking for a cow, in the context of your being *his* patron, like cows are your due, and his due is something else, maybe protection

• giving him chickens as a gift, refusing any payment, thereby one-upping him and making yourself the big man of the village, for which he may seek to revenge himself at the next practicable occasion by giving you a cow
• giving him chickens as a gift, refusing any payment, with your eye on his cow, knowing full well he's going to have to make some sort of gift later or be branded a cheapskate; but, of course, he can respond not with his cow, but with his daughter instead; you don't get to pick
• giving him the chickens because he's already got chickens, taking the cow because you have a butter churn, and the two of you are connected by so many threads of obligation and relation, your kids are married to each other, you're in the same secret society, etc., that even though the two of you are ruthlessly competitive and egotistical and constantly trying to get ahead of the other, this isn't played out in material goods -- not because of abundance, but because of scarcity: you can't really afford to do anything less than the optimal distribution of chickens and cows, and the social cost of not sharing the eggs and milk would be too high to consider that option.
• giving him chickens, and noting that down in a ledger of accounts, which is carefully tracked and quantified in Silver Pounds (or dollars) even though no one has seen a physical Silver Pound (or dollar) around these parts for a long time, and at some point next year if you need a cow or something else, the line in the ledger will be scratched out [/lli]
  

Actual spot-transaction barter, by contrast, was generally used for the extremely rare -- and dangerous -- situation that you had complete strangers (automatically suspicious) who you for some reason would never deal with again. They are here, they have probably ill-gotten loot, and they wanted to trade it for something, and now you'd better make DAMN sure that what you give them is worth no more than what you get. But that's a novel, charged, situation. It suggests that you're dealing with, indeed, a band of "wandering adventurers", not characters rooted in a tangle of obligations, relationships, histories, and connections.

What do you all think of this in the context of AW's "barter"?

Have any of you guys read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years?

Yes!!! Love it!

I was really influenced by that book when I and Jonatan worked on a Nobilis hack wherein Hx was replaced with Bonds. Not just emotional bonds, but also financial ones. Basically, if you were at -3 with someone you owed them big time, and if you were at +3, they owed you big time. Emotional leverage, such as knowing their secrets or having subjugated them at some point also added to your bond. If you were at positive bonds with someone it always counted as leverage for manipulation (the leverage being pay back your debt by doing this for me) and we played around with moves that rolled +bond. If you couldn't pay back your bond you would become a lesser man to them. So, you would no longer be under obligation to pay back, but you would be under obligation to honour them and do as they told you. I was thinking of making that the schtick of one of the playbooks, The True King, but we kind of abandoned the project at that point, I guess things got a little to scattered and bloated.

In the world of Nobilis that works, because there is a functioning society in place. In Apocalypse World, I think it makes sense that social connections has collapsed and sense of obligations and debt cannot be trusted. Maybe sometimes PCs and NPCs give away things for free, expecting payback, but also make it clear that this kind of trust is a risky move.

One other thing that inspired me about Debt is the part on how currency evolves from there being someone who is guaranteed to cash that check, which inspired me to write the following thread about books for barter: http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=2413.0

I think you hit on something in the Bonds discussion that makes perfect sense to me - the social structure version of accumulating debt hardly needs a rule. Its part of making the world feel real. So if you did a favor for Lits, that's leverage when you go to manipulate him later as is promising him a favor in the future.

Barter has always struck me as a pretty good abstraction of post-apocalyptic trade. Whether its reasonable or not, its true to the genre. The Postman is a great example of the sort of thing you're talking about. He never directly charges for delivery but expects food and shelter in exchange. That's 1-barter per month worth of mail and running through the wasteland.

The hold up the road reloads bullet casings and they'll give you a working bullet for three spent ones, so merchants take bullet casings at five for a bullet. There may be scarcity but there's enough plenty for holds to have bustling marketplaces and support people who make their living buying and selling.

The hardholder will give you room and board for the month in exchange for a gun because his gang has to replace parts on theirs. The gun becomes the standard unit of value because the government, such as it is, will take it. Or maybe your 1-barter is a sleeping bag, a water jug that you can refill and a pre-war ration bar with enough nutrition for a month. In that case you literally keep yourself alive with your living expenses.

Litts is known to keep his word. If he writes out a promise to work someone's shift in the algae vats for a month, everyone will trust him to do it. That note is now barter.

Essentially, the game world and the genre (except The Road) tend to assume that you can get surplus to trade with enough work and it seems reasonable that within even a single generation, any group that trades with outsiders will develop a fairly standard value system.

So given what you guys are saying, and upon reflection, I think you're right, nomadzophiel, that the mechanics of barter in the game reflect this multiplicity of economic modes pretty well -- even if "barter" as a word might be a little confusing.

The Nobilis hack thing sounds awesome and makes a lot of sense in a feudal context. But I'd argue that Graeber and his anthropologist buddies are arguing that when "social connections has collapsed and sense of obligations and debt cannot be trusted", spot-transaction barter works even worse. Because without a standard of currency, you are just hella unlikely to have the precise thing the other guy wants in that moment. You're a skinner and you walk up to the guy with the moose carcass and you say "I will perform one dance for you for a pound of that meat", and 90% of the time the guy is going to say "fuck that, I don't need a dance". The savvyhead would like a dance and has fixing skills to trade for it, but the skinner doesn't have anything he wants fixed. Spot-tansaction barter is so terrifically inefficient that if you rely on it in that context, you'll starve. Instead, the skinner is going to go to the hardholder and say, "I dance. Use me" and the hardholder doesn't care much for dancing but wants to keep the savvyhead happy because shit's always breaking down and can just order the guy with the moose carcass to fucking give the skinner some and so the hardholder says, "okay. you're mine." That is 1-barter in mechanical terms in AW and AW's barter scales beautifully to cover it. But it's not actually literally barter in terms of the social relationships and consequences, and that's kind of illuminating. There's actually hella debt involved. The skinner is in no position now to say "okay, you had your thirty-three dances, I've been fed for a month, we are quits." He can make that argument in general terms -- "I've done a lot, I love you but I want to move on, surely I've paid you what I owe you for helping me, and surely you want me to spread the fame of your hold, so let me leave" -- but it's not smoothly quantifiable, with an invoice for services rendered.

I don't think it's "social connections has collapsed and sense of obligations and debt cannot be trusted" -- on the contrary. I think in our cushy happy world, you can trade a certain number of dollars for a certain thing, kaching kaching, and walk out of the store happily finished with the transaction. I think in AW you don't survive long unless you think not just about the transaction but about WHO you're dealing with and what it means, what you're getting yourself into. To ignore the question of "who can I trust?" is suicidal and the fact that the ultimate answer is "noone" (at least until you roll a 12+ on advanced seduce & manipulate) doesn't help much, because the question is "who can I trust most for right now, given that I have to trust someone?" Short of magically happening to always having-the-thing-that-the-person-who-has-the-thing-you-want wants, or functioning law/authority/currency (of which, sure, there are pockets), trust is all you've got.

But as I said, AW's barter mechanic actually covers this handily. One thing that really helps is its granularity. 1-barter isn't a meal: it's a *month* of meals. That suggests that no one walks into the Maestro D's establishment and says "I'd like a plate of stew, what will it cost me?" The answer to that question is "who the fuck are YOU?"

If you're the hardholder, it costs you nothing, sir, and how's arranging that security detail going? If you're the nearby peasant who's been bringing in my potatoes like you're supposed to, it costs you nothing, but you're not getting the good stuff, obviously, and if you're the peasant who's been slacking off, fuck you, get out of my place. If you're the Operator, and I trust you, then okay, let's talk, maybe we can work something out -- but it's hardly worth doing so for ONE plate of soup. The plate of soup is going to be on the house if I think you REALLY can set me up with access to fresh plums, reliably. And if you're some stranger I've never seen before, who has some oddments you salvaged that you want to trade for a bowl of stew, first of all, my crew's guns are out while we're having this conversation, and second, okay, I'll look at your shit and see if *I* happen to need it right now, but really, you should be finding a place in this little social system of ours and convince us to trust you, or move the fuck on, or else you're going to end up dead.

My interesting two cents of follow-up there is that standard of value, whether dollars or bullet casings is exactly what you need for trade when there's no trust. I don't care if the guy at the grocery store checkout is a junkie who steals TVs when he's off work. My money spends the same as the next guy's. Travelling merchants need a standard of value. Holds big enough that you can't know every member personally need one. In a small community, say 200 or less, 1-barter might vary wildly from situation to situation. I think that abstraction of barter, where whatever your 1-barter is will be useful to trade with anyone, works a lot like the abstraction of threats of violence and negotiation (going aggro and manipulating). This is how it works for the PC's, not the rest of the world.

Sure, but how the moves work depends on fictional positioning, which depends on how we're imagining the world. I think it's very plausible that even when PCs do the barter moves, they're not operating in a smooth regularized space of transactions where they can say "thanks very much for the month of bodyguard services, I think I will be using this next 1-barter on retaining a savvyhead instead" and expect a lack of consequences. It seems very much in the spirit of the game that even theoretically simple transactions can have unexpected complications and strings attached.

The playbooks all list barter equivalencies with the caveat "As a one-time expenditure, and very subject to availability, 1-barter might count for..." -- there's no reason "very subject to availability" need only mean "oh, we don't have any in stock." It can well mean "we don't have any for YOU" or "you'd better talk to the hardholder about that".

It would also be interesting to have some Graeber-esque custom moves for situations where a standard of value hasn't stabilized and economic relations are more messily intertwined with social ones. "If you give 1-barter to someone, but with strings attached" already implies the kind of aggressive-gifting scenario, but you could flesh it out with some kind of hold mechanism -- gifts in real-world serious gifting economies often work almost like the skinner's hypnotic move -- someone in your debt is actively seeking some way to discharge it and regain the upper hand. Or maybe adding some options to the "When you make known that you want a thing and drop jingle to speed it on its way" move -- like "you don't have to pay, but you're going to owe Ba, and owing Ba for too long can be a dangerous proposition" and "you can get it from Dremmer, but doing so will make an enemy of Grip"...

The barter with string attached is a good example. OK, so Athena the Touchstone has a stack of Smithsonian picture books about ancient civilizations that are worth 1-barter. These are clearly rare, valuable for their knowledge and their beauty and a worthy trade item. Now Litts works in the algae pits. He's not educated and if we were being 100% realistic probably wouldn't care about the pretty pictures. But if Athena uses the "barter with strings attached" to get Litts to work her shifts in the vats this month in exchange for her books, then Litts is interested in the books descriptively because the move says he is proscriptively. Some heretofore undefined aspect of his character emerges that gives him a reason to accept this particular exchange.

This is a great post Plausible. Have you seen these moves for barter and debt?

Thanks for a great post!

My comment is that where's there's crosshairs looking at everyone, a certain immidiacy should permeate the economy. Especially one were induviduality is so profound.


I mean: Litts could be killed by an algea-infection within weeks, and anyone could be shot. Even the Hardholder might have a better position for survival for weeks/months, but stuff happens and it's not certain she can pay if the dangers are affecting her hardhold.

A certain immidiacy is good for play as well. I do love those moves, especially the Operator one.