Debt: The First 5000 Years
His excuse is about as plausible as, "My dog ate my homework." Yes dogs do sometimes eat homework, but most of the time that claim is a lie. First, it's odd how such a garbled sentence managed to be perfectly understandable English. If it was garbled, what was the original intention? I don't know of any major tech company founded in SV in the 1980s by ex-IBM engineers who were mostly Republican. I can't recall any famous company or organization that was known for forming democratic circles of 20-40 people with laptops in garages (regardless of the decade). Any sort of elaboration or…
The book is so wide range and meta narrative with a bunch of really specific examples. Some of those have been addressed but nobody seem to want to address the book as a whole. The basic idea of the book is very old and not original. Social science and philosophy has been arguing about the definition/meaning/origin of debt, money, property right for a long time. He takes a very clear position on it that is clearly based in his ideological believes and then does a running narration of 5000 years of history that all proves his point crossing every social science in the process. From my…
Dave, Dave, don't be so defensive! I mean, I spend time googling for my name too, but I manage to resist the temptation to throw myself into any discussion of my work, it just comes across badly. I mean, I did go and buy a copy of your book, hardback too, and I did just go and give you a semi-positive review in which I heartily recommended large chunks of it. I really did enjoy quite a lot of it. You're right, page 4 does mention the idea that a debt is a promise. But it's immediately pooh-poohed as an idea that's "dangerous because it's self-evident". And the last paragraph does call a debt…
> Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on. Yet a hundred pages later, the…
The thing is, is that those "shitty" conditions may well be a de facto, silently elected choice (conservative). The whole globalist ideal is that their paradigm of civilizational excellence is the only answer but it isn't, not by a long shot. Read Huxely's Island. Moreover the effects of capitalist-globalism have, I would posit, given rise to poverty in many instances with first-movers advantage, selectively shunting trade into some nations and away from others. If one nation elects to adopt the Western zeitgeist, and their neighbors neglect it, their neighbors will suffer as a product of…
Don’t read it. Save your brain for a book that isn’t riddled with so many errors Brad DeLong wrote ten articles on the errors in Chapter 11. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm... > I have read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years thoroughly and despite Graeber’s readability, scholarship, and erudition, it is a very bad book. Its tone is much too polemical. More important, when it gets to the more recent history that I know well, it is riddled with errors and distortions. Beyond that, it suffers from serious conceptual confusions, and in his excellent…
A few further points and references on money. There's the standard four-point definition used in economics: 1. A medium of exchange. 2. A unit of account. 3. A store of value. 4. Sometimes: a standard of deferred payment. Note that these four functions are given more-or-less in order of significance, and that the great obsession of goldbugs and anti-inflationists , a (stable) store of value, is third on the list and is exceeded by the role as a medium of exchange. Fail in the first role and all commerce stops. I was surprised that with the emphasis on debt and credit in the article,…
> I'm curious if you've read David Graeber's "Debt" and if so what were your thoughts? If not, I think you'd find his analysis interesting. I haven’t. You’re correct. I really need to read his book even if I know there will be some conclusions I strongly disagree with. The anthropological analysis will be insightful. > It's an analysis that draws a very clear line between the idea of money and things that are valuable. For example, a primate trading sex for food wouldn't be an instance of using money in this framework. I also think you'd enjoy his exploration into the usage of currency as…
[My reply was too long for HN. This is part 1/3. Sorry!] What David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" years has taught me, above all else, is that most economists from Adam Smith onwards know little about history and anthropology. I already knew that people like to spread just-so creation myths. In many cases, these end up being ungrounded in reality, but instead are meant as short-hand for the general culture belief of how something worked, rather than the reality. A somewhat relevant example, look at http://westernreservepublicmedia.org/middleages/feud_peasant... as an example of how…
> The point is not if barter is used sometimes or if some people, in some circumstances, would start using cigarettes as money, but if that's the main history of money, specifically in the context of early states, as has been claimed for many years without any kind of evidence. Both sides of the argument are making claims without evidence, because evidence prior to record-keeping of debt doesn't exist, and never will. There are only theories about how money came into being, and some are more plausible than others. Graeber himself contradicts his own "debunking" of Menger's theory: > "All…