Thanks for sharing this. Graeber’s name came up many times during a recent a deep dive on ancient Mesoamerican societies. I had seen his new book The Dawn of Everything as well as an older text, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, and was eager to pick them up. I was unaware he had passed, however. Nearly all of his previous topics of research and publishing were of interest to me; it is a shame to realize this most recent book will be the last.
What a way to go to. The book, cowritten with archeologist David Wengrow, ties together so many different developments within archeology and anthropology that are driving some major paradigm shifts. These massively important paradigm shifts have mostly been confined to academia so far and I don't there's been such a broad attempt to tie them altogether like this. Especially not one geared towards the public
This book will undoubtedly change the way we talk about non-industrial peoples and lifestyles for decades to come.
E.g. the origins of agriculture. It's going from the idea of having a single point of origin to multiple (~15-20) points of origins around the world.
Another major shift in thinking about agriculture is realizing it wasn't so much of a technological advancement (indeed agricultural people had radically reduced lifespans, less leisure time, more disease, etc) as something people were likely forced into. And most people around the world grew at least part of their food or at least had the knowledge to do it so people shifted in and out of agriculture commonly.
Another major shift in thinking is around cities. In anthropology the concept of cities have actually been defined by hierarchical social structures. We have more and more examples of many very large rural places that very much go against the idea and drive a big hole in the idea that hierarchy is a natural biproduct of increasing populations.
I could go on. One that I wish got covered more in the book was the relationships between cultures and ecologies. This is more of a major shift in archaeobotany and will probably take a while to be fully fleshed out and reach the wider public, but archeologists are increasingly seeing, for example, the Amazon rainforest as a manufactured landscape. One that was very heavily shaped by the indigenous peoples that lived in them and would not be around in the way that it is without them. Same for California and it's deep dependence on cultural burning practices and also for most of Australia that early colonists often described as looking like a "giant well-managed park".
> We have more and more examples of many very large rural places that very much go against the idea and drive a big hole in the idea that hierarchy is a natural biproduct of increasing populations.
For those that are unaware, this is basically the core of anarchist political theory; hierarchies aren't merely natural consequences of human society, but were in fact created via force.
Isn't it rebelling against a naturalistic fallacy? I think the naturalistic fallacy here is the assumption that hierarchies are natural. The point being made is that hierarchies are manmade and must be enforced by people to uphold. It's NOT just a natural consequence of growth
I assume by force they mean coercion by other humans with a greater capacity for violence or control over resources, although the obvious contrary example would be the natural hierarchy of families, of which tribal and clan societies were an extension. Knowledge and skill also tend to create hierarchies without necessarily requiring coercion, depending on how valuable that is in a specific society, although consolidating that power probably does require coercion, at least by keeping knowledge secret.
This is a bit of a tangent to your comment, but I still kinda wanted to point it out.
In chimpanzee cultures, the "alpha males" are rarely the strongest or most violent ones. It's usually the most charismatic chimps that get along with the most other members of the group and have their support. Usually the approval of the elders plays a big role.
In some of the Northeast woodland cultures talked about in the book they had similar leadership models based on charisma. Charisma here doesn't really mean just having a way with words (though it does also mean that). It means being able to understand the needs of all the members and having their approval
Whether or not you wanna call this "hierarchy without coercion" is mostly a matter of semantics and what you ultimately define as "hierarchy". But I think a key difference to point out is that these positions of leadership don't really hold any permanent power. They have a lot of influence, but that influence can be taken away as easily as it's given to them
> more in the book was the relationships between cultures and ecologies.
Though he does touch on this topic in the chapter about the origins of private property.
Specifically that foragers did in fact took active care of, and shaped, their ecology not unlike farmers. It’s just that they didn’t have a burning need to permanently stick with the domestication of plants and animals as the food was abundantly available to them.
Thanks! That’s helpful. I was a little bit aware of these paradigm shifts, and it’s useful to know that Graeber was important in discovering and/or popularizing them.
Began "The Dawn of Everything" about a week ago, still on chapter 3.
Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, solid and mind-blowing.
Sometimes the book gets too much into petty fights. I didn't like its takes on Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" or Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". But that's a matter of my personal taste.
The problem with that part of the book is that it's wildly historically inaccurate. The Diggers and the Levellers were not just trying to enact a much more egalitarian society 100 years before Rousseau but were also (along with a bunch of other non conformist thinkers and doers across Europe) busy producing a vast body of populist pamphlets that later Enlightenment thinkers drew on, stripped of their theological content and rendered more palatable. Dismissing these as peasant revolts is the sort of intellectual snobbery that most early modern historians got over 50 years ago when it was realised that the Enlightenment didn't suddenly spring from nothing in France in 1715 and actually started much earlier in the protestant lands. Maybe this hasn't penetrated David Graeber's corner of academia yet?
It's good to see the Jesuit Relations (basically the National Geographic of its time) being introduced to a popular audience but the notion that the ideals of liberty and social equality didn't exist in European thought prior to contact between American and European cultures is just wrong.
> It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture
Well, La Boétie's "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" dates back to 200 years before Rousseau, and I wouldn't say it was inspired by American Indians. I am not saying that the discovery and then the deep relations that France did have with American Indians did not play an important in the literature and reflections: on the contrary just a bit after La Boétie's time, Montaigne integrated them in his thinking. That was still over 150 years before Rousseau.
Edit: There were other major transformations at work, like the fact that before 1500, writers would either be lords or strongly depend on King or lords both for their income and for being allowed to publish. It was a Middle Age organisation, with a chivalry based nobility; writing essays was not a thing, the number of themes was as reduced as the number of forms. Then society organisation changed, bourgeoisie and nobles started mixing more and more; writing was more long-form (technical reasons come into play too) and of course expanded the number of themes it dealt with.
There were plenty of Westerners who were concerned with inequality -- there were numerous failed peasant rebellions throughout Europe ever since the Middle Ages.
He fully addresses that in the book. Don't take my word for it, I don't have his explaining skills.
But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality". Equality under a ruler or rebellion against abuses is not the same as thinking the whole society as composed of equals. Think of no-slavery, equality among genders, sexual freedom, etc. Even thinkers that thought about equality before Iluminism (e.g. Thomas More) didn't go that far.
I strongly recommend you reading, at least, chapter 2 in the book. Is way deeper than what I explain.
> But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality".
Typical Graeber. Total nonsense. Radical equality has multi-origins in religious cults for 1000s of years. It has been part of 'Western' history writing for almost as long as we have historical narratives.
Pretty much as far as we can tell these ideas are resurfacing over and over in every big culture. For most we have no documentation but its clear there and has been documented lots of time.
How would contact with “First Nations” in any way help European elites to come to the concept of the radical equality you are describing? They neither had nor believed in any of these things.
Having read too much history for fun and jobs, the comment sounds wrong. You can go back to the Roman republic to find people concerned about this (Gracchi brothers).
The claim isn't actually that inequality wasn't a topic, the claim is that discussing inequality within the framing that equality might actually be the natural state of thing, or at least just as natural… that was a novel topic at the time of Rousseau.
And sure, it's probably more fair to talk about why even that topic was burgeoning in popularity rather than to imply that it was truly novel.
I haven't read the book but I assume here Rousseau is serving as an emblem for the Enlightenment (or an aspect of it at least), which is generally regarded as uhh kind of a big deal. That there were earlier Europeans here and there who discussed some of the same concepts is of little significance.
The Enlightenment didn’t grew out of concerns for inequality, it wasn’t even its big point even though the Enlightenment was a very intellectually diverse movement. Read Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, it contains the word “equality” exactly zero times.
Also, it is quite ironic to mention the thought of Rousseau as an exemplar of the Enlightenment when he is often put into the camp of Counter-Enlightenment.
I'm not as familiar with how anthropologists feel about Yuval Harari, but fwiw Graeber is far from unique amongst academic anthropologists in his distaste for Jared Diamond's work and the misconceptions and myths that it spread
It's pretty common in social science/philosophy that a paradigm gets popular, overly drawn upon and that then pisses off the next commentators.
Graener & Wengrove are as susceptible to this as others.
I mean... the origins of enlightenment liberalism, the origin of money and such don't really have distinct answers. There are always multiple, arguable narratives.
The "paradigm" concept is all about narrowing these to simple causal chains and dynamics... which then limits the next generation.
We love paradigms, anti-paradigms, paradigm shifts... So, every author likes to rebel against the preceding simplification and argue their own, calling them myths and misconceptions.
For the most part, imo, excess is what drives it all. The Jared Diamond paradigms, YNH's, Marx's... Graener & Wengrow are focused on challenging their paradigms as much as they are on promoting their own.
If successful, these new paradigms develop their own excesses and a new generation can get pissy with them.
>It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"?
I really hope he doesn't say that because Rousseau is just the high point of a debate about luxury and sociability that runs throughout the whole eighteenth century. He and others like him were influenced by travelogues from the New World describing natives as living simply and equitably. But he was equally influenced by the objective conditions of early modern capitalism, ancient Stoicism, and Christian writings about greed and pride. He wrote his own 'Confessions' in tribute to St.Augustine, after all.
I like Graeber, and he has a truly original mind, but he doesn't have the best reputation in academia for being 100% scholarly.
My pre-ordered copy of "The Dawn of Humanity", hot off the press, just arrived yesterday, from Bookshop.org, right on schedule. I am preparing to experience all my cherished preconceptions exploding.
I'm ashamed to admit I've never actually read any of Graeber's books, even though I'm fairly anarchist-leaning. I really need to change that. I didn't even know that he finished another one before he died, so I guess I'll have to add that to my list as well.
He’s got a lot of great talks and other appearances on YouTube. I don’t read much but I listen to stuff like this on Bluetooth headphones while I clean the house and do other physical work. Often instead of reading an authors book I will listen to them give the same book talk at three different venues. I don’t claim it’s as good as reading the book but compared to buying the book and watching it collect dust on my shelf it’s a winner.
Aha, I see I'm not the only one who listens to talks while doing housework or working out. I've been on a Varoufakis binge for a while, perhaps I'll check Graber now ;)
I recommend Debt the first 5000 years as well as The Democracy Project. Both of which were absolutely fascinating to me. Solidarity forever and rest in power Graeber.
I've seen quite a bit of criticism of the Debt book of basically being a giant exercise in cherry-picking and sort of a politically motivated narrative. However, history and economics are topics where neutrality and objectivity of authors are hardly the norm.
It's an interesting read despite that IMO. When I first read it as a teen it blew my mind, and over time I read a bunch of critiques that corrected beliefes I'd had based on it, but I still think it was a good read, because even a cherry picked tour through history and philosophy is a tour through history and philosophy.
Sure, but it is like that with a lot of stuff you read. I read the economist weekly and they constantly cherry pick whatever makes capitalism and deregulation look great. Still the economist is high quality journalism and has many insights worth reading.
Graeber also obviously has an angle but three are still many interesting insights and angles. I don’t think anyone is ever going to give e complete unbiased version of anything. Better to read different perspectives with an open mind and a healthy does of scepticism.
The Economist has plenty of elite respectability but its journalism is pretty bad. The breathless article about copilot replacing programming labour is fairly indicative of both their accuracy and attitude on most things.
Some of them were popular enough to get audiobook versions, which can help you get started if sitting down to read big tomes is something you find difficult
Bakunin-reading anarchist here admits to the same ignorance. Fascinated to learn that he was an early supporter of the Kurdish struggle in northern Syria.
I am not an anarchist at all but I think he has some very good criticisms of a lot of fundamental beliefs among modern day economists. Economics as a profession is built upon a set of axioms or premises about human nature and society. Graeber cannot go toe to toe with modern economists with their equations but he does a brilliant job of tearing apart the assumptions of economists within the classical school of though.
I lived “Debt: first 5000 years” and “Bullshit jobs”
Both challenge a lot of truthisms about our modern capitalist world. I am surprised the ideas in these books have not become more widely known on the political left.
If you think "Debt: first 5000 years" is brilliant job a tearing apart assumtions of economics you don't know anything about economics.
In fact is a pretty embracing takedown of strawmen he set up as how he imagines economists.
He very clearly has so much distaste for economist that he couldn't even be bother to actually research the history of economics. He makes so many fundamental mistakes that are so embracing, he clearly doesn't want debate. He basically sees economists as evil and he doesn't need to know more.
> I am surprised the ideas in these books have not become more widely known on the political left.
I don't know '5000 ...' was widely read by anybody that fancied himself a intellectual liberal. The problem is that the book doesn't real proscribe anything practical so it does not actually translate into any coherent political position.
> The problem is that the book doesn't real proscribe anything practical so it does not actually translate into any coherent political position.
The book wasn't written to promote a practical (political?) position. It's an anthropology of debt. I'll give an examples of something I learned from it that I personally found incredibly interesting:
* Economists all tell the same story about the origin of currency. "People used to barter, but that was impractical, so they invented money to make exchange easier." There is literally no example of that happening in any society anywhere on Earth at any known time. He details instead how, in China, the government needed to raise a large, professional army, so the gov't paid soldiers in their new currency and forced the population to pay taxes in that currency. Poof! Society has reoriented itself to start using currency.
> He very clearly has so much distaste for economist that he couldn't even be bother to actually research the history of economics.
Can you give a specific example where he got the history of economics wrong? Because he cites specific cases where, for example Adam Smith borrowed from Islamic texts on finance; I don't know of anywhere he makes "fundamental mistakes," but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.
It makes very, very clear arguments about debt and how that should be handled. Claiming its only a history is just not accurate. He is clearly promoting his politics with this book.
> 'll give an examples of something I learned from it that I personally found incredibly interesting:
And I'm telling you that this is a straw-men about economics that was never true.
Economics did actually think about these things but he had no interest researching that. He is totally misinterpreting the history of economics on this question.
The whole point about barter being impractical on small scales is exactly WHY we do not find societies in the small using barter. Its not that people starter bartering and evolved beyond it, its that the impossibility of barter forces your society to come up with something else. Economist were aware of this. Garber loves to claim how much smarter anthropologists are and how they understood social credit, gift giving and extraction, but of course non of this was new to economics.
Graeber literally didn't even know the history of economies about this and he didn't research it.
Read this from a economics text from 'Geld' 1892 and this is not some fringe economist, but one of the most famous of his time:
> Voluntary as well as compulsory unilateral transfers of assets (that is, transfers arising neither from a ‘reciprocal contract’ in general nor from an exchange transaction in particular, although occasionally based on tacitly recognized reciprocity), are among the oldest forms of human relationships as far as we can go back in the history of man’s economizing. Long before the exchange of goods appears in history, or becomes of more than negligible importance…we already find a variety of unilateral transfers: voluntary gifts and gifts made more or less under compulsion, compulsory contributions, damages or fines, compensation for killing someone, unilateral transfers within families, etc.
But apparently economists were totally unaware of any of this according to Graeber. Graeber himself claims that anthropologist (who are much smarter and not pawns of capitlaism). Graeber reference about anthropology date to 4 decades beyond this essay.
We can go on to the question of currency emerging.
We know that coins were first used in modern Turkey to pay mercenaries, and there was no government there that forced that currency to be used to pay taxes. These mercenaries were from outside of that territory and it was a store of value that can then be traded.
The problem with Graeber is that he collects all the example that prove his point, and ignores anything that might not agree with it. He goes at great lengths to find examples where to different cultures traded doesn't look like traditional long distance trade, and ignores many other more common examples. But he presents it as 'I have looked at everything'. Currency emerging from long distance trade between strangers is simply historical, if he likes it or not.
The dumb things he says in general are just mind blowing. He believes economies believe this:
> money is simply a mathematical system whereby one can compare proportional values, to say 1 of these is worth 17 of those.
Literally not even economics 101 level of understanding. How he seems to believe the Marginal Revolution of 1870s has never happened.
How about his claims about long distance trade:
> You don't cross mountains, deserts, and oceans, risking death in a dozen different ways, so as to show up with a collection of goods you think someone might want, in order to see if they happen to have something you might want.
What? Has he not heard of caravans, the silk road and the millenniums old history of long distance trade both on sea and on land. How did tin get from mountains of northern Iran to Greece during the bronze age exactly? Quite clearly there were many different political entities that you had to cross. We have documents from traders at the time who were constantly risking changing needs and demands in different places, supply lines that constantly disrupted by wars in different regions, huge risk were being taken all the time.
How about Portuguese sailors who tried to sale to India? They had never traded directly with India before.
He just has an incredibly narrow view on both economics and the real world. In his world the only thing that matters is small tribes and centralized states. Graeber has promoted ignore anything that doesn't fit in my world view to an artform.
We could go on about how Graeber reading of Adam Smith is totally wrong and many other things but dealing with Graeber to much ruins my day, I don't need to dredge up all this stuff again.
> Bronze age Greece turns out to have got its tin from (what is now) southern England.
While some tin certainty was mined in England, its not the only supply line in the bronze age.
> You miss the point about caravans: everything they carried in any volume were things there was a known and hungry market for.
No, I am not missing the point, the argument Graeber makes is very clearly about the denial of high risk entrepreneurial discovery.
I explained there is still market risk, supply lines are not perfectly stable and the don't just magically spring up with high certainty. Supply lines grow over time, extend, mutate and so on. Its called entrepreneurial discovery and it has been well studied in economics (something that seems to have almost no function in Graeber world view).
Of course volume increases as security increases, but even then the risk is still substantial. All European to Indian Ocean trade was incredibly high risk for the interior existence.
Non of your responses undermines my central argument I would say.
> Economics as a profession is built upon a set of axioms or premises about human nature and society.
No, its not. Well, unless you mean the universal assumptions of empirical science, that the universe is deterministic and operates by consistent laws.
It's true that there are some concepts (like the rational actor concept) that are influential in framing economic models, but these are generally recognized as, at best, simplifications, and there are approaches within economics that have done away with any one of them, and even within those that haven't an important area of work for decades has been identifying and quantifying the areas where those common bases are materially wrong and the impacts of the deviations from them.
I think modern economists have been acknowledging and quantifying the flaws in simplifying assumptions in economic models for decades [1].
That being said, I do think there is a serious problem in the way economics is often taught, and things like debt (and more broadly, anthropology) is part of the cure [2]
Noted, but they still are pretty accepted in mainstream economics (nobel prize in economics in 2002).
Also of course, they're not the only ones doing behavioral economics [1]:
> Imperfect information is core to modern econ; theories showing how imperfect information can cause markets to break down received a Nobel 20 years ago. Perfect rationality has been successfully challenged by behavioral economics for decades, and received Nobels in 2002, 2013, and 2017.
Economics is hard. Behavioral economics is having a hard time right now with many of the core hypothesis (loss aversion) and key interventions (priming) turning out to be experimentally not-reproducible.
He epitomized, embodied how and what public intellectuals should be, should aspire to: the a willingness to ask hard questions, to challenge conventional preconceived notions. It seems like academia these days is more about maintaining the status quo. If your ideas are engineering debate, it means you're doing your job.
He didn’t challenge any conventional preconceived notions. His parents were leftists and he grew up in a commune and all his views literally revolved around this political ideology.
Being incredibly rude to people who disagreeing with him. Accusing anybody that find flaws in his book as being pawn of capitalism. Doing poor research and ignoring all the evidence that doesn't fit his model. Putting anthropology above other social sciences. What an amazing guy.
This is a very HN way of looking at academia. The vast majority of academics aren't looking to be "public", they quietly do great work for decades, passing their knowledge down to their students. You don't hear about them because their main job is to educate not bloviate.
Not saying Graber does this, but there are academics (I can think of a Canadian professor) who are very much "public intellectuals" but whose entire career is popular due to controversy. Is that person educating or is he leading a social movement? I guess that's up for debate, but that's hwy people know who he is, not because of great work.
Very different perspective from the debate here in Norway . Here is is seen more as a duty of academics to engage with the public and a push to get them to do that more. What value is knowledge if it is not known? We live in a media world increasingly dominated by quacks and pseudo science. The need for real experts to make themselves heard is bigger than ever.
Thus at least hear in Norway the academics who popularized knowledge and engage with the public are celebrated. Politicians have started to put more pressure on academics to speak up.
I know from a mother who was a life long journalist that it was always very hard to get experts to talk to media. They are so focused on a level of accuracy and formality that often is entirely unsuitable to address the public at large. But that does not mean that the alternative is to let quacks dominate public discourse.
If we're thinking of the same professor/Kermit the Frog impersonator, he was definitely somewhat of a public figure before he got involved with the C-16 controversy.
If you look at his public appearances from before this viral clip (and even for a year or two after), most of it is fairly well grounded and uncontroversial (or at least, not controversial for controversy's sake).
I felt like sharing this comment I left here when he passed, as it confirms for me the adoration many of us apparently felt for him.
“David saved my academic career, if not my life. When I faced expulsion from the LSE, having already left the University of Chicago due to the health issues, he wrote a compelling letter on my behalf when there was no reason for him to do so. I wasn’t even in his department.
Although he and I disagreed about a number of things, I will forever appreciate him sticking his neck out for me when there was little evidence to suggest it was worth doing.
Recently had a throwaway thought while reading The Dawn of Everything.
The formation of cultural norms fundamentally sit on the idea of recollection of the distant past and not of that which has just happened in front of you.
Example:
The reason for wearing ties is part of the western cultural code not because each person distinctly and has first-hand witnessed how it started, it's just being shaped by historical precedent.
So what happens, over time, to cultural norms when the recollection can be made in first-person, distinct ways? (Think the internet, VR)
This has happened to some extent forever, through oral tradition, but manufactured media certainly accelerates the process. If you’re interested in this kind of thing i’d recommend Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, in which the author analyzes the way nationalism developed with the invention of the printing press. It's a classic text of anthropology and absolutely blew my mind when i read it as a teenager.
How do people on HN deal with the potential disappearance of work altogether ?
physical labour -> boston dynamics
office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7)
it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of tasks will just vanish
and i'm saying this with a human life approach. How do we organize cities / nations around that. Do we plan for smooth transition, say 40 years of gradually smarter tooling so people stay in charge but with advanced assist ? do we go UBI ? do we convert every human as a space tourist ?
No, not at all, I just see so many jobs where things are impossibly inefficient, bad software, bad education, bad management, bad everything. A lot of it due to the mismatch of old paper practice and human interfacing between lame digital UIs and printers. It's so bad that people are faster writing down documents instead of using software. Now if you go full digital.. what takes 15 min is now 15 ms. Same goes for a lot of operations across society.
What I've seen is that increased efficiencies have massively increased the amount of "things" being done by the same number of people.
As a random example, I'm dealing with a large government department on a semi regular basis as a consultant, so I get to see lots of parts of their business and in some ways I know them better than their own staff do.
It's madness. They have the same sized team of admins in charge of an exponentially growing set of business applications.
Decades ago large enterprises like this department would have had maybe 2-3 core applications, typically running on a mainframe. Then they'd have a few dozen peripheral applications in the sense that "email" counted as one of those apps!
Now? Their single sign on system has hundreds, and that's not including hundreds more non-SSO applications. They're almost certainly over a thousand if you count things like Google Maps (which they use heavily!) and the long tail of developer tools, system admin platforms, and whatnot.
In the past, people like me would have had a dedicated secretary. Now? I'm expected to not just manage my own calendar, but do my own project management, organise my own hotel rooms, and so forth.
It has become "so easy" that "anyone can do it", so everyone does. This just means that instead of one or two meetings a week, now we have many per day. Being able to organise a meeting doesn't mean that the same number of meetings have less organisation overhead. It means many more meetings.
Work hasn't be reduced. We're doing more of it than ever before...
The disappearance of work seems greatly exaggerated. Education and healthcare are a big chunk of the economy and nowhere near automated. Also consider that we’ve been talking about driverless cars for over a decade, and this is something that should be well under way by now, but it’s slow going.
I used to think this as well until I read Bullshit Jobs. The point Graeber makes very well is that as jobs have gotten automated a way they have been replaced by a huge number of meaningless office jobs. And this isn’t based on him judging particular jobs as pointless but rather a huge number of people writing to him and explaining just how pointless their jobs are.
So why don’t these people quit their jobs? Because a lot of nonsense jobs pay well and people don’t want to be unemployed because society is not setup to pay people to not work. Yet society is ironically happy to pay people to do nonsense.
Economists have a hard time believing this can be true. Things like efficient market theory suggests that companies want to be as efficient as possible. Yet they fail to see the tribal nature of humans. That is partly what Graeber exposes: How many CEOs will keep around people they don’t need because what is the point of being a boss of you got nobody to boss around?
CEOs are a bit like kings of old. Importance is shown through the number of retainers you have.
And often it is just self preservation. When management realize their whole division is full of people with no useful tasks to do they realize that they themselves risk getting fired. Why have managers and VPs if there are nobody to manage?
I don’t doubt such jobs exist, though I haven’t read the book. I don’t know how prevalent they are, though? A sibling comment casts some doubt on it [1].
But what we can say, thanks to the pandemic, is that many parents and children are very unhappy when schools close, and that there is a shortage of medical staff.
There also seem to be shortages of various kinds of workers that are “essential” but not well-paid. Arguably they should be paid better.
> That is partly what Graeber exposes: How many CEOs will keep around people they don’t need because what is the point of being a boss of you got nobody to boss around?
i've literally seen this in action: managers jockeying for promotion hire as many workers or contractors as they can get, bloating their teams to prove who can "manage more people" best...
David Graeber already had an answer to this with his idea of "bullshit jobs", wherein as the labor that is necessary to keep society running is slowly reduced or automated away entirely by technological advancement, more jobs are invented that serve no practical purpose other than to keep people performing the wage labor ritual of selling their time to capitalists (keep in mind Graeber was a left-wing anarchist) in order to justify having access to resources. Even if there's absolutely no basis in reality for people to continue working, people will be made to think that they need to continue working and will be kept under the threat of work or starvation no matter how abundant resources and labor power are unless they simply refuse to continue to do so like we're seeing right now with the Great Resignation, which is essentially just people waking up to the realization that most of the jobs available to people today (especially young people entering the workforce) are bullshit jobs.
I assumed that his views represented the previous post ww2 world where work, companies, careers were all things to pursue but since this decade I think there's a mismatch as we can indeed see in the great resignation.
Maybe it will push back people to pursue passion, excellency and social bond (I will do things of high value for me and others so we're all happier).
I agree with you but I'm also not really interested in getting into what would undoubtedly be a fruitless tangential debate about anarchism on the orange site, so I just phrased the comment in a way to skirt that potential discussion
Why is anarchism necessarily socialist? If it’s just about the lack of hierarchal centralized power, then laissez faire capitalism can fit with decentralized communities who don’t restrict economic activity.
I’m not saying it’s good, only questioning a certain definition.
This anarchist is very supportive of non-authoritarian voluntary socialism. I hope that my support and those of many others will eventually bring it into existence. I value that workers be free, more than that they be organized. In many cases the former will depend somewhat on the latter, but that is contingent not essential.
Capitalism is itself hierarchical. You have the Capitalist who owns the Capital goods and controls the workers who provide the labour in order to turn a profit all of which is exploited by the capitalist for the capitalist gains.
Markets are accepted in Anarchism (and socialism) but Capitalism is not.
Why do AnCaps present themselves as anarchist? Is it a name recognition marketing strategy? Are they themselves mistaken, or are they trying to convince others of them being anarchist?
I see this a lot, where ancaps present themselves as anarchist, and believe that they are left wing, but when asked are shown to be ancaps by their answers. I don’t know what the endgame is in these conversations, for them or for me, as I’m mostly asking exploratory questions and have no agenda in asking per se.
Murray Rothbard did it to both high jack left wing fervor and also to convince people that it was radical to give capitalists unfettered power. It's little more than an attempt by capitalists to create a fake opposition that is actually anything but. Most AnCaps do it because they have been duped into thinking it's real Anarchism (I was a fervent AnCap from 2012-2015. The Ron Paul campaign got me in, and Rand Pauls hypocrisy convinced me to join the left wing)
The largest potential for disappearance of works has already happened.
It was called the industrial revolution, and literally since then the smartest intellectual have predicted mass unemployment and the disappearance of work.
Endlessly the same prediction with endlessly the same argument only to be proven wrong over and over.
But the argument is always the same. The largest amount of labor used to be farm labor. Used to be 95% of the population.
No innovation today comes even remotely close disrupting that large a % of the population.
One of the most labor intensive things humans did for 1000s of years was making of cloth, an absurd amount of work. That was as well disrupted.
The pace of labor disruption today is WAY slower and the dynamic economy is WAY faster at producing new uses of labor. Hence why we have not actual seen this supposed collapse in the amount of required labor despite an endless parade of supposedly smart people predicting it for 200 years straight.
I still don't agree about the similarity today. Every step in the past created a new layer (if I get your point), by virtue of being new, couldn't be solved so humans were involved to do it. But what's new to be done now ? Technology is wrapping around all layers of the pyramid, from mechanical to factories to information to "intelligence" (to an extent). I honestly fail to see what it won't be able to handle. Especially considering how lame most jobs are today[0] I don't think it will hold long.
[0] I've ranted about it so many times but it reaches absurd levels .. people are not doing much, and the few that is asked of them is ridiculous. Plus it's often done through coercion by mediocre management that nobody respect (causing immense political friction, paranoia and misery.. most of my colleagues delay work and watch tik tok .. after talking to them the main reason is that nothing is working right nobody care, thus nobody wants to work anymore).
At every point the smartest people asked 'But what's new to be done now ?'. Turns out even the smartest people don't know the future.
At a certain point its realizing that your own limitation if imagination is what preventing you from predicting the future.
Again, at every point over the last 200 years smart people were sitting around asking this same question, finding the same answers and then promptly be totally wrong.
How many times does it need to happen before you believe a historical pattern rather then your own limited predictive capability.
Fact is, if anything, labor is the limiting factor for a lot of things we would want to do.
> Especially considering how lame most jobs are today
Jobs today are generally less lame then the past. This is another Marxist myth, alienation doesn't hold up.
The book - Fabric of Civilization takes an informative dive on what happened as cotton/wool fabric technology evolved and different bottle necks in the process changed, along with who was compensated more and who lost their jobs in the process.
I didn't read that book but remember the topic a bit. But things have changed, a lot less people back in the days and a lot more limited technological capabilities.. now tech can really cover most of what people do. There's a shift IMO.
That I mostly care about people existence and well being, above the contemporary economic systems (because some can say, we can't sustain GDP without that style of work and that I believe our system is quite unhealthy and that deviating from it can lead to very different but better lives)
It's a well-written biography and Graeber comes across as a great guy but on the other hand the Brad DeLong takedown linked in the article [1] is quite something.
I'm wondering how he wrote a 500 page book on debt without really understanding banking?
David Graeber had an account here and defended himself from DeLong's accusations in a comment [1]. They even had an exchange in that thread. At best I think DeLong has been pretty uncharitable to Graeber.
DeLong was definitely trolling Graeber, but Graeber brought it on himself with overreaction to reviews which brought up the error. (A reviewer opened an article by saying it was an impressive book he was considering setting as a text for his students and a few paragraphs of summary of points Graeber made which are good, before highlighting a mistake and another argument he considered weak. Graeber wrote a screed about how the reviewer was "part of a strategy of deligitimization... without even being aware he was doing so" and insisted the Apple quote was the only error in his book and it was actually the editors' fault...)
Debt is a thought-provoking book, but it's a book with no shortage of sloppy errors and dubious ancillary claims mostly incidental to its actual arguments. One DeLong probably should have picked up when he was compiling his lists is referring to Keynes' Treatise on Money his "most famous work", which is a bit like calling Wings Paul McCartney's most famous band.
I'd accept that. OP's submission has a good example where Graeber's difficulty taking criticism almost cost him and Wengrow a publication which was saved by Wengrow's more measured approach.
He and Wengrow were serious in a certain sense: They were determined to publish extracts in peer-reviewed journals, to establish scholarly credibility. When they made their first submission, to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, they received brief comments dismissing their work as insufficiently “new.” Graeber was immediately distressed, convinced the anonymous reviewers had “some ax to grind.” Wengrow managed to calm him down while he replied on their behalf. Politely, Wengrow asked for examples of where exactly work like theirs had appeared before. The Journal was unable to produce any. It accepted the paper. Graeber was amazed. “How do you do that?” Wengrow remembers him marveling. “The man did not know how to handle stress,” another friend told me. A heated exchange on Twitter could derail him. Still, he refused to shy away. One persistent bugbear was the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong — after DeLong’s blog took him to task for a handful of factual errors in Debt, the two became entrenched in a protracted flamewar. (DeLong recently resurfaced, amid positive press for The Dawn of Everything, to affirm his stance that “nothing David Graeber writes is trustable.”)
I'd missed the claim about Keynes on first reading. I suppose it would have to be The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It appears to be very difficult for one person to write a historical treatise of such scope and breadth without making a nontrivial number of sloppy errors. There's so much surface area of things that could go wrong relative to the powers of human attention and working memory. I recall Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy which also has no shortage of sloppy errors and dubious ancillary claims despite Russell's reputation as a careful thinker.
I greatly enjoyed reading Debt. It gave me a new and valuable perspective on many things. I would not trust it alone as a source for any particular factual claim and would carefully check the references as needed, but as a whole I found the core arguments compelling. (That said, I think the overall level of scholarship is actually quite good and I would extend this same caution to any large work synthesizing many sources.) Like you said, it's a thought-provoking book.
I like your example of Russell's History of Western Philosophy.
Nitpicking (trolling) stuff that does not change or invalidate the central thesis is unhelpful.
Food fights over "most influential" (books, albums, paintings) is just hipster gatekeeping. As if. Which is more influential? St Peppers or Rubber Soul? Could the more popular St Peppers exist without Rubber Soul? Blah, blah, blah. Most people don't care. Both are amazing and worth studying.
I'd much prefer to read both DeLong and Graeber's Top Ten Albums lists, over DeLong kibitzing about Graeber's choices.
Especially now that I know Graeber was easily antagonized. Continuing to poke him just feels mean spirited. And definitely antithetical to scholarship.
Right on. I'd actually edited out for brevity "perhaps a better analogy is that it's like saying Rubber Soul is the most famous Beatles album." and am now happy I left it to you to express better.
I want to add to the above comment. Graeber's lack of integrity and disregard for facts should cast a shadow of mistrust over his other work, not to mention his explosive reaction on being called out for it.
If you can't trust someone's writings on facts you know about, why trust them on facts you don't know about? One of the essential things to understand when taking in information is to first understand: is this information trustworthy?
I see the above as clear evidence Graeber is not only untrustworthy but explicitly seems to feel he has the right to be so. Worse yet, he writes from the perspective of an expert on economic anthropology, but has taken a position where very basic facts of that field are beyond his ken. Not because of a lack of intellect or understanding, but because he has taken that position on purpose.
And now I see so many people on a site for hackers and technology celebrating someone's ideas without first wondering if those ideas are even factually correct and it puzzles me how we ended up here. Discussion about the factual correctness of Graeber's ideas, or the trustworthiness of his perspective and person, seems to be actively discouraged.
I’m going to assume that you’re basing your opinion of Graeber on Brad DeLong’s unhinged attacks on his work and character. There are no factual mistakes in “Debt” that impact the solidity of Graeber’s conclusions or historical narratives, most inaccuracies were minor and corrected in subsequent editions without changing the character of the book or the arguments within. Many if not most of DeLong’s attacks of inaccuracies are matters of interpretation, and in such cases it’s generally better to give the words of more accomplished and respected academics more weight than less accomplished or respected peers. As to where Graeber stands in relation to DeLong, I quote Graeber from a post here on HN:
“I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England.
Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.”
To name just one of Graeber's essential lies: he makes the claim that Federal Reserve issuing American debt is privately controlled and weaves an extensive chapter based in fundamental ways on this misapprehension. This is a lie that's not "minor" nor "a matter of interpretation" nor unrelated to the "character of the book or arguments within": it's a fundamental misapprehension of the most important debt instrument in modern history (perhaps all history). In a book about debt in history.
I don't really care too much for Graeber's self-important response. If the answer is, yes, Graeber's entitled to say what he wants because people celebrate and have conferences about him, and those who disagree are implied to be beneath him... well, the brazen self-importance is so astonishing that I can't rightly understand how one can agree with that degree of self-importance so directly presented, especially when it comes paired with no actual defense of his statements -- not even a link.
Statements of the form "I'm right because I'm important, and that's all I need to say" are not usually tolerated from almost anyone as a substitute for basic, bare truths. That they are accepted here is not only a comment on the character of Graeber but on the character of his followers.
> To name just one of Graeber's essential lies: he makes the claim that Federal Reserve issuing American debt is privately controlled
From a short piece of writing from the St. Louis Fed itself, linked to in another comment below:
>The Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress.
Now, we could quote the next few lines too, for a bit more context:
> So is the Fed private or public? The answer is both. While the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
Clearly, it's a rather unique institution that makes arguments that it is privately controlled or not rather harder to resolve.
But that also means that this is not "an essential lie" by Graeber. He has elided some of the complexity in favor of what he sees as a more important truth, without saying something that it categorically false.
American debt is issued entirely by Congress and the Treasury, and its monetization controlled by the Fed's Board of Governors, which is appointed by the government and independently operated. There's no means of control over these two things outside the U.S. government. There's also the FOMC, but this is relatively unessential such that it's unlikely to be related to whatever "essential truth" Graeber has in mind. In particular, they don't set monetary policy but do whatever the Board of Governors orders in that regard.
I wasn't making an argument about the behavior of the Fed.
You stated that Graeber had told "an essential lie" in claiming that the Fed was privately controlled. I quoted from the St. Louis Fed. their own text which (a) confirms that it is not part of the government (b) it's complicated.
I don't really give a damn about the argument on whether the Fed is or is not part of the government; what I care about is people claiming that someone is lying when they are not.
The point is issuance of American debt, and the Fed's role in it, is not privately controlled, neither in fact or in essence. Saying otherwise is an obvious lie in both senses.
This dispute might originate deeper into Graeber's other work on debt in "Debt: The first 5000 years." In common parlance, Treasury Bonds are the debt. But, in Graeber's theory of debt, the currency itself is also debt.
I haven't read Debt yet but one can look at the index and jump right to p365 (Federal Reserve Bank - loans to government by, 365-366). It characterizes the Federal Reserve as "a peculiar sort of public-private hybrid" (this is certainly true, and it's a deliberate design feature) and gives an accurate but highly abbreviated description of fractional reserve banking and the Fed's purchase of government bonds.
Nothing on this page tells me that he doesn't understand the system or is attempting to deceive. I don't understand where your objection is coming from. Have you branded Graeber the great deceiver because of a line like "while technically, the Fed cannot lend money directly to the government by buying Treasury Bonds, everyone knows that doing so indirectly is one of its primary reasons for being"? That statement is a lot less controversial than you perhaps believe it is.
Everything on this page seems pretty innocuous, and while I'm sure the whole book is a lot more daring... this doesn't jive with your criticism at all.
> To name just one of Graeber's essential lies: he makes the claim that Federal Reserve issuing American debt is privately controlled and weaves an extensive chapter based in fundamental ways on this misapprehension.
No, he does not. This is the only passage I can find where Graeber comes close to what you claim he wrote:
“The Federal Reserve—despite the name—is technically not part of the government at all, but a peculiar sort of public-private hybrid, a consortium of privately owned banks whose chairman is appointed by the United States president, with Congressional approval, but which otherwise operates without public oversight.”
As has been pointed out to you at least twice in the other comments, this is how the Federal Reserve describes itself. You’ve misremembered Graeber (here I will be charitable to you and not claim that you’ve lied) as saying the Fed is “privately controlled”, and your repeated assertions, as you’re backed into a corner in other threads, depends on this precise misremembering of what he actually wrote.
And furthermore, he does not “weave an entire chapter based in fundamental ways on this misapprehension”. The chapter is primarily about the role of the US military, its global domination, and ability to wage war in support of its economic interests, in the proliferation of the USD and its economic power. The paragraphs about the Fed and it’s precise association with the government is basically a sidebar.
> Statements of the form "I'm right because I'm important, and that's all I need to say" are not usually tolerated from almost anyone as a substitute for basic, bare truths. That they are accepted here is not only a comment on the character of Graeber but on the character of his followers.
I thought you were more acquainted with the long running dispute between Graeber, Delong, and a host of neoliberal/libertarian/Austrian economists. Apparently, you do not realize that the passage I quoted was from the final response that Graeber offered in their long running dispute, a dispute that included answers, in detail, of DeLong’s specious claims.
“I’m right because I am important” was not Graeber’s argument, his argument was along the lines of “if “Debt” was so riddled with obvious and crippling flaws, why as it been so influential in economics and anthropology? Why has it led to conferences and it’s own influential body of work that cites it? Why did it lead to a professorship at the London School of Economics? Collaborations with prominent economists?”
Given your attack on Graeber is riddled with errors, depends upon a misremembered quote, demonstrates ignorance of the content of his own long-running defense of his book, how are we now to judge your character as you have seen fit to judge me and his other supporters?
I actually followed the Graeber-DeLong argument when it broke, and found Graeber to be quite unhinged. In one tweet I found memorable, he accuses DeLong of "war crimes" -- presumably for supporting free trade or neoliberal economics or something[1]. At other points he threatened legal action.
But it doesn't matter, really. Graeber knew the target audience on HN wasn't aware of the debate--why would most of them be aware? He expected the audience to simply accept his greatness without evidence.
Just search for "de-legitimization". Again, he doesn't bother to respond to any actual points raised and just exercises a whole lot of ad-hominem - and unlike with Brad, someone like henry Farrel is much more of a fellow traveller.
If you read the critiques that Graeber discusses, you’ll see they’re exactly as he describes: instead of addressing Graeber’s arguments, they instead insinuate that his ideas are not worth addressing (after using the silly Apple error to dismiss Graeber’s entire body of work).
Notably, he does respond to their actual points, at length and to such an extent that copying and pasting an example which includes both Farrel’s critique and Graeber’s response would dwarf my words in this reply. are we even reading the same article?
HN readers would be aware of the long running debate because he mentions the debate, summarizes several elements of it, points readers to where it can be found, IN THE VERY HN POST FROM WHICH I QUOTED!!
Perhaps Graeber believed that HN readers were capable of using search engines to familiarize themselves with the debate, and verify his claims. Apparently, not all HN users are capable of this, as demonstrated by your posts throughout this discussion.
And, we have further evidence of either your incuriosity or obfuscation. No, Graeber did not accuse DeLong of war crimes in that tweet because of DeLong’s mere support of neoliberal economics. If you’d read further that Twitter thread, Graeber provides context, mentioning the ELZN and NAFTA.
Plug those into your favorite search engine, and you’ll get references to the Zapatista’s revolt against NAFTA, and their reasons for their actions. From The Nation[1]:
“We are a product of 500 years of struggle,” began the Declaration of War read out from the city-hall balcony to the people gathered in the main square, or Zócalo. Then came the phrase that would become iconic the world over: “But today we say ¡Ya Basta! (Enough is Enough!).” Named after the equally iconic revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, the Zapatistas planned the rebellion to coincide with the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Their prediction, which history has subsequently borne out, was that NAFTA would hasten the dispossession of indigenous people both by opening up the region to large-scale ranching and by driving down the prices small farmers received for their corn, beans, and coffee. Today, Mexico imports nearly half of the corn and beans it consumes, and is equally dependent on staple products such as American-produced pork, chicken, wheat, and powdered milk.
Researcher and activist Diana Itzú Gutiérrez Luna, who has worked extensively with Zapatista communities, considers the economic warfare inaugurated by NAFTA part of a larger geopolítica del despojo, or geopolitics of plunder. There are currently 77 military bases in Chiapas, most of them located in the autonomous regions controlled by the Zapatistas and/or in areas rich in natural resources: water, uranium, and the barite used for fracking and the drilling of oil wells. “Basically, what they’re attempting is a territorial advance that implies the extermination of these worlds of indigenous life,” she says. The advance, she notes, has assumed a number of different disguises, from the “Puebla-Panama” development plan pushed by former president Vicente Fox to the “Special Economic Zones” designed to extend Mexico’s border model of tax breaks and low-wage maquiladora labor into the deep south.“
So, there you go. An ongoing war in Mexico between ELZN anarchists and the Mexican and US governments over NAFTA and the myriad other destructive neoliberal policies that have wreaked havoc upon indigenous people from which the Zapatistas originate and defend.
Why does Graeber speficially point to DeLong here, claiming that a war crimes tribunal exists that would try him? Just because DeLong merely supports these policies? Another search would have revealed to you that DeLong, in his role of deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in Clinton administration, wrote the economic impact estimates justifying and defending NAFTA. In other words, he was a core member of the team that architected the very trade deal that launched a war between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government.
Knowing now these key facts of which you were previously apparently ignorant, who in this twitter exchange was more justified in their (mutually hyperbolic) statements: DeLong, claiming that that Graeber does not know the power relationship between creditors or debtors - the subject of the Debt book - or Graeber, claiming that the Zapatistas would accuse and try DeLong for war crimes in Chiapas? I think the answer is quite obvious, but judging from the deliberately obtuse arguments that you’ve made, I suspect that you’ll be able to rationalize to yourself that none of what I pointed out here matters.
> There are no factual mistakes in “Debt” that impact the solidity of Graeber’s conclusions or historical narratives, most inaccuracies were minor and corrected in subsequent editions without changing the character of the book or the arguments within.
It's been a while since I read Debt but I distinctly remember Graber's disingenuous take on Adam Smith's famous "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Graber argues that this is wrong because English (Or was it Scottish?) shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence.
I don't know about you but to me that is complete batshit.
The book also makes a way too big of deal about The Myth of Barter. While that is interesting from an anthropological perspective, Graber makes it sound like the bulk of modern economics is somehow based on this myth.
I get why the book is popular. It posits to tackle big questions and contains the usual tropes against the state, big business, banks etc. that a left leaning audience will be more than willing to eat up. But I don't think it provides any new perspectives on economics that bear any resemblance to the real world.
I don't think your summary of why Debt was/is popular will hold up to scrutiny. If you investigate with an open mind why people appreciate the book, it won't be merely because it plays up anti-state and anti-biz, anti-bank tropes. There's tons of other books that do that which people do not find comparable insightful.
The emphasis of the myth of barter and the rest of the stuff about how debt works is interesting especially because it doesn't set out to make the story simpler. He makes the story far more complex and intriguing. It leaves people with the capacity to hold more lightly to our assumptions about the nature of money and power and the economy. None of these things should be taken as inevitable laws of society or something. We recognize that there are many different ways to think about these things. And the simple part is to stop thinking that we all know some supposedly obvious idea like "we must pay our debts" and to start wondering a lot more about all the complexity and presumptions that go into how debt fits into our relationships and situations.
I doubt you'll find readers of Debt who come away extra confident that they now know the answer to how things "really" work. Most readers probably feel more that they have a view of how much there might be out there to understand, and they are willing to be less overconfident and more questioning about it all.
Actually I don't completely disagree with your comment.
"The book asks big questions" would be a better discription than what I originally wrote. The book makes for excellent dinner table conversation.
But I stand by my assertion that it does not provide any new perspectives on economics that bear any resemblance to the real world. And if anything, it makes it difficult for the reader to understand the financial system because of its factual inaccuracies.
Given that a decently large portion of the book discusses the anthropology of money and debt in a wide array of diverse cultures, the idea of lacking "resemblance to the real world" seems wrong to me. The real world includes all those different situations that are starkly different from the current dominant economic case.
The core of the book in my reading is not a description of the dominant financial system. I read it as a discussion of multiple factors that influence how debt can be used in a wide variety of ways in societies. And the parts that discussed our current financial arrangements might not be precise in all regards, but they were still more accurate by my understanding than the wrong-but-common concepts that are asserted by most naive citizens and used in most political rhetoric.
> Given that a decently large portion of the book discusses the anthropology of money and debt in a wide array of diverse cultures, the idea of lacking "resemblance to the real world" seems wrong to me. The real world includes all those different situations that are starkly different from the current dominant economic case.
Ignoring the quaint cultural practices of remote tribes does not diminish one's ability to understand the economics of the real world that they live in. Having an inaccurate picture of they actual system they live in on the other hand is far more damaging.
> but they were still more accurate by my understanding than the wrong-but-common concepts that are asserted by most naive citizens and used in most political rhetoric.
That is a rather low bar. But the book still has quite a few howlers:
- US treasury bonds are literally the safest securities on the planet. Graber calls them a debt that will never be paid.
- Graber claims that the global status of the dollar is maintained in large part by the fact that it is, again since 1971, the only currency used to buy and sell petroleum, glossing over the fact that the US dollar was the reserve currency since Bretton Woods. He then follows up with what can only be called a conspiracy theory, suggesting that the US invasion of Iraq was possibly motivated by Saddam Hussein's switch to the Euro.
- Graber likens the large holdings of US treasures by Western Europe, Japan and Korea to a tribute system which siphons wealth from these supposed client states to the American Empire. But when it comes to China holding vast quantities of the very same treasuries, he says from China's point of view, this is the first stage of a very long process of reducing the United States to something like a traditional Chinese client state.
On your point about US treasury bonds… I don’t have the book in front of me but this is a common, colloquial saying among many of my peers in finance. No one wants the U.S. to pay all of its debt, the structure of the global economy today requires these debts to function. They’re basically cash equivalents.
Grabers comments on the dollar as an oil currency… I disagree with that. Still, many investors I know around his age would have said something similar 10-15 years ago. The U.S dollar as a reserve currency is America's greatest strength (maybe not greatest but it’s up there) and weakness. Anything that impedes the dollar as a global reserve currency is a significant risk to the U.S.
Grabers comments on Europe, Korea, China, etc. you mention- again not an unusual thing to say in my view. Debatable certainly, but not obviously wrong.
> No one wants the U.S. to pay all of its debt, the structure of the global economy today requires these debts to function. They’re basically cash equivalents.
That is an entirely valid point. But that is not what Graber is alluding to:
> American imperial power is based on a debt that will never-can never-be repaid. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept.
They are cash equivalents exactly because nobody believes the US will default. Basically, the exact opposite of what Graber is saying.
> The U.S dollar as a reserve currency is America's greatest strength (maybe not greatest but it’s up there) and weakness.
People keep saying that but I am yet to hear a compelling explanation of the tangible benefits the US actually derives from this arrangement. Graber points to seigniorage or tribute as he likes to call it. Ben Bernanke, obviously not a neutral source, claimed in 2016 that this is on the order of $20 billion a year[0]. The highest, albeit unsourced claim I could find puts it around $100 billion[1]. Either way, in the larger scheme of things, it is chump change.
> Anything that impedes the dollar as a global reserve currency is a significant risk to the U.S.
Even assuming that is true, it's hard to link it to the invasion of Iraq. Iraq started selling oil for Euros in 2000. This wasn't some rouge act of defiance, the switch happened under the aegis of the UN's food-for-oil program. If it actually was a significant risk, the US could have simply vetoed it at the Security Council.
> Grabers comments on Europe, Korea, China, etc. you mention- again not an unusual thing to say in my view. Debatable certainly, but not obviously wrong.
So, is a foreign county holding huge reserves of US treasuries a) The act of a vassal paying tribute to the US or b) The machination of a rival intended to turn the US into a client state? Certainly, they both can't be true.
I haven't read Debt yet but I have a copy in front of me. Yours is the second critique here that seems to be based on a misreading or misunderstanding of the work.
You've not fully quoted Adam Smith:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
Graeber's refutation, in part:
The bizarre thing here is that, at the time Smith was writing, this simply wasn't true. Most English shopkeepers were still carrying out the main part of their business on credit, which means that customers appealed to their benevolence all the time.
There's nothing disingenuous here. Benevolence (mutual trust and an interest in both one's well being and the well being of the other party in the relationship, informed by some knowledge of one's own needs and the needs of the other party, if you'd prefer to unpack it) is needed to establish a credit relationship.
None of this seems like "complete batshit." Some of the stuff that comes later might be, I haven't read it. (have you read it?)
I've looked at that section of Debt again and it's even worse than I remember.
> You've not fully quoted Adam Smith
That's a strange objection because neither did Graber. The lines appear in the middle of a long and dense paragraph from the chapter Of the Principle Which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour[0]. I don't understand why you feel the second line in anyway changes the point about rational self interest driving specialisation. Have you read the Wealth of Nations?
> Benevolence (mutual trust and an interest in both one's well being and the well being of the other party in the relationship, informed by some knowledge of one's own needs and the needs of the other party, if you'd prefer to unpack it) is needed to establish a credit relationship.
Sure, it makes sense if you redefine benevolence. FWIW, the dictionary definition[1] is inclination or tendency to help or do good to others; charity. Conflating credit to charity is disingenuous on it's own but Graber doesn't stop there, he says Adam Smith
> wants to imagine a world in, which everyone used cash, in part because he agreed with the emerging middle-class opinion that the world would be a better place if everyone really did conduct themselves this way, and avoid confusing and potentially corrupting ongoing entanglements. We should all just pay the money, say "please" and "thank you," and leave the store.
Except that this is unfounded speculation by Graber. Or to use Graber's favourite turn of phrase, an attempt at de-legitimization. There is nothing in the actual text where Smith suggests anything of the sort.
Further, Graber claims Smith
> created the vision of an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore, free of guilt and sin
Again, there is nothing in the text to support the idea that Smith saw debt as sin. The only kind of debt Smith took exception to is public debt[2] and that was for entirely different reasons.
Thanks for elaborating. At first blush my only disagreement is that I don’t think I (or Graeber) “redefined” benevolence at all, and it seems to me a not terrible word to describe the reciprocal trust relationship needed to facilitate the use of debt. I don’t think the larger point you’re making about his take on Smith turns on his use of that word.
As I said, I haven’t read the book, and so I’ll hold off on saying much more. I really expect this to be a book where the author is wrong in some interesting ways, rather than batshit crazy. So many mainstream people get Adam Smith wrong, so the anarchist anthropologist getting it wrong isn’t a complete dealbreaker.
> I don’t think I (or Graeber) “redefined” benevolence at all, and it seems to me a not terrible word to describe the reciprocal trust relationship needed to facilitate the use of debt.
That probably makes banks the most benevolent entities on the planet.
It would be interesting to read a review of Debt by some other economist. I don’t think this can be settled by quoting DeLong or Graeber, considering the bitterness of this feud.
I work at a large institutional investment firm and have read David’s book. He adds to the conversation around debt in unique and thought provoking ways. For me, that’s what matters about the book.
Unfortunately most academic economists are not going to touch it. It's a sprawling, highly polemic work by a marxist anthropologist. Much of the book focuses on various moral issues portraying history as a sequence of just and unjust acts, oppressors and oppressed, and finally there are some call for coordinated debt forgiveness.
That's not really inviting for academic economists that need to focus on quantitative or experimental research and would get nothing by wading into these debates.
So those with economic training who do touch it will be outside Academia or on the margins. Here are some:
The general consensus of these reviews is "man, he gets a lot of stuff wrong, and I don't agree with the central thesis, but boy what rich examples, and interesting insights are in this book."
The reason deLong waded in is that he has a very promiscuous mind and likes to think about Soviet tank strategy in World War 2, financial markets, and public policy. And he shares all those ruminations on his blog. So he'll pick it up, but he has tenure and (apparently) lots of leisure time. There aren't many others in the same position.
Graeber was certainly not Marxist. And the whole nature of his new book and the rest of his work is the opposite of the idea of portraying history as a "sequence" of acts at all let alone defining them in some just/unjust binary.
"In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
and :
"Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers."
In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005."
This critique all seems completely non-sequitur to me.
Graeber emphasized strongly and explicitly that he saw his Bullshit Jobs framework as a first rough attempt that he hoped would inspire further investigation. He chose examples specifically to avoid ambiguity in order to make the concepts clear, and he says this in the book directly. He never made claims about the extent of how widespread bullshit-jobs are except to say that there's enough evidence of the phenomenon to assert that it is real and to study and consider further.
I mean, zero of your quotes have any relevance to your assertion that his thesis was dubious. What do you think his thesis was??
The book's thesis doesn't depend on the exact number of bullshit jobs. Any of the percentages correspond to millions of people spending their days doing work they consider useless. That must have an impact on society -- surely that's worth digging in to? The majority of the book digs into particular kinds of bullshit jobs and what it's like to do them, which I found fascinating.
Honestly I'm not a fan of DeLong and I don't even think this is a particularly good breakdown of Graeber.
I would just encourage people to actually go and learn about the history of economics. The cristal clear that Graeber has nothing but distatest for economists and he can't be bothered to read into it at all.
For him, economists are just evil pawns of Capitalism that need to be destroyed.
This is a bit of a complicated question around the Federal Reserve. For all practical purposes it is, but technically it may not be under some view points.
Of course the Fed is an arm of the government. The member banks have the "form" of private banks, but they are not really private banks. They are government created, backed, run, and funded entities. Think of a Port Authority, and decide whether it is part of the government or not. Of course it is.
The member banks also have no power in Fed decision making, which rests solely in the hands of the Chairman. The members banks exist solely to provide banking services for commercial banks in their district, and as various jobs programs for economists. Some also have museums and exhibitions.
Back in the day when you travelled the nation on horse and buggy, if there was a banking crisis it was important that there be a nearby bank with money. So yes, you needed a network of local reserve banks. Today, that's not so important anymore.
The distinctions being made here are due to a (quaint) stock issuance system that maybe made political sense in the politics of 1913 - when politicians still remembered Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/bank-war) - but this symbolism is irrelevant today.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of legitimate questions to ask about the Fed in the zone of public/private -- is the Fed acting in the interests of the financial sector or the interests of the public? - how "independent" is the Fed"? But arguments about the Fed being really "private" are deep in the realm of conspiracy theory pamphlets.
Anyone who tries to argue this immediately loses the argument, in the same way that people arguing about the influence of the Rockefellers immediately loses the argument. Maybe in 1913, these were useful questions, but today these are all cringe questions.
This is a bit of off. The Federal Reserve executes policy decisions through the member banks. Mainly the NY Fed. The member banks have an antiquated structure where they are “owned” by private banks but are not controlled by them. It’s complicated and annoying. We should just make the member banks an official part of the federal government.
Policy decisions are implemented via OMO at the NYFed. That doesn't mean the member banks actually set policy. The policy is set by the Chairman, who is appointed along with the rest of the Board of Governors by the President.
Neither the member banks nor the shareholders of the members banks have policy input. But I'll grant that "antiquated" is an improvement over my use of "quaint".
> We should just make the member banks an official part of the federal government.
If it gets people to stop arguing that the Federal reserve is "private", then I guess it would be an improvement. That would be the only effect of this change, though - cosmetic - as it is a cosmetic feature in the first place.
Interesting. Makes me want to actually read Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens. I watched the GG&S documentary & enjoyed it, but I should read the book.
What single book of Graeber should I read that has his most important ideas? Is it this one?
It changed my fundamental thought process and I consider the book to be more of a framework.
For example; I now realize how natural it was for my mother to constantly exchange groceries and food with our neighbors and how formally keeping track of them was considered to be a bad thing. Or how we deliberate and take time while gifting someone we know (e.g on their marriage), we gift them in kind. Where as it’s totally OK to gift money in envelopes in Indian marriages if you don’t know the bride/groom that well but got invited to the marriage anyway through some distant relatives. Money here kind of takes away the personal touch, like you have to fulfill a gifting obligation but don’t care much about it because you don’t know the marrying couple.
I could go on for a while because I re-read different parts of the book once every month :-)
It’s difficult to put into words how good it is in terms of the wide range of space-time it covers and the depth of the discourse. It’s like climbing a mountain several times from different paths, some of which are deliberately dead end just to present an alternative view point and why it’s not good enough.
The bibliography could be made into a book of its own.
Debt is incredible, and I don't use that work lightly.
For me I came away not with answers, but feeling like I could for the first time actually think about its big issues (money, economics, morality, community).
I enjoy Graeber's work including Debt: a 5000 year history, but I know that feeling you mean of the book leaving you with more questions than answers. If you haven't read it you might enjoy Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty as an interesting follow up to it.
Thanks, that was interesting. They actually largely agreed in that exchange, not really "vs". That was possible because of not being people who just do or say the caricature of some particular political dogma. If there's any chance to progress our discourse as a society, we have to overcome the pattern where if I say "Graeber and Thiel were in agreement", people stop imagining that it means they both are effectively the caricature of whatever Thiel-critics make him out to be.
I would love to have this sort of dialogue be the norm. I would love to have this sort of reasoned intellectual rapport with others, including those who I might have significant disagreements with.
P.S. Oops, I looked at the YouTube comments. We're F'ed. People don't know how to engage with ideas and respectful discourse anymore.
The issue with this dialogue was that it was not long enough.
I think there are very real disagreements between Thiel and Graeber.
I think the two stand on opposite sides of the egalitarianism debate.
Is this rift completely insurmountable? Perhaps a kind of horseshoe theory can bring them together.
I am not even sure that bringing them together is entirely the goal. It would be nice if a diverse set of beliefs could be practiced in relative isolation to prove out the viability of these concepts. This is why the YouTube comments dont really matter. Not everyone needs to participate in these experiments.
Yes, the exchange was too short for them to actually engage in real discussion. I would have wished they could discuss for 3-5 hours and to have some highlight reel of it.
I had previously avoided this video because the thumbnails (of some instances) show a grotesque depiction of Theil. That's unhelpful.
Errata, this debate was in 2014.
My preassumption was this would simply be a fintech billionaire disagreeing with an academic that financialization of the economy in the 70s is the root cause of our ongoing malaise. Yet another food fight. I'm glad I was wrong.
Theil still tried to shift blame onto the OPEC oil crisis. Wrongly, of course; inequity continued to accelerate and productivity continued to lag, even after the USA became energy self sufficient.
Scarcity
Theil's really stuck on the notion of scarcity. In a world of ridiculous abundance (current supply chain snafus notwithstanding). A true pessimist.
Theil's explanation for why people are poor and malnourished is because of scarcity. We produce enough food to feed 10b people. What's Theil's thesis for this disconnect? Does that thesis apply to other domains?
Whatever Theil's notions about how the world does or should work, I'd like to hear some ideas concretely rooted in the real world. Not just more Friedman style rejection of empiricism.
Democracy
David Graeber is a democracy innovator and practitioner.
Like all reformers and innovators, Graeber would be best served by "show, don't tell". Tell real life stories. Of citizen juries, cooperatives, worker directed social enterprises. And then relate how those examples tie back to his thesis.
My observation and experience is that people can't grok participatory democracy. It simply has to be experienced. Once people see concrete results of constructive participation, it just clicks.
Like most everyone, Theil thinks democracy is simply voting. And can only see the failures. Culture and society has carried around Socrates' fear of plebiscite for millennia -- tyranny of the majority and other monsters -- and so react strongly against any and all reforms.
How do we pop people out of that intellectual dead end? How do we shift the focus from casting ballots to participating in salons?
Graeber's solution is to practice participatory democracy whenever, however you can. Mostly in the margins. Make your own space for reform. He strongly rejects revolution. For both moral and practical reasons.
A point I wish had been made in response to Theil's rejection of social movements.
Libertarian
TLDR for this discussion: right wing libertarian can't or won't consider a left wing libertarian's ideas.
Much as I related to Theil's viewpoints, I'm disappointed that an apparently bright guy can't think of any other organizational structure (for achieving great things) than Silicon Valley style VC-funded startups.
Neoreactionary
In 2014, Theil rejects government and working within the system.
To this viewer, Theil has utterly betrayed his previously stated principles.
Whatever Theil has said in the past should not be cited as his current philosophy.
Conclusion
Previously, I've struggled to criticize Theil. Because I can't figure out what he's talking about. Like his recent blather about China, cryptocurrency, and national security. Theil is incoherent.
Thanks again for this link. For me, it shows that Theil doesn't even believe the things he says. So why should anyone care to listen?
Robert's Rules of Order is not the pinnacle of human achievement. It's just a tool.
New forms of collective decision making require new tools.
I wouldn't ever run an endorsement meeting using joint application design (JAD). Just like I wouldn't use RRO for eliciting user requirements.
Source: 8 years on exec board for local party, former UI designer.
PS- In fact, we're always tweaking our bylaws. To be more fair, more efficient, more representative, etc. For instance, we now use approval voting to stack rank motions to endorse, for maximal fairness. Doing so completely short circuits gaming RRO and mostly eliminated drama around the process.
PS2- OMG, experiencing traumatic flashbacks. Using RRO to craft platforms, amend bylaws, etc is literally hell on earth. Transmuting trivial activities using any other conceivable methodology into soul sucking unending torture. Last time we amended our bylaws, we had rapid response team from suicide prevention hotline physically present to monitor our members and preemptively intervene as necessary.
Surprise, organizing takes an enormous amount of work, which anyone who's involved in any participatory, decentralized, leftist, or anarchist space will tell you.
You may know this! Not clear from your response. Do you have a point about something he's factually incorrect about in his writings, or just that you (unlike many other Occupy participants) didn't like processes he created as much as others?
My point: Occupy had two goals that I kept hearing when I went: 1. the bailout and recovery from the crash of 2008 should help the victims of the crash, and not the perpetrators. And 2. "it's not about the policy, it's about the process." That is to say, the people camping out at Occupy were trying to evangelize the GA model for decision making to the world at large.
Both failed miserably. And I blame the process.
Now, if you want to set up an anarchist space for yourself and some friends and live in it or just have it as a clubhouse for some endeavors, yeah, go for it. I really do look forward to see the first dead mall in my area that's taken over by anarchist squatters.
But the GA process 1. took too damned long. 2. was dominated by people who loved the sound of their own voice, 3. resolved conflicting interest by sheer attrition, by which faction would be last to drop out of the meeting, and worst of all, 4. encouraged people to reinforce their cognitive bubbles before social media came around to do the same thing. The worst of those bubbles was the one that wrapped around each and every Occupy camp and made them unable to understand how they were seen by people 30' away.
Part of the lack of democracy in the USA is the "Bowling Alone" problem: too much of the citizenry has no experience interacting with a democratic process. And part of THAT is the experience of losing a committee vote and moving on.
A democratic process would have to exist in order for us to "interact with" it (what would that even mean? if democracy is somehow separate from the people it isn't democracy). Citizens lose every vote. Rich assholes win every vote. A majority of citizens would never freely and informedly choose to fight multiple pointless wars of aggression on the other side of the planet. A majority of citizens would never freely and informedly imprison more fellow citizens, both in absolute and percentage terms, than any other nation on the planet, in history. A majority of citizens would never freely and informedly pay a Chinese lab to invent a global pandemic, and then enrich whichever pharma firms can best pretend to develop "vaccines" (which in actuality are more like pre-therapeutics, in that while they make infection less deadly they don't actually slow the spread of the virus) for that pandemic. All of these follies are the broken-window fallacy writ large, with the glaziers plowing most of their ill-gotten rents back into the political process to break more windows.
I'm glad I can't understand why so many prefer to blame we the people rather than the system of control to which we are subject. Perhaps they are also subject...
School boards and city councils are part of the democratic process, and they are open to you in your jurisdiction. You just have to face the prospect of your wishes being overruled for lack of support. That is part and parcel of living in a democratic society.
I don't live in a jurisdiction that has a city council. Is there something the local school board can do about the issues mentioned above? I had previously been pretty happy with their performance, but if they've been getting us in all these stupid wars then I have some complaints!
You seem determined to dismiss global concerns with quite specific imaginings of my apparently dysfunctional political participation. I don't actually care that much about democracy, per se. The concept is usually a red herring, cf. your contributions ITT. I just want to stop participating in a system that kills millions of innocents.
What's the single best source for an outsider to become familiar with the problems Occupy's GA consensus process created? The more first-hand accounts the better, video or text.
Seems to me people such as Graeber are concentrated in the USA and only fight entrenched hierarchy there. And the US academia keeps attracting excellent people from all over the world. Is that really the best place to influence history? I think they could have bigger impact elsewhere, for example the fall of Iron Curtain was incredible opportunity but neocons snatched that quickly. Going to war zone like Rojava is other extreme. Why all the rest of the world between these extremes is not interesting for anarchists?
