My pre-ordered copy of "The Dawn of Humanity", hot off the press, just arrived yesterday, from Bookshop.org, right on schedule. I am preparing to experience all my cherished preconceptions exploding.
[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.
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...
See https://www.thebehavioralscientist.com/articles/the-death-of... - for an overview.
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)
That just a strawmen that Garber and co set up. Anybody that actually studies the history of economics knows this.
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.
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.