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
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?
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.
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
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-...
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?
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.
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.
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.