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But also be sure to read critiques of Debt written by economists. Here’s one by Noah Smith: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5

But also be sure to read critiques of Debt written by economists. Here’s one by Noah Smith: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000-years.html?m=1 http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...

tome 6y ago
Thanks for linking that. It does a good job of drawing out some of the feelings I had when I read Debt. On the one hand I'm very glad I read the book. I found it very enlightening in terms of various aspects of history and anthropology, as well as enlightening about various leftist ideas. On the other hand I can't say I came away feeling like I had read a "correct analysis" or that I really understood any better how anything worked. (I'm quite surprised to see so much praise for it on HN actually and such little challenge, the sad news about the passing of its author notwithstanding.) [EDIT: There are also some good counterpoints to Noah Smith's critique in the comments, for example https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000-years.html?showComment=1415178947855&m=1#c8998974327663826104 https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt...]
specialist 6y ago
From that reply: "While markets are one thing, capitalism is quite another, though, as it's marked by the power imbalances of wage labor, something not found in all previous incidences of commerce..." Upvote for dissembling markets from capitalism. But I really wish the peanut gallery would also separate corporatism from capitalism. There's nothing about capitalism (dogma, theory, practice) which prohibits the surplus (profit) from being shared with labor.
- aabhay 6y ago
  That’s like saying there’s nothing inherently about dictatorships that makes them oppressive. While yes you can invent a hypothetical situation where the capitalists give all their money to workers, the overwhelming empirical history is that capitalists don’t share their profit with laborers.
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    It's just that living conditions and average wealth has skyrocketed over the past couple hundred years. Deirdre McCloskey refers to it as the Great Enrichment: > The rise in the liberal nations has been a stunning 3,000 percent at the least—or if one allows properly for improvements in quality, such as better medicine and better housing (and for that matter, better economics), more like 10,000 percent. A factor of 100. Goodness. https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/great-enrichment https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/great-enrichment
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      I also enjoy cherry-picking. Here's a different time period to consider: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
      - creddit 6y ago
        A couple hundred years isn’t exactly cherry-picking wrt capitalism...
    - FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
      That happened not because of capitalism but in spite of it. It happened because of technological development and rampant and ruthless exploitation of mostly foreign lands and people, and by stealing from future generations. It’s a terrible system that is constantly failing most people.
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        Sure, not because of capitalism but it spite of it. It's just that, in places that didn't have capitalist economies, it didn't happen. Not to the same degree (with the possible exception of China, and even they are looking capitalist in practice).
  - specialist 6y ago
    "invent a hypothetical situation where the capitalists give all their money to workers" Well, ya, co-ops are technically corporations. But they're generally not corporatists. (For the purposes of a comment thread.) Just like Karl Marx wasn't a Marxist, a la No True Scotsman fallacy, we all agree that there's a lot of daylight between Sam Walton's profit sharing model and the epitome of corporatism that Walmart became. Hypothetically. Of course.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  > There's nothing about capitalism (dogma, theory, practice) which prohibits the surplus (profit) from being shared with labor. ... excepting of course for that particularly comprehensive work on Capitalism that very clearly argues that 'surplus' value can only be created from the exploitation of labor and any group that accumulates that surplus is effectively stealing it from labor. edit: only on HN would a comment acknowledging the existence of Marx earn you downvotes on a post about David Graeber
  - specialist 6y ago
    We hopefully have learned a few thing since. I'm one of those weird lefties that loves markets, capitalism, competition, etc. So long as we are clear-eyed about it and actively counterbalance winner-takes-all.
    - baron_harkonnen 6y ago
      > We hopefully have learned a few thing since. I think we've mostly learned that Marx was right. You seem to be thinking of Marx from the sort of popular fiction of someone that protests capitalism as some great injustice. Marx's logic, at least in Capital, isn't that Capitalism is a moral evil, or that Capitalists are bad people (in fact he argues pretty clearly that the moral character of individual capitalists is irrelevant). Marx's central point is that Capitalism is a system filled with internal contradictions that will continually manifest themselves as crises. These crises will continue until the system finally becomes unstable an collapse. Marx's vision of course was that it would collapse into socialism, but his utopia solutions can be viewed quite independently from his theory of capital. Marx predicted a fairly large portion of our world today: the increasing globalization of capitalism, growing interdependence of labor and capitalist classes, increasing fragility of the labor class, the development of the credit system and financial system to temporarily resolve some of these contradictions. If there is a good critique of Marx it is that he failed to predict the ecological and environmental damage that capitalism would bring. He failed to fully understand the way that these contradiction work with resource use.
      - 6y ago
- notJim 6y ago
  From Wikipedia: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit". I looked around a bit to see if this is a contentious definition, but other definitions I found shared the key bit about private ownership of the means of production. If a private entity owns the means of production, why wouldn't that entity attempt to maximize its share?
  - specialist 6y ago
    Why indeed. Why would any employer pay anything more than the absolute minimum for wages? Or pay any taxes? Or properly dispose wastes? Or...? What about capitalism states that maximizing profit must supersede all other goals?
    - abakker 6y ago
      I always thought the real point was that there was more to maximization than calculus really leads you to. It is trivial to attempt simple maximization, but very hard when you want to find maximized profits given social pressure, preparedness for the future, risk tolerance and a whole host of other issues. Maximizing profits don't necessarily need to be a simplistic mathematical approach to a very complex and atuo-correlated system.
      - specialist 6y ago
        Exactly. You should be in charge.
- dllthomas 6y ago
  Do you mean corporatism in the sense it's been used historically? From Wikipedia: "Corporatism is a political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, scientific, or guild associations on the basis of their common interests." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism Because yes, that's pretty far from capitalism, but it seems to be even further from what we have today.
  - specialist 6y ago
    I mean corporatist as the denial that math inevitably leads to winner-takes-all, and the celebration of those outcomes as moral victories which are somehow rooted in merit, and somehow we're all better off because some kids won all the marbles. Stuff like being anti-democratic, anti-labor, anti-competition, defending monopolies, radical power imbalances, amoral behaviors are just the symptoms, not the causes. The cause is math. Preferential attachment, compound interest, and whatever that gambling thing is called. Even board games and game shows and school children know this and actively mitigate it. If only to keep the game going and enjoyable.
    - dllthomas 6y ago
      I don't think that's a common definition of corporatist. It might well be a useful concept, but it probably deserves a different label. Do you see it as distinct from "corporate capitalism"?
      - specialist 6y ago
        I wish I had a better label. Something that makes clear that I'm criticizing certain players and not the game. A way to celebrate liberal democracy coupled with capitalism, distinct from monopolistic, predatory, fraudulent behavior. David Graeber is much better at this sort of thing. Like his calls for redefining work in terms of caring for each other.
        dllthomas 6y ago
claudeganon 6y ago
Noah Smith is about as intellectually dishonest as they come. He has misrepresented Taleb’s work on several occasions, possibly never having read it in the first place: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SmithBSVendor.html https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SmithBSVendor.html
naravara 6y ago
I'm not as down on Noah Smith as many, but this is honestly a pretty bad review. He basically admits to having trouble understanding it owing to it being disorganized (a point he repeats frequently). But then he complains about people who criticize him for not making good faith attempts understanding what they're saying. Then he spends way too much of it trying to criticize anyone who would tell him it's bad and even spends an entire paragraph talking about how he suspects Graeber is a public intellectual who bristles at criticism before going on to pre-emptively bristle at any potential criticism of his review. Not his best work, to be sure.

tome 6y ago

Thanks for linking that. It does a good job of drawing out some of the feelings I had when I read Debt. On the one hand I'm very glad I read the book. I found it very enlightening in terms of various aspects of history and anthropology, as well as enlightening about various leftist ideas. On the other hand I can't say I came away feeling like I had read a "correct analysis" or that I really understood any better how anything worked. (I'm quite surprised to see so much praise for it on HN actually and such little challenge, the sad news about the passing of its author notwithstanding.) [EDIT: There are also some good counterpoints to Noah Smith's critique in the comments, for example https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000-years.html?showComment=1415178947855&m=1#c8998974327663826104 https://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt...]

specialist 6y ago

From that reply: "While markets are one thing, capitalism is quite another, though, as it's marked by the power imbalances of wage labor, something not found in all previous incidences of commerce..." Upvote for dissembling markets from capitalism. But I really wish the peanut gallery would also separate corporatism from capitalism. There's nothing about capitalism (dogma, theory, practice) which prohibits the surplus (profit) from being shared with labor.

aabhay 6y ago
That’s like saying there’s nothing inherently about dictatorships that makes them oppressive. While yes you can invent a hypothetical situation where the capitalists give all their money to workers, the overwhelming empirical history is that capitalists don’t share their profit with laborers.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  It's just that living conditions and average wealth has skyrocketed over the past couple hundred years. Deirdre McCloskey refers to it as the Great Enrichment: > The rise in the liberal nations has been a stunning 3,000 percent at the least—or if one allows properly for improvements in quality, such as better medicine and better housing (and for that matter, better economics), more like 10,000 percent. A factor of 100. Goodness. https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/great-enrichment https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/great-enrichment
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    I also enjoy cherry-picking. Here's a different time period to consider: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
    - creddit 6y ago
      A couple hundred years isn’t exactly cherry-picking wrt capitalism...
  - FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
    That happened not because of capitalism but in spite of it. It happened because of technological development and rampant and ruthless exploitation of mostly foreign lands and people, and by stealing from future generations. It’s a terrible system that is constantly failing most people.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Sure, not because of capitalism but it spite of it. It's just that, in places that didn't have capitalist economies, it didn't happen. Not to the same degree (with the possible exception of China, and even they are looking capitalist in practice).
- specialist 6y ago
  "invent a hypothetical situation where the capitalists give all their money to workers" Well, ya, co-ops are technically corporations. But they're generally not corporatists. (For the purposes of a comment thread.) Just like Karl Marx wasn't a Marxist, a la No True Scotsman fallacy, we all agree that there's a lot of daylight between Sam Walton's profit sharing model and the epitome of corporatism that Walmart became. Hypothetically. Of course.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> There's nothing about capitalism (dogma, theory, practice) which prohibits the surplus (profit) from being shared with labor. ... excepting of course for that particularly comprehensive work on Capitalism that very clearly argues that 'surplus' value can only be created from the exploitation of labor and any group that accumulates that surplus is effectively stealing it from labor. edit: only on HN would a comment acknowledging the existence of Marx earn you downvotes on a post about David Graeber
- specialist 6y ago
  We hopefully have learned a few thing since. I'm one of those weird lefties that loves markets, capitalism, competition, etc. So long as we are clear-eyed about it and actively counterbalance winner-takes-all.
  - baron_harkonnen 6y ago
    > We hopefully have learned a few thing since. I think we've mostly learned that Marx was right. You seem to be thinking of Marx from the sort of popular fiction of someone that protests capitalism as some great injustice. Marx's logic, at least in Capital, isn't that Capitalism is a moral evil, or that Capitalists are bad people (in fact he argues pretty clearly that the moral character of individual capitalists is irrelevant). Marx's central point is that Capitalism is a system filled with internal contradictions that will continually manifest themselves as crises. These crises will continue until the system finally becomes unstable an collapse. Marx's vision of course was that it would collapse into socialism, but his utopia solutions can be viewed quite independently from his theory of capital. Marx predicted a fairly large portion of our world today: the increasing globalization of capitalism, growing interdependence of labor and capitalist classes, increasing fragility of the labor class, the development of the credit system and financial system to temporarily resolve some of these contradictions. If there is a good critique of Marx it is that he failed to predict the ecological and environmental damage that capitalism would bring. He failed to fully understand the way that these contradiction work with resource use.
    - 6y ago
notJim 6y ago
From Wikipedia: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit". I looked around a bit to see if this is a contentious definition, but other definitions I found shared the key bit about private ownership of the means of production. If a private entity owns the means of production, why wouldn't that entity attempt to maximize its share?
- specialist 6y ago
  Why indeed. Why would any employer pay anything more than the absolute minimum for wages? Or pay any taxes? Or properly dispose wastes? Or...? What about capitalism states that maximizing profit must supersede all other goals?
  - abakker 6y ago
    I always thought the real point was that there was more to maximization than calculus really leads you to. It is trivial to attempt simple maximization, but very hard when you want to find maximized profits given social pressure, preparedness for the future, risk tolerance and a whole host of other issues. Maximizing profits don't necessarily need to be a simplistic mathematical approach to a very complex and atuo-correlated system.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Exactly. You should be in charge.
dllthomas 6y ago
Do you mean corporatism in the sense it's been used historically? From Wikipedia: "Corporatism is a political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, scientific, or guild associations on the basis of their common interests." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism Because yes, that's pretty far from capitalism, but it seems to be even further from what we have today.
- specialist 6y ago
  I mean corporatist as the denial that math inevitably leads to winner-takes-all, and the celebration of those outcomes as moral victories which are somehow rooted in merit, and somehow we're all better off because some kids won all the marbles. Stuff like being anti-democratic, anti-labor, anti-competition, defending monopolies, radical power imbalances, amoral behaviors are just the symptoms, not the causes. The cause is math. Preferential attachment, compound interest, and whatever that gambling thing is called. Even board games and game shows and school children know this and actively mitigate it. If only to keep the game going and enjoyable.
  - dllthomas 6y ago
    I don't think that's a common definition of corporatist. It might well be a useful concept, but it probably deserves a different label. Do you see it as distinct from "corporate capitalism"?
    - specialist 6y ago
      I wish I had a better label. Something that makes clear that I'm criticizing certain players and not the game. A way to celebrate liberal democracy coupled with capitalism, distinct from monopolistic, predatory, fraudulent behavior. David Graeber is much better at this sort of thing. Like his calls for redefining work in terms of caring for each other.
      - dllthomas 6y ago

claudeganon 6y ago

Noah Smith is about as intellectually dishonest as they come. He has misrepresented Taleb’s work on several occasions, possibly never having read it in the first place: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SmithBSVendor.html https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/SmithBSVendor.html

naravara 6y ago

I'm not as down on Noah Smith as many, but this is honestly a pretty bad review. He basically admits to having trouble understanding it owing to it being disorganized (a point he repeats frequently). But then he complains about people who criticize him for not making good faith attempts understanding what they're saying. Then he spends way too much of it trying to criticize anyone who would tell him it's bad and even spends an entire paragraph talking about how he suspects Graeber is a public intellectual who bristles at criticism before going on to pre-emptively bristle at any potential criticism of his review. Not his best work, to be sure.