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I wholeheartedly and aggressively recommend Graeber's book Debt: the first 5000 years. It changed my whole view of the social role of money and property. I have

by reso 3y ago

I wholeheartedly and aggressively recommend Graeber's book Debt: the first 5000 years. It changed my whole view of the social role of money and property. I have bought copies of it for multiple people. I haven't read Bullshit Jobs, because from the press tour around it it seemed to me Graeber's position was one I'd already considered and rejected. It seems to me that a lot of desk jobs that feel like bullshit to the employee are really part of the nervous tissue of the organization, and the value they provide to the organization is still larger than the employee's salary. I could be wrong, however, either about Graeber's thesis or about his conclusion. Either way, brilliant author and great man. Lost too soon in Summer 2020, likely due to rare covid complications. Debt will always have a place on my bookshelf.

therealdrag0 3y ago
That’s one of those books that I read and enjoyed but don’t remember a damn thing about. Do you remember enough to mention a few things you learned?
- blueline 3y ago
  there's an interview with graeber about the book that covers a good deal of the book's content pretty succinctly: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-jamie-stern-weiner-debt-slavery-and-our-idea-of-freedom https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-ja...
- reso 3y ago
  Its one of those books that has so shifted my thinking that it feels like the things I learned in it I always knew, but I'll try to write a few of them down. I think for me, at the place politically that I was when I read it, the most impactful concept in Debt was about how property is a social relationship that often emerges through power/violence relationships. I remember there's a passage where he says something like "It impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object", where the implication is: if something is "yours", that is a fact about your relationship with other human beings, not a fact about the universe. This idea is a rephrasing of Proudhon's line "Property is theft". The intro chapter has an anecdote about discussing IMF loan forgiveness which also is an amazing demonstration about how debt relationships often reflect existing power relationships between people, and are used to perpetuate those existing structures. There's a chapter wherein he describes how in french colonies, the administration convinced the locals to use their currency, having used none before. The method was to impose a debt (through a tax) on the population, payable only in that currency. Then the population will be forced to carry out whatever economic activities get them that currency (such as selling their crops to Frenchmen). This chapter also serves as a counterargument to the right-libertarian/laissez-faire view that states and markets are opposed forces--in fact it is often states which cause markets to exist. He has a thesis I can't quite recall about why different periods of history are dominated by gold/instrinsically valuable currency vs. forms of IOUs, I can't immediately recall the details. Maybe stability. I'm due for a re-read myself sometime soon.
myshpa 3y ago
Read it, you're probably wrong, and it will change your views once again. All his books are superb. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) analyzes our civilization from another angle - how we have apparently "got stuck" on a single trajectory of development, and how violence and domination became normalised within this dominant system. Not finished yet, but it's also a candidate for aggressive recommendations :)
- 317070 3y ago
  The only book I wouldn't recommend is the one about Pirates. The Dawn, Debt, Bullshit Jobs, all were books that had a foundation-shaking therapeutic effect on me. If you are somewhat anarchistic, these provide a framework to hold onto society which makes so much more sense than the one provided in most schooling systems.
yodsanklai 3y ago
> I wholeheartedly and aggressively recommend Graeber's book Debt: the first 5000 years. It was popular and heavily recommended here on HN. But I wonder how many people actually read it. I stopped after a few chapters. Maybe I'm just too dumb or I should have bought it in my native language, but it was too dense and unstructured for my taste. I think there are some people on youtube who summarized the main points. Found it more interesting.
louzell 3y ago
> It seems to me that a lot of desk jobs that feel like bullshit to the employee are really part of the nervous tissue of the organization, and the value they provide to the organization is still larger than the employee's salary I'm not so sure that would actually count as a bullshit job in Graeber's eyes. He works towards a definition of a bullshit job over multiple pages. Here is a bit, I think, that would rule out the job above: > This allows us to refine our definition. Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that are useless or pernicious; typically, there has to be some degree of pretense and fraud involved as well. The jobholder must feel obliged to pretend that there is, in fact, a good reason why her job exists, even if, privately, she finds such claims ridiculous. There has to be some kind of gap between pretense and reality. (This makes sense etymologically: “bullshitting” is, after all, a form of dishonesty.) I read Bullshit Jobs and enjoyed it, yet it kinda nagged at me that I was missing the subtleness of the argument. I'm glad to see here that it hasn't crystalized for many others, too.
- kar5pt 3y ago
  How does that description necessarily not meet that definition? The UP said nothing about whether the person in the job is obligated to pretend that the job is important. Plus everyone is giving slightly different definitions of a bullshit job. It smells of a Motte and bailey fallacy.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> Debt: the first 5000 years Reading the synopsis, I get the impression he's basically defining different forms of IOUs as "debt" instead of "currency", and use it as lever to posit that "debt" came before money, to then go on to explain that people live in a society and depend on each other in many intricate ways... Not that there's anything specifically wrong with that...but is it worth a long read or am I already getting the gist of it ?
- raincole 3y ago
  Yes, it's roughly the idea of this book. Is it still worth reading? It depends on how much you are interested in the history behind all these. I think the book is recommended so much because many people have very weird view towards the concept of "debt". Maybe their upbringing taught them debt is intrinsically bad or something.
- reso 3y ago
  The book is an anthropological history of money. I wouldn't say it has a single thesis, although the idea that money has arose out of debt-relationships in different periods is a recurring theme. It starts in Babylon, where he looks at how temples acted as debt-registrars for cities and how this evolved into a currency system. He moves forward through history and theorizes why some periods are dominated by intrinsically valuable currency (boullion) vs. paper notes or other more abstract stores-of-value. I believe the final chapter covers the 1970s after Nixon moved off the gold standard.

by reso 3y ago

therealdrag0 3y ago

That’s one of those books that I read and enjoyed but don’t remember a damn thing about. Do you remember enough to mention a few things you learned?

blueline 3y ago
there's an interview with graeber about the book that covers a good deal of the book's content pretty succinctly: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-jamie-stern-weiner-debt-slavery-and-our-idea-of-freedom https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-ja...
reso 3y ago
Its one of those books that has so shifted my thinking that it feels like the things I learned in it I always knew, but I'll try to write a few of them down. I think for me, at the place politically that I was when I read it, the most impactful concept in Debt was about how property is a social relationship that often emerges through power/violence relationships. I remember there's a passage where he says something like "It impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object", where the implication is: if something is "yours", that is a fact about your relationship with other human beings, not a fact about the universe. This idea is a rephrasing of Proudhon's line "Property is theft". The intro chapter has an anecdote about discussing IMF loan forgiveness which also is an amazing demonstration about how debt relationships often reflect existing power relationships between people, and are used to perpetuate those existing structures. There's a chapter wherein he describes how in french colonies, the administration convinced the locals to use their currency, having used none before. The method was to impose a debt (through a tax) on the population, payable only in that currency. Then the population will be forced to carry out whatever economic activities get them that currency (such as selling their crops to Frenchmen). This chapter also serves as a counterargument to the right-libertarian/laissez-faire view that states and markets are opposed forces--in fact it is often states which cause markets to exist. He has a thesis I can't quite recall about why different periods of history are dominated by gold/instrinsically valuable currency vs. forms of IOUs, I can't immediately recall the details. Maybe stability. I'm due for a re-read myself sometime soon.

myshpa 3y ago

Read it, you're probably wrong, and it will change your views once again. All his books are superb. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) analyzes our civilization from another angle - how we have apparently "got stuck" on a single trajectory of development, and how violence and domination became normalised within this dominant system. Not finished yet, but it's also a candidate for aggressive recommendations :)

317070 3y ago
The only book I wouldn't recommend is the one about Pirates. The Dawn, Debt, Bullshit Jobs, all were books that had a foundation-shaking therapeutic effect on me. If you are somewhat anarchistic, these provide a framework to hold onto society which makes so much more sense than the one provided in most schooling systems.

yodsanklai 3y ago

> I wholeheartedly and aggressively recommend Graeber's book Debt: the first 5000 years. It was popular and heavily recommended here on HN. But I wonder how many people actually read it. I stopped after a few chapters. Maybe I'm just too dumb or I should have bought it in my native language, but it was too dense and unstructured for my taste. I think there are some people on youtube who summarized the main points. Found it more interesting.

louzell 3y ago

> It seems to me that a lot of desk jobs that feel like bullshit to the employee are really part of the nervous tissue of the organization, and the value they provide to the organization is still larger than the employee's salary I'm not so sure that would actually count as a bullshit job in Graeber's eyes. He works towards a definition of a bullshit job over multiple pages. Here is a bit, I think, that would rule out the job above: > This allows us to refine our definition. Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that are useless or pernicious; typically, there has to be some degree of pretense and fraud involved as well. The jobholder must feel obliged to pretend that there is, in fact, a good reason why her job exists, even if, privately, she finds such claims ridiculous. There has to be some kind of gap between pretense and reality. (This makes sense etymologically: “bullshitting” is, after all, a form of dishonesty.) I read Bullshit Jobs and enjoyed it, yet it kinda nagged at me that I was missing the subtleness of the argument. I'm glad to see here that it hasn't crystalized for many others, too.

kar5pt 3y ago
How does that description necessarily not meet that definition? The UP said nothing about whether the person in the job is obligated to pretend that the job is important. Plus everyone is giving slightly different definitions of a bullshit job. It smells of a Motte and bailey fallacy.

makeitdouble 3y ago

> Debt: the first 5000 years Reading the synopsis, I get the impression he's basically defining different forms of IOUs as "debt" instead of "currency", and use it as lever to posit that "debt" came before money, to then go on to explain that people live in a society and depend on each other in many intricate ways... Not that there's anything specifically wrong with that...but is it worth a long read or am I already getting the gist of it ?

raincole 3y ago
Yes, it's roughly the idea of this book. Is it still worth reading? It depends on how much you are interested in the history behind all these. I think the book is recommended so much because many people have very weird view towards the concept of "debt". Maybe their upbringing taught them debt is intrinsically bad or something.
reso 3y ago
The book is an anthropological history of money. I wouldn't say it has a single thesis, although the idea that money has arose out of debt-relationships in different periods is a recurring theme. It starts in Babylon, where he looks at how temples acted as debt-registrars for cities and how this evolved into a currency system. He moves forward through history and theorizes why some periods are dominated by intrinsically valuable currency (boullion) vs. paper notes or other more abstract stores-of-value. I believe the final chapter covers the 1970s after Nixon moved off the gold standard.