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17623733 No.17623733 [Reply] [Original]

Is this a great book or am I just too uninformed in anthropology / economics? Post a better one if you think it sucks.

>> No.17624051

>>17623733
Bump

>> No.17624266

I read Graeber's Bullshit Jobs and thought it was really good. I've been meaning to look into this book as well. How did you like it OP?

>> No.17624320

>>17623733
yea its great, also as a critique/progression of Nietzsche's geneology of morals and the conception of debt he works out there

>> No.17624403

>>17623733
When an author is interviewed on NPR and a bunch of silly podcasts I tend to wonder if it is worth to read. Piketty went through that, but he might be the exception.

>> No.17624616

>>17623733

A number of interesting details are unearthed, the author clearly did a lot of research, but all of it is bent towards defending the peculiar notion that there was never money without debt. This is important for the author because he wants to delegitimize Capitalism. Underpinning his project are many assumptions, chief among which is the idea that lending is morally wrong.

>> No.17624634

>>17624616
>that damn subversive commie slipping in the idea usury is immoral
Lmao

>> No.17624763

>>17623733
It's very much a pop work but he obviously cites a lot of serious works. Obviously the central thesis is very problematic from the perspective of any standard economics textbook.

>>17624616
Marxists and conservatives both have a perspective where things start with commodity money and obviously come to different conclusions about all that. Money emerging as an IOU doesn't "delegitimize capitalism" necessarily. Most chartalists don't think gift economies are an alternative today and aren't political anarchists. Anarchists think governments are bad so associating the emergence of money with governments imposing liabilities on people or paying their soldiers obviously goes against the voluntarily peaceful "organic solution" right libertarian type thinking about how relations got monetized.
I don't think he's saying lend is necessarily morally wrong but governments trying to eliminate risk for lenders at the expense of everyone else is morally wrong and defaults that just make the wealthy a little less isn't a sin to let play out.

>> No.17624866

not read it yet, but it is pretty obvious on all accounts that the Austrian fairy tale of barter origins is total bs.

>> No.17624887

>>17624866

What's improbable about it? Wouldn't a primitive people converge on a medium of exchange?

>> No.17624909

>>17624616
>chief among which is the idea that lending is morally wrong
fucking dropped, how can one be this stupid? lending is the only reason a rich person's wealth isn't all just hoarded off in a castle waiting to be cashed in some day while helping no one in the mean time

>> No.17625005

>>17624909
>>chief among which is the idea that lending is morally wrong
no such claim is ever made

>> No.17625031

>>17624887
sure, on markers of debt

>> No.17625064

>>17625031

Let's assume that debt is being tracked using units of silver. Wouldn't silver exist as a unit of value prior to being used as a means of tracking debt? Graeber is unconvincing on this point. He believes people didn't value silver until they started using it to track debt.

>> No.17625129

>>17623733
Taleb liked it, and Taleb hates socialists.

>> No.17625157

>>17625064
primitive peoples would have used foodstuffs as immediate units of value. you can't eat silver and it's heavy. hence the genesis of private ownership in societies that practiced herding

but really graeber is arguing that the idea of a barter economy preceding a money economy is a myth. no pure barter economy has ever been observed among primitive tribes and instances of barter economies that have occurred have always been in societies that already used money. he uses a lot of neat examples like how europeans reckoned accounts in roman currency for centuries after the fall of the empire and long after all the actually existing currency had vanished from circulation, or how shopkeepers in hong kong had an informal cash economy using signed over paychecks from british soldiers

>> No.17625173

>>17624887
The question is did any do so not if it's logically possible and how/why did those relations develop. Did primitive tribes have internal monetized operations or did they produce and distribute goods differently? Obviously you're not going to survive in primitive conditions like that. You need a system of credit before anything can get going.
For barter to really work you have to have some understanding of exchange ratios to begin with or it won't function "rationally"... you see people in prison using stuff like cigarettes and such but they're familiar with money already.
A question like how did gold coins end up spreading can be investigated.

>>17624909
That's begging the question how that wealth was accumulated isn't it?

>>17625064
If you need something like silver to survive you're going to value it a lot more obviously but how liabilities got denominated in it is deeper than saying people value silver.

>> No.17625238

>>17625157
>no pure barter economy has ever been observed among primitive tribes

This, in itself, demonstrates nothing. What sort of material remains would we expect to find if some primitive tribesman traded salt for a hammer 60,000 years ago?

I'd suggest that we have seen barter economies emerge in things like prison camps. For some days, prisoners exchange one thing or another for some thing or another. Very quickly the prisoners converge on a single unit of exchange, usually cigarettes. Is it that difficult to believe that this very thing would have happened in places that had never seen money?

>> No.17625292

>>17625238
graeber more or less argues that money has always existed, since it's exchanged debt. an economist will start from the assumption that money develops out of a pure barter economy but it's actually that the barter economy itself is predicated on a sense of money (like your example with the cigarettes). he's saying that the standard account puts the cart before the horse

>> No.17625314

>>17623733
I read Utopia of Rules by him and it was interesting at first but eventually he started referencing Star Trek during his cultural analysis. Nothing wrong with that in of itself but it became obvious that he was just wrong about Star Trek and basically making shit up for the sake of his arguments. The main thing I remember was him claiming that you never saw criticism or even any real representation of the Federation as a government/law maker which is just patently false. Since much of his work is based on cultural examples it really sullied basically everything he did for me.
"An attempt an Anarchist Anthropology" by him is a decent overview of anarchism

>> No.17625319

>>17625292

Logically, doesn't property need to exist before it can be lent or borrowed? I get that he thinks the two have always existed together, but mustn't there have been a time where the one existed without the other, if only for a second?

>> No.17625339

>>17625314

He wrote some dubious stuff about Buffy as well. Seeing a serious scholar engage with popular culture for the first time must have been thrilling, but it gets old fast.

>> No.17625412

>>17624909
back in the day nobility didn't save money. they spent like you wouldn't believe and would beautify their hometown, throw massive parties, donate to churches, etc.

>> No.17625490

>>17625238
>This, in itself, demonstrates nothing.
OK but you can't just assume there was a barter economy just because there's no evidence disproving that.

Graeber was an anthropologist, so I imagine he'd have a good discussion of any evidence for barter economies. I would add that we don't really have to go back that far in history to see gift economies or communal property.

>> No.17625595

>>17623733
Its very good

>> No.17626310

>>17625064
well they used cows and other animals, which furthermore become only later become measured in metals (among other things).