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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

Graeber did not claim to be the first debunking the myth of barter.

However, what does it even matter, when the zombie keeps walking to this day? The linked article repeats the myth of barter.

And lest people think it's only right-ish economists that keep repeating it, Yanis Varoufakis did so too (in his book "Talking to my daughter about the economy").

And yeah sure, nothing "hinges" on the myth of barter. But it is a symptom, a glaring illustration that economists are really bad at arguing from how real people actually act, and cheerfully embrace just-so stories that support their preferred ideas - which is the linked article's whole game, too.

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> Graeber did not claim to be the first debunking the myth of barter.

I didn't say Graber claimed that. I was refuting the common defence of the book and emphasising that it was already a mainstream view.

> However, what does it even matter, when the zombie keeps walking to this day?

> But it is a symptom, a glaring illustration that economists are really bad at arguing from how real people actually act

How much does the historical origin of money matter to the understanding economics of today?

Economists aren't particularly interested in the origin of money. Any references to barter are usually in fluffy lines like this article or as dumb thought experimens. The fact that some of them get it wrong is not indicative of anything.

> cheerfully embrace just-so stories that support their preferred ideas

Which is rife across the humanities and not exclusive to economics. Hell, Graber's entire book is full of just that.

If you look at popular books or even school text books, they will cheerfully claim that seasons are caused by the change in distance between the earth and the sun. That doesn't mean people working on climate models don't know that's not the case.

And Varoufakis is <insert polite term for crackpot>, not exactly representative of mainstream economics.

I think your criticism of Graeber is somewhat fair. And it's a fair point that incorrect popular/lay theories don't mean experts don't know how things actually work.

That said, I do think Graeber is right to emphasize the role of culture and belief--anthropological ideas--as an antidote to overly quantitative/mechanistic models. I'm not an economist, but it does seem like behavioral economics was pretty revolutionary in advancing the idea that humans are not just rational utility maximizers, despite Keynes using the term "animal spirits" nearly 100 years ago.

Again, speaking as a layperson, it's frankly a bit weird to me how distant economics, anthropology, and psychology seem to be from each other.

> I do think Graeber is right to emphasize the role of culture and belief--anthropological ideas--as an antidote to overly quantitative/mechanistic models

This is a false and misguided dichotomy. Nothing prevents you from taking culture and beliefs into account when you create a model.

Can you give examples of this done well? Genuinely curious, as I’ve not seen it.

Many New Keynesian models posit price and wage stickiness.

Labor search models usually have a notion of bargaining power.

I do ^^

"Just-so stories that support their preferred ideas" + "so nothing prevents you from taking culture and beliefs into account when you create a model."

A litte OT but,... years ago i read a HN-Topic, about um 'What to change if we could'. I read some postings, where people seem realy angry with abuse, misuse and malpractice, done by people who may or even may not wanted to be remembered as: 'This is our work, we do this cos we are in empowered to do so' (won't explain it more, back to more context:)

My conclusion by that time was, questioning: 'Is privatizing favourable?' Cos there is confusing data, complex situations and a need for easy hypotheses...(and solutions maybe) The assumption that time was, that the gov spend a (huge) budged to pacify many more conflicting 'partys' than a private entity would like to do/or will, cos generating income through excessive spending (may 'only work when'/'need expotential growth') means nothing more than the need to reinvest profits to bigup the businesses.

(sry, non native english-speaker)

And now really OT, I remember some of the friends around Putin are building contractors, and the TV-shows about the war in Ukraine or Syria before um...

[turns-around-in-a-circle] (-;

Behavioral economics, the bastard child of psychology, is built on an edifice of fashionable nonsense. The field is rife with grand generalizations based on dubious conclusions from small under-powered behavioral experiments. Just look at what a disaster the much hyped priming studies turned out to be. I would not count on behavioral economics to advance a more accurate understanding of the human condition.

I know very little about economics but I am compelled to point out the irony in your comment.

How I understood your comment: "This whole field, consisting up of many people trying to do understand things, is just a bunch of nonsense generalizations."

Touché.

> Behavioral economics, the bastard child of psychology, is built on an edifice of fashionable nonsense.

This is a relatively fair take. That being said, at least it's damaged and dethroned the equally misguided frictionless spheres of homo economicus.

Yes, this was my point: that prior, economists had silly ideas about humans which make no sense.

Frictionless spheres are fine in Physics 101 and Homo economicus is fine in Economics 101. Like all models, economic models too are wrong but some of them are useful. The bulk of economics after 101 is about how the models break.

The idea that humans are not perfectly rational self-interested actors has been part of mainstream economics at least since Keynes.

Sure; Keynes coined the term "animal spirits." Yet the criticism (that economics is too modelling-based) is widely levied, e.g. see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/its-ti..., https://aeon.co/essays/economics-is-once-again-becoming-a-wo....

Is it the whole story? Probably not. Like I said, I'm not an economist.

But given the extreme challenges in empirically testing macroeconomic models, it should be no surprise that economists might--as somewhat irrational humans--over-rely on theoretical models.

> How much does the historical origin of money matter to the understanding economics of today?

A lot? Money is a social construct, so the history of money is something like a record of empirical observations that must be accounted for by any proposed theory of money. The fact that most modern economists don't seem too concerned with this doesn't mean that it's not important.

Right, and programmers should first learn Panini's grammer before they start writing code in constructed languages.

It is spelled grammar.

My favorite course I took in college was historical linguistics. But I was a linguistics major…

I do expect CS students to take a history of computing course.

> It is spelled grammar.

Maybe it's interesting to linguistics majors but the rest of us tend to ignore typos when the meaning is clear from the context.

> My favorite course I took in college was historical linguistics.

And?

> I do expect CS students to take a history of computing course.

The overwhelming majority of them don't and seem to do just fine.

Then history is doomed to repeat itself…

If you're going to dismiss all economists & anthropologists that do not subscribe to your opinions, you're not going to advance your opinions very much

> If you're going to dismiss all economists & anthropologists that do not subscribe to your opinions, you're not going to advance your opinions very much

The idea that Varufakis is not mainstream is not even remotely controversial. I have issues with Graeber's misrepresentation of economics, not his anthropology.

I'm pretty sure the "myth" of barter is really just an educational/explanatory crutch that economists have used to introduce laypersons to the idea of money without overwhelming them with caveats and nuances. Kind of like how schoolchildren learn that the American Revolution was a revolt against unjust "taxation without representation".

You can tell that Graeber isn't an economist because he mistakes the oversimplified educational narrative for what monetary economists actually believe about the history of money and credit. But you have a fair point--even economists often fool themselves about this, possibly because the field has grown to the point where many aren't as familiar with this topic as they should be (I don't think that was the case 100 years ago).

This is taught in universities in Economics degrees (along with many other misconceptions, as a matter of fact). So it's not at all the case you're saying.

Do you have examples of that from actual current university course materials?

There’s a big difference between “economics degree holder” and “economist”

Even if it is an oversimplified story to explain a more difficult concept, it's often used as a moral justification. And really, I'd say Debt is more about the moral justifications of capitalism than it is an economic argument one way or the other.

> it's often used as a moral justification.

A moral justification for what?

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