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David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

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Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#181

Post by unmole »

thoughtstheseus wrote: post #180
unmole wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 und…

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 hi…

> 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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#182

Post by justin66 »

unmole wrote: post #177
justin66 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nev…

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 intere…

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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#183

Post by thoughtstheseus »

unmole wrote: post #181
thoughtstheseus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

> 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…

Sounds like we agree. The points from Davids book are worthy of discussion.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#184

Post by unmole »

justin66 wrote: post #182
unmole wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intere…

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 m…

> 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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#185

Post by ncmncm »

panick21_ wrote: post #178
teachrdan wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's an anthropology of debt. 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…

Bronze age Greece turns out to have got its tin from (what is now) southern England.

Portuguese sailors absolutely had been to India. But getting through the maze of canals in Egypt to the Red Sea was more expensive than they liked.

You miss the point about caravans: everything they carried in any volume were things there was a known and hungry market for.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#186

Post by [deleted] »

unmole wrote: post #184
justin66 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#187

Post by Jeff_Brown »

quadrangle wrote: post #102
rsj_hn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How could history not be a sequence of acts?

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#188

Post by panick21_ »

agumonkey wrote: post #179
panick21_ wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dynami…

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. Especi…

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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#189

Post by panick21_ »

ncmncm wrote: post #185
panick21_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an anthropology of debt. 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…

Bronze age Greece turns out to have got its tin from (what is now) southern England. Portuguese sailors absolutely had been to India. But getting through the maze of canals in Egypt to the Red Sea was more expensive than they liked. You miss the point about caravans: everything they carried in any volume were things there was a known and hungry market for.

> 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.

Re: David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

#190

Post by specialist »

petermcneeley wrote: post #8

Graber vs Thiel discussion 2020: https://youtu.be/eF0cz9OmCGw

Very good. Thank you.

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?

My instinct to ignore Theil was proven correct.

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