Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber of Bullshit Jobs, and, more importantly, this book. Graeber was an anthropologist, and he goes through the history of debt and how it became intertwined with our culture and morality with many, many examples. The book is chock full of ideas.
Also The Dawn of Everything, which Graeber cowrote with archaeologist David Wengrow. The broader point of the book is that there is no one story of the "evolution" of society into modern states and no "agricultural revolution" triggering the rise of urbanization and social hierarchy. Instead, there have been countless arrangements and permutations of these things with intelligent, politically-conscious people thinking about how they wanted to order their society long before the invention of writing. He takes particular aim at popular writers pushing simpler stories painting Western capitalism as a natural endpoint, especially Stephen Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari.
Even if you aren't onboard with Graeber's radical left politics, both books are so chock full of ideas and examples that it's hard to come away without a lot to think about.
Graeber misinterprets the history and ideas of mainstream economics, calls the safest securities on the planet a debt that will never be paid and spins bizarre conspiracy theories about the Iraq invasion. You might learn about the quaint cultural practices of remote tribes but a lot of the ideas presented are complete nonsense.
You might say it has good and original parts. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.
A non-economist makes economic claims that just so happen to reflect the political views of his political contemporaries, but it is the job of anyone who disagrees to cite an entire body of literature, reviewed to a high but unspecified standard?
I'd totally agree with you had Graeber not been an influential anthropologist (wherein one academically studies human activity, culture, trade, economics, social structures, institutions etc. from a rigorous historical lens)
Your demand would have made sense if Debt was a peer-reviewed scholarly work and not a political screed aimed at a lay readership.
But then again, there is enough nonsense in there than can be picked apart without being a domain expert. For example, Graeber claims 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" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run.
And dunking on Smith is how Graeber builds his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory.
I've not the read Greaber's book, though I intend to, but Adam Smith is regularly misinterpreted in an extreme right-wing way (e.g. the Adam Smith Institute) so it's possibly to disagree with that interpretation without disagreeing with Adam Smith.
> The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets.
> As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty, and a pernicious restriction on the capacity of each nation to increase its collective wealth. Yet the mercantile system benefited the merchant elites, who had worked hard to keep it in place. Smith pulled no punches in his assessment of the bosses as working against the interests of the public. As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’
> The merchants had spent centuries securing their position of unfair advantage. In particular, they had invented and propagated the doctrine of ‘the balance of trade’, and had succeeded in elevating it into the received wisdom of the age. The basic idea was that each nation’s wealth consisted in the amount of gold that it held. Playing on this idea, the merchants claimed that, in order to get rich, a nation had to export as much, and import as little, as possible, thus maintaining a ‘favourable’ balance. They then presented themselves as servants of the public by offering to run state-backed monopolies that would limit the inflow, and maximise the outflow, of goods, and therefore of gold. But as Smith’s lengthy analysis showed, this was pure hokum: what were needed instead were open trading arrangements, so that productivity could increase generally, and collective wealth would grow for the benefit of all
Greaber's interpretation of Smith is just as shallow as extreme right-wing one. And what's worse is Greaber's whole cloth invention of Adam Smith's supposed morality.
Simply, as a meta note / rational argument's sake ->
Let's assume X (Smith) makes statement S (X -> S). A few hundreds of years later, Y (Graeber) makes statement S' that refutes S and says Y -> S' and negates ~ (X -> S). Now what I'd expect is a Z, that counter-refutes Y. For example, Z -> S''. Instead, you're going back to saying yeah, we all know X -> S, so how can Y -> S' be ever true...
I think Debt is a terrible book but that's not a convincing or even substantive review. Even more bizzare is the author admitting to dunking on the book without even having read it!
Does Noah Smith consider himself left-wing? I've always tagged him as "right-wing but not totally insane" as he often seems to be explaining bits of reality to his audience who consider them politically incorrect, like renewables and climate change not being a hoax, or him explaining that being 'woke' is okay, as long as you aren't rude to white men.
I followed the stoush between DeLong and Graeber closely, and my strong impression is that Graeber was thin-skinned, vengeful, often inaccurate and unable to stand criticism. DeLong was a bit trolly, but nothing a competent, stable writer shouldn't have been able to handle. This impression is also borne out by my own reading of Graeber's work, and his reprehensible actions as a working academic:
I have the same impressions of Graeber in this back and forth but it doesn't change the fact that Graeber has a point
I mean making a Twitter bot to spam someone "stay away!" every day seems a lot more thin-skinned and vengeful than Graeber's response here. And Graeber points out that most of the "factual errors" pointed out by DeLong do basically nothing to detract from the main theses Graeber makes in his book.
It's clear DeLong has it out for him and the "takedown" is just a collection of "gotchas" on minor details pasted together to try to attack the overall validity of the book
As suggested by its title, "Debt" is an anthropology book about the history of debt. And by extension the origins of money. Not economics.
Adam Smith and his contemporaries hypothesized that barter proceeded money. Modern economics textbooks and pundits continue to repeat this misbelief. Academics even admit the tale is often repeated as form of short hand narrative.
Too bad that the book about debt and how it became intertwined with our culture and morality relies on a spurious conflation of basic terms. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments but the beliefs that Graeber choses to ascribe to him are invented whole cloth.
And for a book written by an anthropologist, the picture of China we get is a culture existentialist caricature.
Belated followup. I reread the bits which reference and quote Adam Smith. (Revised edition.) Because maybe I'm being clueless.
Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.
FWIW, I wouldn't expect Smith to have access to reports from the New World, or even the inclination to connect the dots (play anthropolgist). So maybe you think Graeber is too harsh there. But I certainly expect Adam's academic successors to adjust as necessary.
Also FWIW, I wouldn't care so much about barter-money genesis fables, recognizing that pop-science lags academic best avail science by decades or more, were it not for the outsized influence that economic spokesmodels have on real world policy.
With that kind of assumed power, relished and hoarded, the pundits have that much more responsibility to be intellectually honest. In my future perfect world, of course.
You don't have to explain more, beating a dead horse. But I am keen to know which explanations -- what is money? where did money come from? -- you favor.
The purpose of the book is to make the general-audience reader realize the problems with the conceptual-historical framework of neoliberal economics and politics. David Graeber rightfully argues that Neoliberalism sells itself to the masses by constructing this "quaint" tale of uncivilized barter-practicing foraging tribes turning into coin/money using farmers into debt based industrial-financial empires.
I am sure there are many factual inaccuracies in the book (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully manages to do is show the reader that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest). And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"
> The purpose of the book is to make the general-audience reader realize the problems with the conceptual-historical framework of neoliberal economics and politics
And misrepresenting mainstream economics is the way to do that?
> (I am not an expert so I wouldn't know either way). But what he successfully
This is a bizzare take. It's like claiming Graeber gets the premises wrong but somehow the conclusions he draws are correct?
> that there are many many different economic systems practiced throughout history, and many of them very highly sophisticated (and not quaint as you suggest).
But somehow these grand sophisticated economic systems did not find takers outside their niches. This is what makes rui stones and cloth bolts quaint curiosities compared to coinage and credit when discussing the 5000 years of debt.
> And once the reader realizes this, there is only a short step to the question, "is neoliberalism really the best we can do or one of the other systems better for us?"
Too bad he spins nonsensical conspiracy theories to do that.
And you agree that it's a work of political rhetoric and not dispassionate scholarship.
Also The Dawn of Everything, which Graeber cowrote with archaeologist David Wengrow. The broader point of the book is that there is no one story of the "evolution" of society into modern states and no "agricultural revolution" triggering the rise of urbanization and social hierarchy. Instead, there have been countless arrangements and permutations of these things with intelligent, politically-conscious people thinking about how they wanted to order their society long before the invention of writing. He takes particular aim at popular writers pushing simpler stories painting Western capitalism as a natural endpoint, especially Stephen Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari.
Even if you aren't onboard with Graeber's radical left politics, both books are so chock full of ideas and examples that it's hard to come away without a lot to think about.