Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

graeber is fascinating and compelling reading, and he may be right about things from time to time, but he is not a reliable guide to reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years#Cri...

View on HN

I read the book then sought out criticisms including some of the ones you linked. Did you read the book? I was actually surprised the criticisms were so weak and/or hadn't read the book. I finished thinking "wow cool ideas, but not sure which parts are fact or ideology" and then the criticisms from economists made it clear they're the ones peddling fairy tales

A consistent problem I’ve noticed with Graeber is that he seems to attract strident critics who don’t appear to have done more than skim the book they’re criticizing—and maybe not even all of it. It’s as if they read some sentence they don’t like, then red-out from anger for a few pages, then keep going and soon it happens again.

It’s really inconvenient if you’re actually interested in reading good-faith commentary on his work.

I quite liked the book actually, but a consistent problem with it is that if you have a half-decent familiarity with some of the relevant background it's basically impossible not to spot that it's full of errors, some of them pretty innocuous and others pretty glaring. Thing is, if you can't help noticing that Apple Computer wasn't, in fact, a non-hierarchical organization formed by ex-IBM engineers working in groups of 20-40 using laptops(!) in their garages and know enough about bond trading to realise than investors aren't getting involved as a means of paying tribute to governments, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether some of the stuff about ancient coinage and unusual tribal approaches to indebtedness might also be embellishments of misunderstood anecdotes or completely the wrong way round.

It's really inconvenient that the general response to this by Graeber and his acolytes has been to insist that anyone with the temerity to suggest it might be flawed must be doing so in bad faith.

Huato doesn't seem to have read the first line of page 22, as Graber actually refutes the claim that money and debt co-emerged. As far as the Cato institute's criticism is concerned, that section is almost entirely free of specificity, unsurprisingly considering how right-wing Cato is in general. All accounts are flawed to some degree, these criticisms you point to are almost entirely ideological or non specific.

the page also contains criticisms from left-wing and even anarchist thinkers; basically their criticism is that graeber's work amounts to storytelling, a cartoon version of history as you said, not research

Did you read the book? what were your personal thoughts, more interested in that then random political creatures

Reply on news.ycombinator.com