David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
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This book will undoubtedly change the way we talk about non-industrial peoples and lifestyles for decades to come.
Rest in power, David Graeber
E.g. the origins of agriculture. It's going from the idea of having a single point of origin to multiple (~15-20) points of origins around the world.
Another major shift in thinking about agriculture is realizing it wasn't so much of a technological advancement (indeed agricultural people had radically reduced lifespans, less leisure time, more disease, etc) as something people were likely forced into. And most people around the world grew at least part of their food or at least had the knowledge to do it so people shifted in and out of agriculture commonly.
Another major shift in thinking is around cities. In anthropology the concept of cities have actually been defined by hierarchical social structures. We have more and more examples of many very large rural places that very much go against the idea and drive a big hole in the idea that hierarchy is a natural biproduct of increasing populations.
I could go on. One that I wish got covered more in the book was the relationships between cultures and ecologies. This is more of a major shift in archaeobotany and will probably take a while to be fully fleshed out and reach the wider public, but archeologists are increasingly seeing, for example, the Amazon rainforest as a manufactured landscape. One that was very heavily shaped by the indigenous peoples that lived in them and would not be around in the way that it is without them. Same for California and it's deep dependence on cultural burning practices and also for most of Australia that early colonists often described as looking like a "giant well-managed park".
For those that are unaware, this is basically the core of anarchist political theory; hierarchies aren't merely natural consequences of human society, but were in fact created via force.
by force of whom? Gods? Aliens? or was it by the humans within that society? this hypothesis has naturalistic fallacy written all over it.
In chimpanzee cultures, the "alpha males" are rarely the strongest or most violent ones. It's usually the most charismatic chimps that get along with the most other members of the group and have their support. Usually the approval of the elders plays a big role.
In some of the Northeast woodland cultures talked about in the book they had similar leadership models based on charisma. Charisma here doesn't really mean just having a way with words (though it does also mean that). It means being able to understand the needs of all the members and having their approval
Whether or not you wanna call this "hierarchy without coercion" is mostly a matter of semantics and what you ultimately define as "hierarchy". But I think a key difference to point out is that these positions of leadership don't really hold any permanent power. They have a lot of influence, but that influence can be taken away as easily as it's given to them
Though he does touch on this topic in the chapter about the origins of private property.
Specifically that foragers did in fact took active care of, and shaped, their ecology not unlike farmers. It’s just that they didn’t have a burning need to permanently stick with the domestication of plants and animals as the food was abundantly available to them.
In any case, thanks for the link.
Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, solid and mind-blowing.
Sometimes the book gets too much into petty fights. I didn't like its takes on Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" or Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". But that's a matter of my personal taste.
It's good to see the Jesuit Relations (basically the National Geographic of its time) being introduced to a popular audience but the notion that the ideals of liberty and social equality didn't exist in European thought prior to contact between American and European cultures is just wrong.
Well, La Boétie's "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" dates back to 200 years before Rousseau, and I wouldn't say it was inspired by American Indians. I am not saying that the discovery and then the deep relations that France did have with American Indians did not play an important in the literature and reflections: on the contrary just a bit after La Boétie's time, Montaigne integrated them in his thinking. That was still over 150 years before Rousseau.
Edit: There were other major transformations at work, like the fact that before 1500, writers would either be lords or strongly depend on King or lords both for their income and for being allowed to publish. It was a Middle Age organisation, with a chivalry based nobility; writing essays was not a thing, the number of themes was as reduced as the number of forms. Then society organisation changed, bourgeoisie and nobles started mixing more and more; writing was more long-form (technical reasons come into play too) and of course expanded the number of themes it dealt with.
But what he addresses is radical equality, as a fundamental value, as opposed to "less inequality". Equality under a ruler or rebellion against abuses is not the same as thinking the whole society as composed of equals. Think of no-slavery, equality among genders, sexual freedom, etc. Even thinkers that thought about equality before Iluminism (e.g. Thomas More) didn't go that far.
I strongly recommend you reading, at least, chapter 2 in the book. Is way deeper than what I explain.
Typical Graeber. Total nonsense. Radical equality has multi-origins in religious cults for 1000s of years. It has been part of 'Western' history writing for almost as long as we have historical narratives.
Pretty much as far as we can tell these ideas are resurfacing over and over in every big culture. For most we have no documentation but its clear there and has been documented lots of time.
The claim isn't actually that inequality wasn't a topic, the claim is that discussing inequality within the framing that equality might actually be the natural state of thing, or at least just as natural… that was a novel topic at the time of Rousseau.
And sure, it's probably more fair to talk about why even that topic was burgeoning in popularity rather than to imply that it was truly novel.
Also, it is quite ironic to mention the thought of Rousseau as an exemplar of the Enlightenment when he is often put into the camp of Counter-Enlightenment.
Graener & Wengrove are as susceptible to this as others.
I mean... the origins of enlightenment liberalism, the origin of money and such don't really have distinct answers. There are always multiple, arguable narratives.
The "paradigm" concept is all about narrowing these to simple causal chains and dynamics... which then limits the next generation.
We love paradigms, anti-paradigms, paradigm shifts... So, every author likes to rebel against the preceding simplification and argue their own, calling them myths and misconceptions.
For the most part, imo, excess is what drives it all. The Jared Diamond paradigms, YNH's, Marx's... Graener & Wengrow are focused on challenging their paradigms as much as they are on promoting their own.
If successful, these new paradigms develop their own excesses and a new generation can get pissy with them.
I really hope he doesn't say that because Rousseau is just the high point of a debate about luxury and sociability that runs throughout the whole eighteenth century. He and others like him were influenced by travelogues from the New World describing natives as living simply and equitably. But he was equally influenced by the objective conditions of early modern capitalism, ancient Stoicism, and Christian writings about greed and pride. He wrote his own 'Confessions' in tribute to St.Augustine, after all.
I like Graeber, and he has a truly original mind, but he doesn't have the best reputation in academia for being 100% scholarly.
[1] For example this one is great: https://youtu.be/M-frUMXKcEw
For those looking for a left-wing critique, I like Aufheben's: https://libcom.org/library/5000-years-or-debt
Graeber also obviously has an angle but three are still many interesting insights and angles. I don’t think anyone is ever going to give e complete unbiased version of anything. Better to read different perspectives with an open mind and a healthy does of scepticism.
I lived “Debt: first 5000 years” and “Bullshit jobs”
Both challenge a lot of truthisms about our modern capitalist world. I am surprised the ideas in these books have not become more widely known on the political left.
In fact is a pretty embracing takedown of strawmen he set up as how he imagines economists.
He very clearly has so much distaste for economist that he couldn't even be bother to actually research the history of economics. He makes so many fundamental mistakes that are so embracing, he clearly doesn't want debate. He basically sees economists as evil and he doesn't need to know more.
> I am surprised the ideas in these books have not become more widely known on the political left.
I don't know '5000 ...' was widely read by anybody that fancied himself a intellectual liberal. The problem is that the book doesn't real proscribe anything practical so it does not actually translate into any coherent political position.
The book wasn't written to promote a practical (political?) position. It's an anthropology of debt. I'll give an examples of something I learned from it that I personally found incredibly interesting:
* Economists all tell the same story about the origin of currency. "People used to barter, but that was impractical, so they invented money to make exchange easier." There is literally no example of that happening in any society anywhere on Earth at any known time. He details instead how, in China, the government needed to raise a large, professional army, so the gov't paid soldiers in their new currency and forced the population to pay taxes in that currency. Poof! Society has reoriented itself to start using currency.
> He very clearly has so much distaste for economist that he couldn't even be bother to actually research the history of economics.
Can you give a specific example where he got the history of economics wrong? Because he cites specific cases where, for example Adam Smith borrowed from Islamic texts on finance; I don't know of anywhere he makes "fundamental mistakes," but I'd love to be proven wrong on that.
It makes very, very clear arguments about debt and how that should be handled. Claiming its only a history is just not accurate. He is clearly promoting his politics with this book.
> 'll give an examples of something I learned from it that I personally found incredibly interesting:
And I'm telling you that this is a straw-men about economics that was never true.
Economics did actually think about these things but he had no interest researching that. He is totally misinterpreting the history of economics on this question.
The whole point about barter being impractical on small scales is exactly WHY we do not find societies in the small using barter. Its not that people starter bartering and evolved beyond it, its that the impossibility of barter forces your society to come up with something else. Economist were aware of this. Garber loves to claim how much smarter anthropologists are and how they understood social credit, gift giving and extraction, but of course non of this was new to economics.
Graeber literally didn't even know the history of economies about this and he didn't research it.
Read this from a economics text from 'Geld' 1892 and this is not some fringe economist, but one of the most famous of his time:
> Voluntary as well as compulsory unilateral transfers of assets (that is, transfers arising neither from a ‘reciprocal contract’ in general nor from an exchange transaction in particular, although occasionally based on tacitly recognized reciprocity), are among the oldest forms of human relationships as far as we can go back in the history of man’s economizing. Long before the exchange of goods appears in history, or becomes of more than negligible importance…we already find a variety of unilateral transfers: voluntary gifts and gifts made more or less under compulsion, compulsory contributions, damages or fines, compensation for killing someone, unilateral transfers within families, etc.
But apparently economists were totally unaware of any of this according to Graeber. Graeber himself claims that anthropologist (who are much smarter and not pawns of capitlaism). Graeber reference about anthropology date to 4 decades beyond this essay.
We can go on to the question of currency emerging.
We know that coins were first used in modern Turkey to pay mercenaries, and there was no government there that forced that currency to be used to pay taxes. These mercenaries were from outside of that territory and it was a store of value that can then be traded.
The problem with Graeber is that he collects all the example that prove his point, and ignores anything that might not agree with it. He goes at great lengths to find examples where to different cultures traded doesn't look like traditional long distance trade, and ignores many other more common examples. But he presents it as 'I have looked at everything'. Currency emerging from long distance trade between strangers is simply historical, if he likes it or not.
The dumb things he says in general are just mind blowing. He believes economies believe this:
> money is simply a mathematical system whereby one can compare proportional values, to say 1 of these is worth 17 of those.
Literally not even economics 101 level of understanding. How he seems to believe the Marginal Revolution of 1870s has never happened.
How about his claims about long distance trade:
> You don't cross mountains, deserts, and oceans, risking death in a dozen different ways, so as to show up with a collection of goods you think someone might want, in order to see if they happen to have something you might want.
What? Has he not heard of caravans, the silk road and the millenniums old history of long distance trade both on sea and on land. How did tin get from mountains of northern Iran to Greece during the bronze age exactly? Quite clearly there were many different political entities that you had to cross. We have documents from traders at the time who were constantly risking changing needs and demands in different places, supply lines that constantly disrupted by wars in different regions, huge risk were being taken all the time.
How about Portuguese sailors who tried to sale to India? They had never traded directly with India before.
He just has an incredibly narrow view on both economics and the real world. In his world the only thing that matters is small tribes and centralized states. Graeber has promoted ignore anything that doesn't fit in my world view to an artform.
We could go on about how Graeber reading of Adam Smith is totally wrong and many other things but dealing with Graeber to much ruins my day, I don't need to dredge up all this stuff again.
Portuguese sailors absolutely had been to India. But getting through the maze of canals in Egypt to the Red Sea was more expensive than they liked.
You miss the point about caravans: everything they carried in any volume were things there was a known and hungry market for.
While some tin certainty was mined in England, its not the only supply line in the bronze age.
> You miss the point about caravans: everything they carried in any volume were things there was a known and hungry market for.
No, I am not missing the point, the argument Graeber makes is very clearly about the denial of high risk entrepreneurial discovery.
I explained there is still market risk, supply lines are not perfectly stable and the don't just magically spring up with high certainty. Supply lines grow over time, extend, mutate and so on. Its called entrepreneurial discovery and it has been well studied in economics (something that seems to have almost no function in Graeber world view).
Of course volume increases as security increases, but even then the risk is still substantial. All European to Indian Ocean trade was incredibly high risk for the interior existence.
Non of your responses undermines my central argument I would say.
No, its not. Well, unless you mean the universal assumptions of empirical science, that the universe is deterministic and operates by consistent laws.
It's true that there are some concepts (like the rational actor concept) that are influential in framing economic models, but these are generally recognized as, at best, simplifications, and there are approaches within economics that have done away with any one of them, and even within those that haven't an important area of work for decades has been identifying and quantifying the areas where those common bases are materially wrong and the impacts of the deviations from them.
That being said, I do think there is a serious problem in the way economics is often taught, and things like debt (and more broadly, anthropology) is part of the cure [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
[2] https://ravik.substack.com/p/does-learning-economics-make-yo...
Just FYI, both Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, not economists.
Also of course, they're not the only ones doing behavioral economics [1]:
> Imperfect information is core to modern econ; theories showing how imperfect information can cause markets to break down received a Nobel 20 years ago. Perfect rationality has been successfully challenged by behavioral economics for decades, and received Nobels in 2002, 2013, and 2017.
[1] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/this-years-econ-critics-ma... (includes links)
See https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-death-of... - for an overview.
That just a strawmen that Garber and co set up. Anybody that actually studies the history of economics knows this.
Not saying Graber does this, but there are academics (I can think of a Canadian professor) who are very much "public intellectuals" but whose entire career is popular due to controversy. Is that person educating or is he leading a social movement? I guess that's up for debate, but that's hwy people know who he is, not because of great work.
Thus at least hear in Norway the academics who popularized knowledge and engage with the public are celebrated. Politicians have started to put more pressure on academics to speak up.
I know from a mother who was a life long journalist that it was always very hard to get experts to talk to media. They are so focused on a level of accuracy and formality that often is entirely unsuitable to address the public at large. But that does not mean that the alternative is to let quacks dominate public discourse.
If we're thinking of the same professor/Kermit the Frog impersonator, he was definitely somewhat of a public figure before he got involved with the C-16 controversy.
If you look at his public appearances from before this viral clip (and even for a year or two after), most of it is fairly well grounded and uncontroversial (or at least, not controversial for controversy's sake).
“David saved my academic career, if not my life. When I faced expulsion from the LSE, having already left the University of Chicago due to the health issues, he wrote a compelling letter on my behalf when there was no reason for him to do so. I wasn’t even in his department.
Although he and I disagreed about a number of things, I will forever appreciate him sticking his neck out for me when there was little evidence to suggest it was worth doing.
Thanks David.”
The formation of cultural norms fundamentally sit on the idea of recollection of the distant past and not of that which has just happened in front of you.
Example: The reason for wearing ties is part of the western cultural code not because each person distinctly and has first-hand witnessed how it started, it's just being shaped by historical precedent.
So what happens, over time, to cultural norms when the recollection can be made in first-person, distinct ways? (Think the internet, VR)
physical labour -> boston dynamics
office labour -> ~cloud + smartphones (i'm in an office job right now, and it's near zero work, it's full on redundancy, ambiguous and contradictory information, political friction.. any computer could replace the entire building and operate faster 24/7)
it's really not a huge stretch to predict 90% of tasks will just vanish
and i'm saying this with a human life approach. How do we organize cities / nations around that. Do we plan for smooth transition, say 40 years of gradually smarter tooling so people stay in charge but with advanced assist ? do we go UBI ? do we convert every human as a space tourist ?
You may be falling for AI propaganda: https://monroelab.net/attack-mannequins-ai-as-propaganda
What I've seen is that increased efficiencies have massively increased the amount of "things" being done by the same number of people.
As a random example, I'm dealing with a large government department on a semi regular basis as a consultant, so I get to see lots of parts of their business and in some ways I know them better than their own staff do.
It's madness. They have the same sized team of admins in charge of an exponentially growing set of business applications.
Decades ago large enterprises like this department would have had maybe 2-3 core applications, typically running on a mainframe. Then they'd have a few dozen peripheral applications in the sense that "email" counted as one of those apps!
Now? Their single sign on system has hundreds, and that's not including hundreds more non-SSO applications. They're almost certainly over a thousand if you count things like Google Maps (which they use heavily!) and the long tail of developer tools, system admin platforms, and whatnot.
In the past, people like me would have had a dedicated secretary. Now? I'm expected to not just manage my own calendar, but do my own project management, organise my own hotel rooms, and so forth.
It has become "so easy" that "anyone can do it", so everyone does. This just means that instead of one or two meetings a week, now we have many per day. Being able to organise a meeting doesn't mean that the same number of meetings have less organisation overhead. It means many more meetings.
Work hasn't be reduced. We're doing more of it than ever before...
So why don’t these people quit their jobs? Because a lot of nonsense jobs pay well and people don’t want to be unemployed because society is not setup to pay people to not work. Yet society is ironically happy to pay people to do nonsense.
Economists have a hard time believing this can be true. Things like efficient market theory suggests that companies want to be as efficient as possible. Yet they fail to see the tribal nature of humans. That is partly what Graeber exposes: How many CEOs will keep around people they don’t need because what is the point of being a boss of you got nobody to boss around?
CEOs are a bit like kings of old. Importance is shown through the number of retainers you have.
And often it is just self preservation. When management realize their whole division is full of people with no useful tasks to do they realize that they themselves risk getting fired. Why have managers and VPs if there are nobody to manage?
But what we can say, thanks to the pandemic, is that many parents and children are very unhappy when schools close, and that there is a shortage of medical staff.
There also seem to be shortages of various kinds of workers that are “essential” but not well-paid. Arguably they should be paid better.
> That is partly what Graeber exposes: How many CEOs will keep around people they don’t need because what is the point of being a boss of you got nobody to boss around?
the result? you guessed it: bullshit jobs
Maybe it will push back people to pursue passion, excellency and social bond (I will do things of high value for me and others so we're all happier).
I’m not saying it’s good, only questioning a certain definition.
Markets are accepted in Anarchism (and socialism) but Capitalism is not.
I see this a lot, where ancaps present themselves as anarchist, and believe that they are left wing, but when asked are shown to be ancaps by their answers. I don’t know what the endgame is in these conversations, for them or for me, as I’m mostly asking exploratory questions and have no agenda in asking per se.
People work the same amount and demand ten times as many products and services.
People demand the same amount of products and services but every person simply works 90% less.
10% of the people work and voluntarily give away their surplus to those who don't work.
The first one is called consumerism. The second one is called work sharing. The third one is called income sharing.
My personal favorite is work sharing.
It was called the industrial revolution, and literally since then the smartest intellectual have predicted mass unemployment and the disappearance of work.
Endlessly the same prediction with endlessly the same argument only to be proven wrong over and over.
No innovation today comes even remotely close disrupting that large a % of the population.
One of the most labor intensive things humans did for 1000s of years was making of cloth, an absurd amount of work. That was as well disrupted.
The pace of labor disruption today is WAY slower and the dynamic economy is WAY faster at producing new uses of labor. Hence why we have not actual seen this supposed collapse in the amount of required labor despite an endless parade of supposedly smart people predicting it for 200 years straight.
[0] I've ranted about it so many times but it reaches absurd levels .. people are not doing much, and the few that is asked of them is ridiculous. Plus it's often done through coercion by mediocre management that nobody respect (causing immense political friction, paranoia and misery.. most of my colleagues delay work and watch tik tok .. after talking to them the main reason is that nothing is working right nobody care, thus nobody wants to work anymore).
At a certain point its realizing that your own limitation if imagination is what preventing you from predicting the future.
Again, at every point over the last 200 years smart people were sitting around asking this same question, finding the same answers and then promptly be totally wrong.
How many times does it need to happen before you believe a historical pattern rather then your own limited predictive capability.
Fact is, if anything, labor is the limiting factor for a lot of things we would want to do.
> Especially considering how lame most jobs are today
Jobs today are generally less lame then the past. This is another Marxist myth, alienation doesn't hold up.
Thanks to peak oil and climate change "solving" this problem, I don't really think too much about that prospect.
what does this mean?
I'm wondering how he wrote a 500 page book on debt without really understanding banking?
[1] https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/01/the-very-last-david-g...
Debt is a thought-provoking book, but it's a book with no shortage of sloppy errors and dubious ancillary claims mostly incidental to its actual arguments. One DeLong probably should have picked up when he was compiling his lists is referring to Keynes' Treatise on Money his "most famous work", which is a bit like calling Wings Paul McCartney's most famous band.
He and Wengrow were serious in a certain sense: They were determined to publish extracts in peer-reviewed journals, to establish scholarly credibility. When they made their first submission, to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, they received brief comments dismissing their work as insufficiently “new.” Graeber was immediately distressed, convinced the anonymous reviewers had “some ax to grind.” Wengrow managed to calm him down while he replied on their behalf. Politely, Wengrow asked for examples of where exactly work like theirs had appeared before. The Journal was unable to produce any. It accepted the paper. Graeber was amazed. “How do you do that?” Wengrow remembers him marveling. “The man did not know how to handle stress,” another friend told me. A heated exchange on Twitter could derail him. Still, he refused to shy away. One persistent bugbear was the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong — after DeLong’s blog took him to task for a handful of factual errors in Debt, the two became entrenched in a protracted flamewar. (DeLong recently resurfaced, amid positive press for The Dawn of Everything, to affirm his stance that “nothing David Graeber writes is trustable.”)
I'd missed the claim about Keynes on first reading. I suppose it would have to be The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It appears to be very difficult for one person to write a historical treatise of such scope and breadth without making a nontrivial number of sloppy errors. There's so much surface area of things that could go wrong relative to the powers of human attention and working memory. I recall Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy which also has no shortage of sloppy errors and dubious ancillary claims despite Russell's reputation as a careful thinker.
I greatly enjoyed reading Debt. It gave me a new and valuable perspective on many things. I would not trust it alone as a source for any particular factual claim and would carefully check the references as needed, but as a whole I found the core arguments compelling. (That said, I think the overall level of scholarship is actually quite good and I would extend this same caution to any large work synthesizing many sources.) Like you said, it's a thought-provoking book.
Nitpicking (trolling) stuff that does not change or invalidate the central thesis is unhelpful.
Food fights over "most influential" (books, albums, paintings) is just hipster gatekeeping. As if. Which is more influential? St Peppers or Rubber Soul? Could the more popular St Peppers exist without Rubber Soul? Blah, blah, blah. Most people don't care. Both are amazing and worth studying.
I'd much prefer to read both DeLong and Graeber's Top Ten Albums lists, over DeLong kibitzing about Graeber's choices.
Especially now that I know Graeber was easily antagonized. Continuing to poke him just feels mean spirited. And definitely antithetical to scholarship.
If you can't trust someone's writings on facts you know about, why trust them on facts you don't know about? One of the essential things to understand when taking in information is to first understand: is this information trustworthy?
I see the above as clear evidence Graeber is not only untrustworthy but explicitly seems to feel he has the right to be so. Worse yet, he writes from the perspective of an expert on economic anthropology, but has taken a position where very basic facts of that field are beyond his ken. Not because of a lack of intellect or understanding, but because he has taken that position on purpose.
And now I see so many people on a site for hackers and technology celebrating someone's ideas without first wondering if those ideas are even factually correct and it puzzles me how we ended up here. Discussion about the factual correctness of Graeber's ideas, or the trustworthiness of his perspective and person, seems to be actively discouraged.
“I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England. Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.”
- David Graeber, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164707
I don't really care too much for Graeber's self-important response. If the answer is, yes, Graeber's entitled to say what he wants because people celebrate and have conferences about him, and those who disagree are implied to be beneath him... well, the brazen self-importance is so astonishing that I can't rightly understand how one can agree with that degree of self-importance so directly presented, especially when it comes paired with no actual defense of his statements -- not even a link.
Statements of the form "I'm right because I'm important, and that's all I need to say" are not usually tolerated from almost anyone as a substitute for basic, bare truths. That they are accepted here is not only a comment on the character of Graeber but on the character of his followers.
From a short piece of writing from the St. Louis Fed itself, linked to in another comment below:
>The Federal Reserve Banks are not a part of the federal government, but they exist because of an act of Congress.
Now, we could quote the next few lines too, for a bit more context:
> So is the Fed private or public? The answer is both. While the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
Clearly, it's a rather unique institution that makes arguments that it is privately controlled or not rather harder to resolve.
But that also means that this is not "an essential lie" by Graeber. He has elided some of the complexity in favor of what he sees as a more important truth, without saying something that it categorically false.
You stated that Graeber had told "an essential lie" in claiming that the Fed was privately controlled. I quoted from the St. Louis Fed. their own text which (a) confirms that it is not part of the government (b) it's complicated.
I don't really give a damn about the argument on whether the Fed is or is not part of the government; what I care about is people claiming that someone is lying when they are not.
Nothing on this page tells me that he doesn't understand the system or is attempting to deceive. I don't understand where your objection is coming from. Have you branded Graeber the great deceiver because of a line like "while technically, the Fed cannot lend money directly to the government by buying Treasury Bonds, everyone knows that doing so indirectly is one of its primary reasons for being"? That statement is a lot less controversial than you perhaps believe it is.
Everything on this page seems pretty innocuous, and while I'm sure the whole book is a lot more daring... this doesn't jive with your criticism at all.
No, he does not. This is the only passage I can find where Graeber comes close to what you claim he wrote:
“The Federal Reserve—despite the name—is technically not part of the government at all, but a peculiar sort of public-private hybrid, a consortium of privately owned banks whose chairman is appointed by the United States president, with Congressional approval, but which otherwise operates without public oversight.”
As has been pointed out to you at least twice in the other comments, this is how the Federal Reserve describes itself. You’ve misremembered Graeber (here I will be charitable to you and not claim that you’ve lied) as saying the Fed is “privately controlled”, and your repeated assertions, as you’re backed into a corner in other threads, depends on this precise misremembering of what he actually wrote.
And furthermore, he does not “weave an entire chapter based in fundamental ways on this misapprehension”. The chapter is primarily about the role of the US military, its global domination, and ability to wage war in support of its economic interests, in the proliferation of the USD and its economic power. The paragraphs about the Fed and it’s precise association with the government is basically a sidebar.
> Statements of the form "I'm right because I'm important, and that's all I need to say" are not usually tolerated from almost anyone as a substitute for basic, bare truths. That they are accepted here is not only a comment on the character of Graeber but on the character of his followers.
I thought you were more acquainted with the long running dispute between Graeber, Delong, and a host of neoliberal/libertarian/Austrian economists. Apparently, you do not realize that the passage I quoted was from the final response that Graeber offered in their long running dispute, a dispute that included answers, in detail, of DeLong’s specious claims.
“I’m right because I am important” was not Graeber’s argument, his argument was along the lines of “if “Debt” was so riddled with obvious and crippling flaws, why as it been so influential in economics and anthropology? Why has it led to conferences and it’s own influential body of work that cites it? Why did it lead to a professorship at the London School of Economics? Collaborations with prominent economists?”
Given your attack on Graeber is riddled with errors, depends upon a misremembered quote, demonstrates ignorance of the content of his own long-running defense of his book, how are we now to judge your character as you have seen fit to judge me and his other supporters?
But it doesn't matter, really. Graeber knew the target audience on HN wasn't aware of the debate--why would most of them be aware? He expected the audience to simply accept his greatness without evidence.
[1] https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/304604741126721536
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/02/seminar-on-debt-the-fir...
Just search for "de-legitimization". Again, he doesn't bother to respond to any actual points raised and just exercises a whole lot of ad-hominem - and unlike with Brad, someone like henry Farrel is much more of a fellow traveller.
Notably, he does respond to their actual points, at length and to such an extent that copying and pasting an example which includes both Farrel’s critique and Graeber’s response would dwarf my words in this reply. are we even reading the same article?
Perhaps Graeber believed that HN readers were capable of using search engines to familiarize themselves with the debate, and verify his claims. Apparently, not all HN users are capable of this, as demonstrated by your posts throughout this discussion.
And, we have further evidence of either your incuriosity or obfuscation. No, Graeber did not accuse DeLong of war crimes in that tweet because of DeLong’s mere support of neoliberal economics. If you’d read further that Twitter thread, Graeber provides context, mentioning the ELZN and NAFTA.
Plug those into your favorite search engine, and you’ll get references to the Zapatista’s revolt against NAFTA, and their reasons for their actions. From The Nation[1]:
“We are a product of 500 years of struggle,” began the Declaration of War read out from the city-hall balcony to the people gathered in the main square, or Zócalo. Then came the phrase that would become iconic the world over: “But today we say ¡Ya Basta! (Enough is Enough!).” Named after the equally iconic revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, the Zapatistas planned the rebellion to coincide with the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Their prediction, which history has subsequently borne out, was that NAFTA would hasten the dispossession of indigenous people both by opening up the region to large-scale ranching and by driving down the prices small farmers received for their corn, beans, and coffee. Today, Mexico imports nearly half of the corn and beans it consumes, and is equally dependent on staple products such as American-produced pork, chicken, wheat, and powdered milk.
Researcher and activist Diana Itzú Gutiérrez Luna, who has worked extensively with Zapatista communities, considers the economic warfare inaugurated by NAFTA part of a larger geopolítica del despojo, or geopolitics of plunder. There are currently 77 military bases in Chiapas, most of them located in the autonomous regions controlled by the Zapatistas and/or in areas rich in natural resources: water, uranium, and the barite used for fracking and the drilling of oil wells. “Basically, what they’re attempting is a territorial advance that implies the extermination of these worlds of indigenous life,” she says. The advance, she notes, has assumed a number of different disguises, from the “Puebla-Panama” development plan pushed by former president Vicente Fox to the “Special Economic Zones” designed to extend Mexico’s border model of tax breaks and low-wage maquiladora labor into the deep south.“
So, there you go. An ongoing war in Mexico between ELZN anarchists and the Mexican and US governments over NAFTA and the myriad other destructive neoliberal policies that have wreaked havoc upon indigenous people from which the Zapatistas originate and defend.
Why does Graeber speficially point to DeLong here, claiming that a war crimes tribunal exists that would try him? Just because DeLong merely supports these policies? Another search would have revealed to you that DeLong, in his role of deputy assistant secretary for economic policy in Clinton administration, wrote the economic impact estimates justifying and defending NAFTA. In other words, he was a core member of the team that architected the very trade deal that launched a war between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government.
Knowing now these key facts of which you were previously apparently ignorant, who in this twitter exchange was more justified in their (mutually hyperbolic) statements: DeLong, claiming that that Graeber does not know the power relationship between creditors or debtors - the subject of the Debt book - or Graeber, claiming that the Zapatistas would accuse and try DeLong for war crimes in Chiapas? I think the answer is quite obvious, but judging from the deliberately obtuse arguments that you’ve made, I suspect that you’ll be able to rationalize to yourself that none of what I pointed out here matters.
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/zapatista-chiapas-...
It's been a while since I read Debt but I distinctly remember Graber's disingenuous take on 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." Graber argues that this is wrong because English (Or was it Scottish?) shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence.
I don't know about you but to me that is complete batshit.
The book also makes a way too big of deal about The Myth of Barter. While that is interesting from an anthropological perspective, Graber makes it sound like the bulk of modern economics is somehow based on this myth.
I get why the book is popular. It posits to tackle big questions and contains the usual tropes against the state, big business, banks etc. that a left leaning audience will be more than willing to eat up. But I don't think it provides any new perspectives on economics that bear any resemblance to the real world.
The emphasis of the myth of barter and the rest of the stuff about how debt works is interesting especially because it doesn't set out to make the story simpler. He makes the story far more complex and intriguing. It leaves people with the capacity to hold more lightly to our assumptions about the nature of money and power and the economy. None of these things should be taken as inevitable laws of society or something. We recognize that there are many different ways to think about these things. And the simple part is to stop thinking that we all know some supposedly obvious idea like "we must pay our debts" and to start wondering a lot more about all the complexity and presumptions that go into how debt fits into our relationships and situations.
I doubt you'll find readers of Debt who come away extra confident that they now know the answer to how things "really" work. Most readers probably feel more that they have a view of how much there might be out there to understand, and they are willing to be less overconfident and more questioning about it all.
"The book asks big questions" would be a better discription than what I originally wrote. The book makes for excellent dinner table conversation.
But I stand by my assertion that it does not provide any new perspectives on economics that bear any resemblance to the real world. And if anything, it makes it difficult for the reader to understand the financial system because of its factual inaccuracies.
The core of the book in my reading is not a description of the dominant financial system. I read it as a discussion of multiple factors that influence how debt can be used in a wide variety of ways in societies. And the parts that discussed our current financial arrangements might not be precise in all regards, but they were still more accurate by my understanding than the wrong-but-common concepts that are asserted by most naive citizens and used in most political rhetoric.
Ignoring the quaint cultural practices of remote tribes does not diminish one's ability to understand the economics of the real world that they live in. Having an inaccurate picture of they actual system they live in on the other hand is far more damaging.
> but they were still more accurate by my understanding than the wrong-but-common concepts that are asserted by most naive citizens and used in most political rhetoric.
That is a rather low bar. But the book still has quite a few howlers:
- US treasury bonds are literally the safest securities on the planet. Graber calls them a debt that will never be paid.
- Graber claims that the global status of the dollar is maintained in large part by the fact that it is, again since 1971, the only currency used to buy and sell petroleum, glossing over the fact that the US dollar was the reserve currency since Bretton Woods. He then follows up with what can only be called a conspiracy theory, suggesting that the US invasion of Iraq was possibly motivated by Saddam Hussein's switch to the Euro.
- Graber likens the large holdings of US treasures by Western Europe, Japan and Korea to a tribute system which siphons wealth from these supposed client states to the American Empire. But when it comes to China holding vast quantities of the very same treasuries, he says from China's point of view, this is the first stage of a very long process of reducing the United States to something like a traditional Chinese client state.
Grabers comments on the dollar as an oil currency… I disagree with that. Still, many investors I know around his age would have said something similar 10-15 years ago. The U.S dollar as a reserve currency is America's greatest strength (maybe not greatest but it’s up there) and weakness. Anything that impedes the dollar as a global reserve currency is a significant risk to the U.S.
Grabers comments on Europe, Korea, China, etc. you mention- again not an unusual thing to say in my view. Debatable certainly, but not obviously wrong.
That is an entirely valid point. But that is not what Graber is alluding to:
> American imperial power is based on a debt that will never-can never-be repaid. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept.
They are cash equivalents exactly because nobody believes the US will default. Basically, the exact opposite of what Graber is saying.
> The U.S dollar as a reserve currency is America's greatest strength (maybe not greatest but it’s up there) and weakness.
People keep saying that but I am yet to hear a compelling explanation of the tangible benefits the US actually derives from this arrangement. Graber points to seigniorage or tribute as he likes to call it. Ben Bernanke, obviously not a neutral source, claimed in 2016 that this is on the order of $20 billion a year[0]. The highest, albeit unsourced claim I could find puts it around $100 billion[1]. Either way, in the larger scheme of things, it is chump change.
> Anything that impedes the dollar as a global reserve currency is a significant risk to the U.S.
Even assuming that is true, it's hard to link it to the invasion of Iraq. Iraq started selling oil for Euros in 2000. This wasn't some rouge act of defiance, the switch happened under the aegis of the UN's food-for-oil program. If it actually was a significant risk, the US could have simply vetoed it at the Security Council.
> Grabers comments on Europe, Korea, China, etc. you mention- again not an unusual thing to say in my view. Debatable certainly, but not obviously wrong.
So, is a foreign county holding huge reserves of US treasuries a) The act of a vassal paying tribute to the US or b) The machination of a rival intended to turn the US into a client state? Certainly, they both can't be true.
You've not fully quoted Adam Smith:
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 interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
Graeber's refutation, in part:
The bizarre thing here is that, at the time Smith was writing, this simply wasn't true. Most English shopkeepers were still carrying out the main part of their business on credit, which means that customers appealed to their benevolence all the time.
There's nothing disingenuous here. Benevolence (mutual trust and an interest in both one's well being and the well being of the other party in the relationship, informed by some knowledge of one's own needs and the needs of the other party, if you'd prefer to unpack it) is needed to establish a credit relationship.
None of this seems like "complete batshit." Some of the stuff that comes later might be, I haven't read it. (have you read it?)
> You've not fully quoted Adam Smith
That's a strange objection because neither did Graber. The lines appear in the middle of a long and dense paragraph from the chapter Of the Principle Which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour[0]. I don't understand why you feel the second line in anyway changes the point about rational self interest driving specialisation. Have you read the Wealth of Nations?
> Benevolence (mutual trust and an interest in both one's well being and the well being of the other party in the relationship, informed by some knowledge of one's own needs and the needs of the other party, if you'd prefer to unpack it) is needed to establish a credit relationship.
Sure, it makes sense if you redefine benevolence. FWIW, the dictionary definition[1] is inclination or tendency to help or do good to others; charity. Conflating credit to charity is disingenuous on it's own but Graber doesn't stop there, he says Adam Smith
> wants to imagine a world in, which everyone used cash, in part because he agreed with the emerging middle-class opinion that the world would be a better place if everyone really did conduct themselves this way, and avoid confusing and potentially corrupting ongoing entanglements. We should all just pay the money, say "please" and "thank you," and leave the store.
Except that this is unfounded speculation by Graber. Or to use Graber's favourite turn of phrase, an attempt at de-legitimization. There is nothing in the actual text where Smith suggests anything of the sort.
Further, Graber claims Smith
> created the vision of an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore, free of guilt and sin
Again, there is nothing in the text to support the idea that Smith saw debt as sin. The only kind of debt Smith took exception to is public debt[2] and that was for entirely different reasons.
0: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-n...
1: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/benevol...
2: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-n...
As I said, I haven’t read the book, and so I’ll hold off on saying much more. I really expect this to be a book where the author is wrong in some interesting ways, rather than batshit crazy. So many mainstream people get Adam Smith wrong, so the anarchist anthropologist getting it wrong isn’t a complete dealbreaker.
That probably makes banks the most benevolent entities on the planet.
That's not really inviting for academic economists that need to focus on quantitative or experimental research and would get nothing by wading into these debates.
So those with economic training who do touch it will be outside Academia or on the margins. Here are some:
* https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...
* http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...
* https://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/
* https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/25/too-big-to-fail-the-fir...
The general consensus of these reviews is "man, he gets a lot of stuff wrong, and I don't agree with the central thesis, but boy what rich examples, and interesting insights are in this book."
The reason deLong waded in is that he has a very promiscuous mind and likes to think about Soviet tank strategy in World War 2, financial markets, and public policy. And he shares all those ruminations on his blog. So he'll pick it up, but he has tenure and (apparently) lots of leisure time. There aren't many others in the same position.
How can one one river enter the sea in more than one place?
https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh...
"In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
and :
"Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers."
In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005."
Link to the paper discussed by the article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
Graeber emphasized strongly and explicitly that he saw his Bullshit Jobs framework as a first rough attempt that he hoped would inspire further investigation. He chose examples specifically to avoid ambiguity in order to make the concepts clear, and he says this in the book directly. He never made claims about the extent of how widespread bullshit-jobs are except to say that there's enough evidence of the phenomenon to assert that it is real and to study and consider further.
I mean, zero of your quotes have any relevance to your assertion that his thesis was dubious. What do you think his thesis was??
I would just encourage people to actually go and learn about the history of economics. The cristal clear that Graeber has nothing but distatest for economists and he can't be bothered to read into it at all.
For him, economists are just evil pawns of Capitalism that need to be destroyed.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/in-plain-english/who-owns-the-fed...
Of course the Fed is an arm of the government. The member banks have the "form" of private banks, but they are not really private banks. They are government created, backed, run, and funded entities. Think of a Port Authority, and decide whether it is part of the government or not. Of course it is.
The member banks also have no power in Fed decision making, which rests solely in the hands of the Chairman. The members banks exist solely to provide banking services for commercial banks in their district, and as various jobs programs for economists. Some also have museums and exhibitions.
Back in the day when you travelled the nation on horse and buggy, if there was a banking crisis it was important that there be a nearby bank with money. So yes, you needed a network of local reserve banks. Today, that's not so important anymore.
The distinctions being made here are due to a (quaint) stock issuance system that maybe made political sense in the politics of 1913 - when politicians still remembered Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/bank-war) - but this symbolism is irrelevant today.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of legitimate questions to ask about the Fed in the zone of public/private -- is the Fed acting in the interests of the financial sector or the interests of the public? - how "independent" is the Fed"? But arguments about the Fed being really "private" are deep in the realm of conspiracy theory pamphlets.
Anyone who tries to argue this immediately loses the argument, in the same way that people arguing about the influence of the Rockefellers immediately loses the argument. Maybe in 1913, these were useful questions, but today these are all cringe questions.
Neither the member banks nor the shareholders of the members banks have policy input. But I'll grant that "antiquated" is an improvement over my use of "quaint".
> We should just make the member banks an official part of the federal government.
If it gets people to stop arguing that the Federal reserve is "private", then I guess it would be an improvement. That would be the only effect of this change, though - cosmetic - as it is a cosmetic feature in the first place.
What single book of Graeber should I read that has his most important ideas? Is it this one?
It changed my fundamental thought process and I consider the book to be more of a framework.
For example; I now realize how natural it was for my mother to constantly exchange groceries and food with our neighbors and how formally keeping track of them was considered to be a bad thing. Or how we deliberate and take time while gifting someone we know (e.g on their marriage), we gift them in kind. Where as it’s totally OK to gift money in envelopes in Indian marriages if you don’t know the bride/groom that well but got invited to the marriage anyway through some distant relatives. Money here kind of takes away the personal touch, like you have to fulfill a gifting obligation but don’t care much about it because you don’t know the marrying couple.
I could go on for a while because I re-read different parts of the book once every month :-)
It’s difficult to put into words how good it is in terms of the wide range of space-time it covers and the depth of the discourse. It’s like climbing a mountain several times from different paths, some of which are deliberately dead end just to present an alternative view point and why it’s not good enough.
The bibliography could be made into a book of its own.
Bullshit Jobs is also interesting, but it's a much lighter, much more "pop" book.
I haven't read this one yet to know if it's on the same level as Debt, but the reviews so far have suggested it is.
For me I came away not with answers, but feeling like I could for the first time actually think about its big issues (money, economics, morality, community).
I read both Diamond's and Harari's and am reading this one.
All three are very, very good.
Graeber makes heavy criticism of Harari and Diamond, but I found his criticism to be marginal. He really doesn't touch the core of those 2 books.
I would love to have this sort of dialogue be the norm. I would love to have this sort of reasoned intellectual rapport with others, including those who I might have significant disagreements with.
P.S. Oops, I looked at the YouTube comments. We're F'ed. People don't know how to engage with ideas and respectful discourse anymore.
Is this rift completely insurmountable? Perhaps a kind of horseshoe theory can bring them together.
I am not even sure that bringing them together is entirely the goal. It would be nice if a diverse set of beliefs could be practiced in relative isolation to prove out the viability of these concepts. This is why the YouTube comments dont really matter. Not everyone needs to participate in these experiments.
I had previously avoided this video because the thumbnails (of some instances) show a grotesque depiction of Theil. That's unhelpful.
Errata, this debate was in 2014.
My preassumption was this would simply be a fintech billionaire disagreeing with an academic that financialization of the economy in the 70s is the root cause of our ongoing malaise. Yet another food fight. I'm glad I was wrong.
Theil still tried to shift blame onto the OPEC oil crisis. Wrongly, of course; inequity continued to accelerate and productivity continued to lag, even after the USA became energy self sufficient.
Scarcity
Theil's really stuck on the notion of scarcity. In a world of ridiculous abundance (current supply chain snafus notwithstanding). A true pessimist.
Theil's explanation for why people are poor and malnourished is because of scarcity. We produce enough food to feed 10b people. What's Theil's thesis for this disconnect? Does that thesis apply to other domains?
Whatever Theil's notions about how the world does or should work, I'd like to hear some ideas concretely rooted in the real world. Not just more Friedman style rejection of empiricism.
Democracy
David Graeber is a democracy innovator and practitioner.
Like all reformers and innovators, Graeber would be best served by "show, don't tell". Tell real life stories. Of citizen juries, cooperatives, worker directed social enterprises. And then relate how those examples tie back to his thesis.
My observation and experience is that people can't grok participatory democracy. It simply has to be experienced. Once people see concrete results of constructive participation, it just clicks.
Like most everyone, Theil thinks democracy is simply voting. And can only see the failures. Culture and society has carried around Socrates' fear of plebiscite for millennia -- tyranny of the majority and other monsters -- and so react strongly against any and all reforms.
How do we pop people out of that intellectual dead end? How do we shift the focus from casting ballots to participating in salons?
Graeber's solution is to practice participatory democracy whenever, however you can. Mostly in the margins. Make your own space for reform. He strongly rejects revolution. For both moral and practical reasons.
A point I wish had been made in response to Theil's rejection of social movements.
Libertarian
TLDR for this discussion: right wing libertarian can't or won't consider a left wing libertarian's ideas.
Much as I related to Theil's viewpoints, I'm disappointed that an apparently bright guy can't think of any other organizational structure (for achieving great things) than Silicon Valley style VC-funded startups.
Neoreactionary
In 2014, Theil rejects government and working within the system.
To this viewer, Theil has utterly betrayed his previously stated principles.
Whatever Theil has said in the past should not be cited as his current philosophy.
Conclusion
Previously, I've struggled to criticize Theil. Because I can't figure out what he's talking about. Like his recent blather about China, cryptocurrency, and national security. Theil is incoherent.
Thanks again for this link. For me, it shows that Theil doesn't even believe the things he says. So why should anyone care to listen?
My instinct to ignore Theil was proven correct.
Here is a much more lengthy discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s