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I have proactively searched for factual critiques of Debt. I've only found quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. If you can show

I have proactively searched for factual critiques of Debt. I've only found quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. If you can show me a more substantive critique, I'd love to read it.

tptacek 3y ago
/r/AskEconomics is a good start. Later Does this read snarky? I don't mean it that way; AskEconomics just doesn't seem to be a fan of Graeber, so if you're looking for critiques, that's a quick way to find some.
- trevyn 3y ago
  HN just hates reddit.
- khrbrt 3y ago
  It would be helpful to link to a specific thread or an FAQ page for the subreddit instead of vaguely suggesting to search its archive or create a new thread.
wharvle 3y ago
The majority of complaints I’ve seen have been of the sort “he says X is true and doesn’t even bother to consider that Y!” … but he does. Like two paragraphs later. He states that specific criticism, and addresses it. Maybe not well! But that’s rarely the complaint. I think the form of the book threw some folks who weren’t used to that sort of thing—a series of assertions and statements unbroken by digression, spanning one or more paragraphs, followed by paragraphs directly stating and addressing many criticisms a reader may have come up with.
- namaria 3y ago
  Yes it really seems like most criticism comes from people merely reacting to some ideas in the book.
samth 3y ago
I recommend this seminar on the book, which contains both strong critiques and a lot of interesting and positive discussion. https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/ https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-semina...
- barry-cotter 3y ago
  More than ten years later this was one of the organiser’s reflection. > think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/ https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/
unmole 3y ago
Graeber claims Adam Smith's famous "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 self-interest" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run. Graeber pretends that all of economics rests on the Myth of Barter. He ascribes moral positions to Smith that are invented whole cloth, smears all economics with his own fabrications and builds up his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments,that somehow doesn't find any references in Graeber's screed. Then there's the bizzare Iraq war conspiracy theory, the fundamental mischaracterisation of the safest securities on the planet and a culture essentialist caricature of China.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on the Iraq war conspiracy theory?
  - unmole 3y ago
    Graeber suggests that Iraq was invaded soon after it started selling oil for euros instead of dollars. In reality, the switch happened in late 2000 but Iraq wasn't invaded till March 2003. And it happened under the UN's Food for Oil-for-Food program and was authorised by the Security Council: https://www.un.org/depts/oip/background/chron.html https://www.un.org/depts/oip/background/chron.html
    - tremon 3y ago
      Two years (from late 2000 till early 2003) is absolutely "soon" in international political timeframes.
      - notahacker 3y ago
        True, but Iraq making some non-dollar payments for oil is absolutely insignificant in international monetary flows.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
What is factual is old, and what is new is just wild speculation. Also, misunderstanding of modern economics and the Fed, yes.
cynicalkane 3y ago
I suspect you actually found good factual critiques, but decided to label them "quibbles". The Fed issues the modern world's most important debt instrument, and has a structure and purpose that Graeber gets fundamentally wrong. The reason critics focus on this is that, if he's lazy and wrong about the modern world's most important debt instrument... in a book about "debt"... it's probably a good sign you can't trust the rest of the book.
- jongjong 3y ago
  I don't agree that Graeber's interpretation was incorrect. However, regardless of implementation details and nuances, there is one critique which is irrefutable about reserve banking; it is far too complicated to be understood by the majority who rely on it. This complexity obscures the functioning of the most important force in economics and society. It is unacceptable on that basis alone. People should not be coerced to participate in a system which they cannot understand on the basis of trust alone. Especially when it involves trusting people they've never met and who may have conflicting interests.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    People have to rely on complex chemistry and physics they don’t understand too. Given a choice between a simplistic economic system with worse outcomes and complex system with better outcomes, I’m choosing the better outcomes every time.
    - floydnoel 3y ago
      that's probably a false dichotomy, though. a lot of us think that the complex system also delivers the worse outcomes. the great depression didn't happen until after the fed existed, after all.
      - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
        How about?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1884 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1884 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baring_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baring_crisis Don't get me wrong, the Great Depression was 100% made worse by the economic thinkers (including the Fed) of the time, but the creation of a central bank was driven by prior problems.
throwawaymaths 3y ago
A good one is the very beginning of the book, where he lambasts the economists use of the coinidence of wants as a just-so story that self-justifies the economists profession. I chuckled, because his anthropological story of the evolution of money is also a just-so story that self-justifies anthropology though I'm inclined to believe it more. Furthermore, throwing out the coincidence of wants model as a phenomenology is also probably misguided. I think it's hard to argue that there isn't social efficiency lost in the informal debt and repayment system, which graeber seems to have an overly high respect for, on top of which, that the social and power dynamics of social debt systems seem, in my mind, to be likely to incipiate more corruption and MORE wealth inequality, than the numismatic debt system. Anyways it's still an incredible (in the good sense) book and everyone should read it for another perspective besides ths neoclassical.
barry-cotter 3y ago
> Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on. Yet a hundred pages later, the bifurcation fallacy takes effect—there’s either a royal boss or no bosses—and we’re assured that Uruk enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.” A naked “what if?” conjecture has wandered off and returned in the three-piece suit of an established fact. > A similar latitude is indulged when we visit the Trypillia Megasites (4100–3300 BC) in the forest-steppe of Ukraine. The largest of these settlement areas, Taljanky, is spread over 1.3 square miles, archaeologists have discovered more than a thousand houses there, and Graeber and Wengrow tell us that the per-site population was, in some cases, probably well over 10,000 residents. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralized administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.” > Proof? An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account, John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “maximalist model.” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man. > A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter this sort of discordance between what the book says and what its sources say. Was Mohenjo Daro—a settlement, dating to around 2600 BC, on one side of the Indus River in Pakistan’s Sindh province—free of hierarchy and administration? “Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But Kenoyer has concluded that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”? Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis. They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig. > And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand. https://archive.is/ATyH2 https://archive.is/ATyH2 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-di...
opo 3y ago
It isn't difficult to find critiques of the book from different economists. The problems they find in the book are much more substantial than quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. For example: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000-years.html http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-... https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-menger https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-me... https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...

tptacek 3y ago

/r/AskEconomics is a good start. Later Does this read snarky? I don't mean it that way; AskEconomics just doesn't seem to be a fan of Graeber, so if you're looking for critiques, that's a quick way to find some.

trevyn 3y ago
HN just hates reddit.
khrbrt 3y ago
It would be helpful to link to a specific thread or an FAQ page for the subreddit instead of vaguely suggesting to search its archive or create a new thread.

wharvle 3y ago

The majority of complaints I’ve seen have been of the sort “he says X is true and doesn’t even bother to consider that Y!” … but he does. Like two paragraphs later. He states that specific criticism, and addresses it. Maybe not well! But that’s rarely the complaint. I think the form of the book threw some folks who weren’t used to that sort of thing—a series of assertions and statements unbroken by digression, spanning one or more paragraphs, followed by paragraphs directly stating and addressing many criticisms a reader may have come up with.

namaria 3y ago
Yes it really seems like most criticism comes from people merely reacting to some ideas in the book.

samth 3y ago

I recommend this seminar on the book, which contains both strong critiques and a lot of interesting and positive discussion. https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/ https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-semina...

barry-cotter 3y ago
More than ten years later this was one of the organiser’s reflection. > think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/ https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/

unmole 3y ago

Graeber claims Adam Smith's famous "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 self-interest" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run. Graeber pretends that all of economics rests on the Myth of Barter. He ascribes moral positions to Smith that are invented whole cloth, smears all economics with his own fabrications and builds up his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments,that somehow doesn't find any references in Graeber's screed. Then there's the bizzare Iraq war conspiracy theory, the fundamental mischaracterisation of the safest securities on the planet and a culture essentialist caricature of China.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Could you elaborate on the Iraq war conspiracy theory?
- unmole 3y ago
  Graeber suggests that Iraq was invaded soon after it started selling oil for euros instead of dollars. In reality, the switch happened in late 2000 but Iraq wasn't invaded till March 2003. And it happened under the UN's Food for Oil-for-Food program and was authorised by the Security Council: https://www.un.org/depts/oip/background/chron.html https://www.un.org/depts/oip/background/chron.html
  - tremon 3y ago
    Two years (from late 2000 till early 2003) is absolutely "soon" in international political timeframes.
    - notahacker 3y ago
      True, but Iraq making some non-dollar payments for oil is absolutely insignificant in international monetary flows.

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

What is factual is old, and what is new is just wild speculation. Also, misunderstanding of modern economics and the Fed, yes.

cynicalkane 3y ago

I suspect you actually found good factual critiques, but decided to label them "quibbles". The Fed issues the modern world's most important debt instrument, and has a structure and purpose that Graeber gets fundamentally wrong. The reason critics focus on this is that, if he's lazy and wrong about the modern world's most important debt instrument... in a book about "debt"... it's probably a good sign you can't trust the rest of the book.

jongjong 3y ago
I don't agree that Graeber's interpretation was incorrect. However, regardless of implementation details and nuances, there is one critique which is irrefutable about reserve banking; it is far too complicated to be understood by the majority who rely on it. This complexity obscures the functioning of the most important force in economics and society. It is unacceptable on that basis alone. People should not be coerced to participate in a system which they cannot understand on the basis of trust alone. Especially when it involves trusting people they've never met and who may have conflicting interests.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  People have to rely on complex chemistry and physics they don’t understand too. Given a choice between a simplistic economic system with worse outcomes and complex system with better outcomes, I’m choosing the better outcomes every time.
  - floydnoel 3y ago
    that's probably a false dichotomy, though. a lot of us think that the complex system also delivers the worse outcomes. the great depression didn't happen until after the fed existed, after all.
    - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
      How about?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1884 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1884 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baring_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baring_crisis Don't get me wrong, the Great Depression was 100% made worse by the economic thinkers (including the Fed) of the time, but the creation of a central bank was driven by prior problems.

throwawaymaths 3y ago

A good one is the very beginning of the book, where he lambasts the economists use of the coinidence of wants as a just-so story that self-justifies the economists profession. I chuckled, because his anthropological story of the evolution of money is also a just-so story that self-justifies anthropology though I'm inclined to believe it more. Furthermore, throwing out the coincidence of wants model as a phenomenology is also probably misguided. I think it's hard to argue that there isn't social efficiency lost in the informal debt and repayment system, which graeber seems to have an overly high respect for, on top of which, that the social and power dynamics of social debt systems seem, in my mind, to be likely to incipiate more corruption and MORE wealth inequality, than the numismatic debt system. Anyways it's still an incredible (in the good sense) book and everyone should read it for another perspective besides ths neoclassical.

barry-cotter 3y ago

> Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on. Yet a hundred pages later, the bifurcation fallacy takes effect—there’s either a royal boss or no bosses—and we’re assured that Uruk enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.” A naked “what if?” conjecture has wandered off and returned in the three-piece suit of an established fact. > A similar latitude is indulged when we visit the Trypillia Megasites (4100–3300 BC) in the forest-steppe of Ukraine. The largest of these settlement areas, Taljanky, is spread over 1.3 square miles, archaeologists have discovered more than a thousand houses there, and Graeber and Wengrow tell us that the per-site population was, in some cases, probably well over 10,000 residents. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralized administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.” > Proof? An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account, John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “maximalist model.” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man. > A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter this sort of discordance between what the book says and what its sources say. Was Mohenjo Daro—a settlement, dating to around 2600 BC, on one side of the Indus River in Pakistan’s Sindh province—free of hierarchy and administration? “Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But Kenoyer has concluded that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”? Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis. They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig. > And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand. https://archive.is/ATyH2 https://archive.is/ATyH2 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-di...

opo 3y ago

It isn't difficult to find critiques of the book from different economists. The problems they find in the book are much more substantial than quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. For example: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-first-5000-years.html http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-... https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-menger https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-me... https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...