The Anthropologist in an Economist World | Hacker News Reader

The Anthropologist in an Economist World

brettscott.substack.com

81 pointsGigamouse14 comments

David’s book on money (Debt: The first 5,000 years) is one of the most fascinating I’ve read. Sad to hear he died.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

As much as I loved this book when first reading it, it is riddled with errors and a lot of it has been refuted. Not to say it isn't a great read, it is, just take it with a very large grain of salt.

> Many times throughout the book, Graeber rails against the fact that the morality of "paying one's debts" functions as a mechanism for keeping debtors in bondage to creditors. But a few times, Graeber actually reverses the equation, and laments the power that debtors can sometimes exercise over creditors, quoting the old saw that "if you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you; if you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank." In other words, whether debt gives power to creditors or debtors, power is the bad thing, and debt is merely the mechanism by which power is expressed.

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...

> To start with, he makes several different historical claims, not all of them compatible:

> (1) Credit transactions preceded and dominated spot transactions in early human societies.

> (2) Media of account emerged before media of exchange.

> (3) Barter was unknown (or at least extremely rare) WITHIN early human societies.

> Notice that point (1) is incompatible with either (2) or (3). Early credit transactions must have involved barter (contradicting number 3) or media of exchange (contradicting 2). There is no other logical possibility. Yet because Graeber’s peculiar concept of barter excludes a farmer trading a pig for delivery of an ax in two weeks (to use Murphy’s example), his claim that barter was non-existent tends to become true by definition.

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...

Sure, there are a lot of possibilities that fullfill the three critera - you're imposing the modern conception of credit on early human civilizations.

To put it simply, early credit relationships were dominantly exchanges of services. So it wasn't barter, it's that you would do something for someone with the expectation that they would do something for you.

There, no media of exchange, and no barter. Solved. That's what you get for projecting definitions backwards through time :)

Now for the first time, I'm not sure how that is controversial, if you read that historically debt was a tool of bondage, then it makes perfect sense to frame the power of bondage as a social ill.

Rest in Power, David Graeber. Truly a great loss.

> As an analogy, imagine a music professor claiming that classical music is the only form of music, and then proceeding to use Western classical music notation and scales to transcribe Indian ragas.

It's probably not a coincidence that this video has been viewed 600,000 times in the last 10 days and uses Indian raga as a specific example.

    Music Theory and White Supremacy
    Adam Neely
    https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA

Also, very happy they are using Jitsi for the video at the bottom :).

was really upset to hear his passing. he had so many valuable thoughts and ideas

I agree. IMO, although I know a significant number of people disagree with me here, I think David Graeber's ideas are important enough that people of all ideological stripes ought to pay attention to what he had to say.

Unfortunately, since he's far, far outside the Overton window, to the left, Americans, by and large, have a rather extreme reaction to those ideas. That's bad, because ideas that make us uncomfortable can sometimes be the ones that allow us to make truly revolutionary leaps in our thinking. Not always -- e.g. wanting to make slavery illegal is an idea that ought to make everyone uncomfortable, but has no legitimate place in today's world. But, definitely sometimes, and I believe Graeber's ideas are the type that could take us forward, rather than backward.

> Not always -- e.g. wanting to make slavery illegal is an idea that ought to make everyone uncomfortable, but has no legitimate place in today's world.

I had a hard time parsing this. Did you mean legal?

Yes. Autocorrect strikes again.

Is there a term for the tension that occurs when objectively optimal policy falls outside the window?

I'm not proposing that it's possible to identify a truly optimal policy mix, only that there might be (at least) one and I'm curious about what happens to society when it falls far outside what's acceptable to discuss.

"Overton Defenestration" would be doing that policy anyways.

The Overton window in nineteenth century US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667409

Reply on news.ycombinator.com