Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Mixed feelings: many interesting little tidbits and quotes, but overall I get the feel of a vast thesis made up of confirmation bias and unreliable evidence like etymologies; some parts are flabbergastingly wrong, like his brief description of Apple Computer’s founding as being founded by circles of IBM engineers (!). He apparently routinely makes factual mistakes; Brad DeLong identified 50 in chapter 12 just to make that point. (Graeber’s response was to shamelessly throw an unnamed copyeditor under the bus—as if so many and such severe errors could be a copyeditor’s fault, or that it was not still his fault for signing off on the edits.) Where not completely wrong, in some cases, like Graeber’s claim like about Nazis & Harvard marching songs, he has stretched the truth beyond reason. When I see errors like those on topics I know or can easily check, it makes me wonder how bad the rest of it is. Such works are no mitzvah, no matter how passionately he believes he needs to reform the modern world into an flattened egalitarian version.
Trying to think kindly about the late David Graeber in email conversation I came up with the following. At his best, he’s like good science fiction. He’ll bodge the fundamentals of physics to tell a good story, but he can expand your imagination about what the possibilities are.
“Can you think of analogous intellects from the more distant past who are remembered well in the present day?” “Fourier?”
Henry Farrell 2022-01-10
And while he’s very cynical about things he’s against, he exhibits a strange lack of cynicism about his in-groups (like the idle poor, or China—accusing the US of manipulating the rates!) Emphasizing the rather ideological bent of the book is his very thin skin as exhibited in response to online criticism like on Crooked Timber.