East Coast and West Coast Togetha on Graeber
OK, Nashville’s not on the east coast, but in the title I’m trying to get across that Brad DeLong and I see eye-to-eye when it comes to David Graeber’s magisterial Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
When I first posted my critical review of Graeber’s book, in the comments Dan Hewitt pointed us to Brad DeLong’s negative reactions (1 and 2) to Graeber as well. Check them out; they’re funny. To give you the punchline, Graeber claims that Apple computer was founded “by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages…” So if you think about it for not too long, you will realize that unless he means the biological “laptop,” this is clearly a bogus claim.
Now for the purpose of my post today. DeLong quotes from Graeber’s exasperated defense of his book, regarding the nonsense Apple anecdote:
Allow me to reassure the reader: You have absolutely no idea how frustrating this is, especially as the stupid line has been held out, reproduced, sent around in every conceivable way to suggest that nothing else in the book is likely to be factually accurate To which all I can reply is: well, notice how this is the only quote in the book that happens with. That one sentence gets repeated a thousand times. No other one does. That’s because it’s the only sentence flagrantly wrong like that.
OK, so for starters, not too many authors run around saying, “[I]t’s the only sentence flagrantly wrong like that.” Most authors go for a zero-tolerance policy on “flagrantly wrong” sentences in their historical books. (I wonder if Manson at his parole hearing said, “My goodness, that one thing…”
But beyond that, Graeber is simply wrong that that is the only “flagrantly wrong” claim in his book. Here are my two favorites, but the margins in my book are littered with “OH CMON” and other such remarks. Graeber seems to think that the absence of such complaints in his reviews means that nobody found any errors besides the Apple debacle, so let me clarify: I didn’t bother bringing the following up in my own review since (a) my space was limited and (b) I didn’t want to sound petty. So check these out, and remember, part of what Graeber does in his book is chastise the economics profession for being idiots:
Economists like Karl [sic] Menger and Stanley Jevons later improved on the details of the story, most of all by adding various mathematical equations to demonstrate that a random assortment of people with random desires could, in theory, produce not only a single commodity to use as money but a uniform price system. (p. 28)
Now, John Maynard Keynes himself was much more open to what he liked to call the “alternative tradition” of credit and state theories than any economist of that stature…His conclusion, which he set forth at the very beginning of his Treatise on Money, his most famous work, was more or less the only conclusion one could come to if…(p. 54)
Actually, there is a third reason I didn’t bring these two up before: It was so inconceivable to me that Graeber could have meant what the plain words imply–namely, that Carl Menger contributed to the work of Adam Smith by adding in mathematical pizzazz, and that Keynes’ most famous book was his Treatise on Money–that I assumed something had happened ‘twixt keyboard and publication. And hey, for all I know, maybe that is still the case. But prima facie, we’ve got at least two more howlers to add to the pile.
Last thing: I’m NOT claiming Graeber is an idiot. His book actually has some very interesting factoids, and he has an unique perspective on these issues. However, now I’m not sure I should trust his recounting of the “factoids.”
I actually have that book on my shelf waiting for me to get around to it, now I am not so sure I want to, and if I do it will apparently be for the entertainment value alone.
Maybe by “like” he meant “Similar to but not including”? That’s the most charitable reading I can conceive.
Where’s that ass-hat Lord Keynes with his usual wikipedia links?
LOL! Ad hominem rubbish nonsense straw man red herring.
When someone calls you an ass-hat is it really necessary to point out it is ad hominem?
I’m just imitating the real fake Lord Keynes.
I fooled three people.
My imitation of Lord Keynes is legen……wait for it….dary!
Khaaann!
How rude!
Spread this far and wide: http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
I’m not sure magisterial is really the word you want.
The problem is that if Graeber gets something that wrong when the man on the street could have corrected him, it makes you wonder what else he slipped in when significantly fewer eyes could have spotted the error.
And make no mistake, Graeber didn’t even realize the extent of the Apple error until the Twitter back-and-forth, when he brushed off the criticism with “go read this Marxist”, apparently *still* thinking that some half-remembered lecture made an extraordinary claim about a well-known company.
And, he “octupled” down by claiming that there are allllll these other ultra-successful companies for which that statement is “perfectly true” … but which he can’t name (even after generous offers of help from people who could think of companies that sorta matched that description, like NeXT and HP).
part of what Graeber does in his book is chastise the economics profession for being idiots:
which proves not everything he says in the book is flagrantly wrong!
Nice try, but he wasn’t talking about either you or the idiot economists you plagiarize.
Of course not.
What an idiot you are.
Hilarious!
Reading your posts is like playing chess with a pigeon.
You crap all over the board, kick the pieces away, and then, just after you plagiarize another pigeon, you declare victory.
Not at all clear from the context that he doesn’t mean Carl’s son, Karl. It wouldn’t give any more sense to the statement, though, except for the mathematical part.
Demosthenes, well, it’s probable just from what I’ve shown you here that he means Carl, founder of the Austrian School. But in a broader context, you’d see he is talking about how the later economists Menger and Jevons refined the classical approach to the origin of money. Since Carl Menger and Jevons (along with Walras) are commonly credited as the pioneers of the marginal revolution, and since Menger is the single economist most associated with the standard theory of the origin of money, I am 99% sure Graeber means Carl.
Now, it’s possible that he never realized Karl and Carl were different, and knew that Karl dabbled in math, and knew that Walras spelled out equilibrium in mathematical conditions, and then somehow ended up saying Karl Menger refined the origin of money theory with math…. That sounds like a stretch, I grant you, but look at what Graeber did with the Apple story.
Now, it’s possible that he never realized Karl and Carl were different, and knew that Karl dabbled in math, and knew that Walras spelled out equilibrium in mathematical conditions, and then somehow ended up saying Karl Menger refined the origin of money theory with math…. That sounds like a stretch,
Actually, that sounds like exactly the kind of false understanding you walk away with when you only have a superficial knowledge of the topic and yet try to write about it anyway while looking “well sourced”. That seems like the most plausible account of what happened, to be honest.