I have proactively searched for factual critiques of Debt. I've only found quibbles about the phrasing he uses to describe the Federal Reserve. If you can show me a more substantive critique, I'd love to read it.
… but he does. Like two paragraphs later. He states that specific criticism, and addresses it. Maybe not well! But that’s rarely the complaint.
I think the form of the book threw some folks who weren’t used to that sort of thing—a series of assertions and statements unbroken by digression, spanning one or more paragraphs, followed by paragraphs directly stating and addressing many criticisms a reader may have come up with.
> think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims.
The Fed issues the modern world's most important debt instrument, and has a structure and purpose that Graeber gets fundamentally wrong. The reason critics focus on this is that, if he's lazy and wrong about the modern world's most important debt instrument... in a book about "debt"... it's probably a good sign you can't trust the rest of the book.
However, regardless of implementation details and nuances, there is one critique which is irrefutable about reserve banking; it is far too complicated to be understood by the majority who rely on it. This complexity obscures the functioning of the most important force in economics and society. It is unacceptable on that basis alone.
People should not be coerced to participate in a system which they cannot understand on the basis of trust alone. Especially when it involves trusting people they've never met and who may have conflicting interests.
Given a choice between a simplistic economic system with worse outcomes and complex system with better outcomes, I’m choosing the better outcomes every time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1884
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baring_crisis
Don't get me wrong, the Great Depression was 100% made worse by the economic thinkers (including the Fed) of the time, but the creation of a central bank was driven by prior problems.
so our next question should be, have the business cycles been cured? no, they certainly haven't.
so I'm not sure what your point was.
> that's probably a false dichotomy, though. a lot of us think that the complex system also delivers the worse outcomes. the great depression didn't happen until after the fed existed, after all.
I pointed out that a bunch of financial crises happened before the Fed existed. I took your point to be that the Fed made things worse.
> so our next question should be, have the business cycles been cured? no, they certainly haven't.
I'm not sure how that could happen at all, without incredible amounts of totalitarianism. Is that what you expect a central bank to do?
This is a ridiculous position to hold.
Also it’s not complicated. The fed issue money and people buy it. The trust it because it’s backed by the largest military and economy in the world and that combines into an ideology most economies want to support and be a part of.
A dollar is a debt investment in the America ideal. The day we aren’t strong enough or liked enough the system will collapse.
Everyone shouldn't be forced to depend on things that they don't understand just because the majority are OK with that. When you trust something that you don't understand, you're taking a risk.
Society shouldn't be coerced into taking risks which it (as a whole) doesn't understand. Especially when it comes to something as important as money.
Most people have a completely wrong mental model about money. They think the money supply is limited, that governments only spend the money they receive as taxes, that nobody gets rich from government money and that bank loans come entirely from other people's bank deposits (hence why they receive interest on their deposits). This is all wrong. Most of society is operating on severely flawed assumptions.
I don't see how it can be morally justified that complexity is not a problem when most of the population is being deceived by the complexity.
Not only that, but there is no escape hatch. Even if you're intelligent and you take the time to learn about how the system works, there's no way for you to take advantage of it unless you have significant capital to invest... Meaning, you're already a beneficiary of the system (in which case you probably don't need an escape hatch anyway).
I don't see any moral justification for it. It only benefits insiders who control the system. Insider trading in all but name.
Like how would this alternative system be more moral than fractional reserve banking and fiat currency?
You can take a minimal amount of US savings and move to the third or developing world and be totally fine for long periods of time. This escape hatch comes with consequences. You lose the safety and public service benefits the “bullshit economy” gives you.
You also learn it’s not so bullshit.
“Money is something we made up so we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat.”
Coercion, in this case, is when a system exists that you don't understand yet you have to follow it's rules.
Which is why mom is clearly being coerced into using the internet. Don't get me started on how my dad get coerced by logistic networks when he gets a package delivered?
Abstraction and interfaces into complicated systems are the best part of the modern economy yet somehow you found the opposite conclusion.
I chuckled, because his anthropological story of the evolution of money is also a just-so story that self-justifies anthropology though I'm inclined to believe it more.
Furthermore, throwing out the coincidence of wants model as a phenomenology is also probably misguided. I think it's hard to argue that there isn't social efficiency lost in the informal debt and repayment system, which graeber seems to have an overly high respect for, on top of which, that the social and power dynamics of social debt systems seem, in my mind, to be likely to incipiate more corruption and MORE wealth inequality, than the numismatic debt system.
Anyways it's still an incredible (in the good sense) book and everyone should read it for another perspective besides ths neoclassical.
Later
Does this read snarky? I don't mean it that way; AskEconomics just doesn't seem to be a fan of Graeber, so if you're looking for critiques, that's a quick way to find some.
Graeber pretends that all of economics rests on the Myth of Barter. He ascribes moral positions to Smith that are invented whole cloth, smears all economics with his own fabrications and builds up his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments,that somehow doesn't find any references in Graeber's screed.
Then there's the bizzare Iraq war conspiracy theory, the fundamental mischaracterisation of the safest securities on the planet and a culture essentialist caricature of China.
I actually think the theory of money as debt is broadly correct (and whilst it's not original to Graeber, his treatment is longer and more interesting than others), but it's just very, very sloppy on details. And yeah, you'd prefer a book on debt to not argue that money and bond markets were characterised by people paying tribute...
Frankly, he simply hates economics and economists. While it is absolutely clear that he has never actually read in economics or economic history. I think he actually literally believes that reading economics will 'taint' him.
Let look at an example. When people pointed to Menger work on some of the things that he praises anthropologists for. He responded with 'all Menger did was some math' or something along those lines. This is pretty baflfing, because anybody with even the most basic knowlage of economic history, knows that this is not true. So where did Graeber get this ridiculous idea?
Turns out, after being informed of these things, he likely just googled the name and found Karl Menger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Menger) who turns out is a mathematician. But he is the son of the economist 'Carl Menger'.
And why this is particularly bad, is because Carl Menger is one of the most famous economists, being part of the 'marginal revolution' in economics. And further, he is well known to have written on the exact topics discuss in Graeber book. Basically he would be on of the top 3 people you would start to read if you are interest in the subject of money, money formation, various forms exchange and so on.
All Graeber seems to actually know is a small part of Adam Smith, and even then he is doing his own interpretation. He ignores all other works of Smith and literally all other works by economist.
And even ignoring all those discussion, the conclusion Graeber ends up drawing from this whole debate doesn't actually support by the evidence. So the whole discussion is kind of pointless.
In reality, the switch happened in late 2000 but Iraq wasn't invaded till March 2003. And it happened under the UN's Food for Oil-for-Food program and was authorised by the Security Council: https://www.un.org/depts/oip/background/chron.html
Again, the switch was authorized by the UN Security Council. The US could have simply vetoed the resolution if it was considered a threat.
I'm not advocating the theory, but W. Bush wasn't inaugurated until early 2001, so if it was a difference between admins it couldn't have been vetoed in time.
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...
https://jacobin.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages
https://mises.org/library/have-anthropologists-overturned-me...
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/hummel_on_graeb.htm...
> A similar latitude is indulged when we visit the Trypillia Megasites (4100–3300 BC) in the forest-steppe of Ukraine. The largest of these settlement areas, Taljanky, is spread over 1.3 square miles, archaeologists have discovered more than a thousand houses there, and Graeber and Wengrow tell us that the per-site population was, in some cases, probably well over 10,000 residents. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralized administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.”
> Proof? An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account, John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “maximalist model.” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man.
> A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter this sort of discordance between what the book says and what its sources say. Was Mohenjo Daro—a settlement, dating to around 2600 BC, on one side of the Indus River in Pakistan’s Sindh province—free of hierarchy and administration? “Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But Kenoyer has concluded that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”? Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis. They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig.
> And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand.
https://archive.is/ATyH2 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-di...