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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

He is interesting but also wrong a lot: https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/04/david-graeber-april-f...

If you'd like an antidote to his book Debt, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible is useful. Debt may be called "5,000 years of anecdotes:" https://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages.

This: https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/the-anarchist-and-the-anthr... also doesn't cover him with glory.

He did think differently and often intelligently, which is to be admired, but "Different and also correct" is different from simply "different."

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I don't know how your comment, although interesting and with worthwhile links (thanks, by the way), relates to mine. I'd not mentioned his "thinking differently", and neither did I suggest that he was "different and also correct". (Nor did I mention his work "Debt".)

I liked his writing; for its style and because it made me think. I like that. It doesn't imply total agreement or fanaticism, and neither does it imply hostility or disagreement.

I would offer, from your first link, part of a comment lifted from its comment thread (even if I might dispute the commenter's use of the word "tiny"):

... We can all pick over tiny details in books and engage in hermeneutic readings…. It’s not hard.…. [W]hat’s going to be remembered, David’s book with its intellectually revolutionary message, one that has inspired so many young economists that I meet or DeLong’s pedantic complaints about ambiguous meanings and contentious issues.… Who wins in the contest for etiquette? I don’t know. But who wins the intellectual argument? Again, let history decide. But I’m thinking Graeber.

for anyone interested in some history between the author of the first link and graeber, in his own words: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164707

That was an informative read. Many thanks.

> I think the biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544-odd pages of Debt, despite years of obsessively flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I thought it was one, actually it's three. Yup. Guilty as charged.

Yes it's an illuminating read. :-)

Are there any non-joke publications that critiqued his writing?

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