of the themes when you go to mesopotamia and the roman empire and the hung dynasty, one of the things you see in precapitalist societies is that debt builds up and there is this mechanism to deal with the fact there is too much debt and all of these people in debt slavery. how did the ancient world deal with this problem? >> there is a problem that always came up especially in periods where you have virtual credit money rather than people using cash. there is always something you have to do to make sure everything doesn't go out of hand and massive people aren't effectively enslaved to the rich. in mesopotamia, they have just done a clean slate. periodically, every new king would come in and said, all debt is canceled, start over again. that became institutionalized every seven to 49 years depending on the reading. that was one way, wipe it out and start over again. another way was simply eliminate