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David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

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Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#101

Post by quadrangle »

unmole wrote: post #85
jmcmichael wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inaccu…

> 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 brew…

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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#102

Post by quadrangle »

rsj_hn wrote: post #55
skybrian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#103

Post by pydry »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #81
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#104

Post by skybrian »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #87
skybrian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29195047

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#105

Post by quadrangle »

sien wrote: post #58
cynicalkane wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

The thesis of 'Bullshit Jobs' was also dubious at best. https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh... "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 acad…

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??

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#106

Post by JasonCannon »

goatlover wrote: post #52
JasonCannon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Anarchists are left wing. AnCaps aren't anarchists. Anarchism is inherently socialist.

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.

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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#107

Post by jessaustin »

ocschwar wrote: post #90
jessaustin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for 1., I would blame the lack of democracy in USA more than the norms of discussion within certain short-lived public meetings. https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

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...

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#108

Post by cynicalkane »

jmcmichael wrote: post #92
cynicalkane wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 pe…

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.

[1] https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/304604741126721536

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#109

Post by JasonCannon »

aspenmayer wrote: post #48
JasonCannon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Anarchists are left wing. AnCaps aren't anarchists. Anarchism is inherently socialist.

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, a…

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)

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#110

Post by vishnugupta »

ashtonkem wrote: post #88
culi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol this sounds like a class assignment. 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 peopl…

> 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.

To add to it, “an-archy” literally means the absence of top-down order, in a way the opposite of “hire-archly”.
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