This book is interesting, but flawed. Graeber compiles a broad socioeconomic history that spans centuries and the globe, which I found enjoyable and insightful. I also found his argument that money is, effectively, debt rather convincing (I was, however, a proponent of that view before reading the book, so I might be a bad judge of that argument). As far as that's the book's message, it's very well done. Graeber, however, tries to do a lot more. He attempts a close-to-Marxist critique of contemporary market economies, making several moral and policy assertions, but his claims about the world today fall very short.
His failures stem from two primary causes. The first is that, while he has impressive anthropological insights about the way that transactions have fit into the social relations in various cultures, he really doesn't understand economics, in the traditional sense, at all. This results in criticisms of the field and of the policy implications that come from it that are entirely untethered from reality. He erects more than a few straw men in this book. It also results in a utopian vision for the modern world (even if, perhaps, his utopia is less ambitious than most.)
The second, likely related, root cause of his book's shortcomings is that he glosses over the key developments of the 19th and early 20th centuries with very superficial analysis. After giving in depth analysis of various ancient tribal wedding practices, it was bizarre that he didn't have more to say about Bretton Woods. A corollary issue is that he was only limitedly successful in bridging the gap between his ideas about the social implications of money on an individual level and his critical ideas about the modern economy on the level of the global system. Because of his limited coverage of the construction of today's global economic systems and his limited understanding of broad economic theories, there are a lot of holes in his attempts to use his anthropological analyses to criticize neoliberalism and its institutions. This isn't to say that there's nothing convincing about any of his criticisms... It's hard not to be at least a little bit sympathetic to the argument that it's absurd to hold a nation responsible for IMF loans made to the dictators who oppressed them, and there's something inherently emotionally compelling when Graeber puts "in a good word for the non-industrious poor," since, "At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.” However compelling one might find all of that, though, it's superficial. He doesn't really suggest what it means for us or what could be done differently... he avoids the messy technical details altogether (and with economics, debt, and finance, the devil can often find a spacious abode in the details). Plus, no one needs to read 400 pages to get a couple of brief, simplistic, emotional appeals like that.
I would recommend this book to those rare people who are so fascinated by economics, culture AND history that reading a 400 page book about them seems like a great idea... and who have sufficient knowledge of all three (especially economics) to recognize Graeber's shortcomings. Parts of the book will be captivating for those people. I wouldn't, however, recommend bothering with it if you're interested in it primarily to learn anything about the world today... not much of this lengthy book deals with that and, when he gets to the topic, a quarter of what he says is preposterous, and most of the rest is pedestrian.
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