3 ms·
To be fair to the late Graeber, DeLong was intentionally provoking him from the start. To be fair to DeLong, he was doing it because Graeber had dramatically ov
by notahacker 6y ago
To be fair to the late Graeber, DeLong was intentionally provoking him from the start. To be fair to DeLong, he was doing it because Graeber had dramatically overreacted to relatively mild critical takes on his work on the Crooked Timber economics blog whose contributors thought his book intellectually stimulating enough to hold a multi-author 'seminar' on it - accusing them of being part of a 'strategy of delegitimization'. Which just goes to show that academic debate can easily head in the same direction as arguments on the rest of the internet.
As for the actual Debt: The First 5000 Years book, it's engaging, thought-provoking, less opinionated than I was expecting and right about a lot of big things. But his critics aren't wrong that it's also wrong about a lot more small details than the founding of Apple Computer (one I'm surprised none of the academic economists scrutinising his book picked up on: he describes Treatise on Money as Keynes 'most famous work' which is akin to calling Wings Paul McCartney's most famous band. That's particularly surprising in the middle of a passage about Keynes' work which is actually well-informed). Still think it's worth reading for people vaguely interested in the subject matter though.
- cynicalkane 6y agoI feel like there's some form of Gell-Mann amnesia here. Why say a book is right about a lot of big things when it is frequently wrong about those things which can be verified?
- earthboundkid 6y agoBecause I didn’t read Debt to learn about Apple, and that’s not what I took away from it.
- cynicalkane 6y agoThat's deeply disingenuous. It's not like this guy was telling the truth everywhere else. The lies were numerous. That's what Gell-Mann amnesia is, really: we believe what we want to believe, and forget the quality of the source.
- notahacker 6y agoBecause I've read other, less entertaining writing on the history of money which concurs with Graeber's central argument that money is much best understood as debt accounting (and some pretty terrible writing about the magical powers of certain metals) and the sloppiness in illustrative anecdotes (or impractical utopian proposals of regular debt jubilees) doesn't really affect that central thesis. I wouldn't necessarily rely on Graeber's colourful anecdotes about historical civilisations or obscure tribes being accurate and uncontroversial without checking what other anthropologists think, but those are 'small picture' things.