Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist.
Brad DeLong is a self-proclaimed troll and a proven serial liar. He for some unfathomable reason decided to go gunning for me despite my never having met him or interacted with him in my life; he started by spewing outright personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I could figure out) until I pointed out false personal aspersions were actionable; so then he appears to have decided to go after the book instead. The first time I tried to correct one of the obviously false statements about my work that appeared on his blog, providing irrefutable evidence (he claimed Giovanni Arrighi had never said something I'd attributed to him, I produced a quote from Arrighi saying exactly what I'd claimed), he simply cut the part with the evidence out of my response (he carefully edits the comment section). After that I blocked him on twitter and stopped even looking at his blog. I thought eventually he'd get bored and go away, but bizarrely, he kept it up for literally years. He stalked me online, showing up to attack me whenever my name was mentioned prominently in a public debate, on twitter, he made up dummy eggshell accounts to try to trick me into engaging with him, he'd pretend I was arguing with him, knowing I couldn't see his tweets (people showed them to me later), he'd take tweets I'd made in arguments with others and putting them on his blog pretending they were addressed to him, and otherwise behaved in a totally and frankly rather unhinged fashion. Finally, again, knowing I'd blocked him and had refused to interact with him for years at that point, he created a twitter bot to attack me every day for a month, each tweet ending with "stay away!" - i.e., pretending he wasn't the one stalking me but the other way around.
So the man is irrefutably a liar. You can believe his other claims about my scholarly work if you like.
In fact, most of the "factual errors" he claims to have found are either differences of interpretation, downright misrepresentations of my position, or points so trivial it's somewhat flattering that's the best he managed to find. Example: he once posted an entire blog post just to say my interpretation of the Sumerian principles called "me" was incorrect. When I showed this to one of my best friends, who is a Mesopotamianist, the friend started laughing out loud. Nobody, he said, really knows what the "me"s are. There are a half dozen interpretations. The one I adopted was the most widely accepted one but sure, he said, lots of people have other ones. I think the biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544-odd pages of Debt, despite years of obsessively flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I thought it was one, actually it's three. Yup. Guilty as charged. I got the number wrong. The difference between 1 and 3 had absolutely no bearing on the point I was making in the sentence in question. But DeLong has triumphantly trumpeted this again and again as proof that I'm an ignoramus. In other words, he's still not managed to find anything really substantial wrong with the book.
Frankly, this is a transparent and rather pathetic game. Anyone who goes through a long book on diverse topics will be able to find some things they can hold out and say are "errors." Just to show how easy the game is to play, just in the course of his trolling me, DeLong managed to himself make more glaring errors than he managed to come up with in 544 pages of text. Some were genuinely embarrassing. Let me recall a few offhand:
1. he claimed that Switzerland doesn't have an air force (it does)
2. he claimed that Jeremy Bentham's body is preserved in London School of Economics (everyone who knows anything about Bentham knows his body is in University College London, LSE didn't even exist when he died - and this guy is an economic historian?)
3. he was completely unaware that the bubonic plague struck Medieval Europe more than once - which, again, for a professional economic historian, is incredibly embarrassing. I mean this is very very basic Medieval History 101 stuff. And he was just totally clueless.
I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England.
Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.
> Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.
After reading your response and digging into this a bit further, I retract my previous comment and no longer put any stock in Brad DeLong's intellectual honestly. I apologize for spreading it further.
Thanks much for saying. I mean it's understandable. It wouldn't normally occur to anyone that someone that reputable - professor at Berkeley, former Treasury official - would also be an internet troll. In fact he might be the only person I know of in a position that reputable who behaves the way he does. But he does.
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it 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..."
Yes, DeLong, we all know there was a garbled sentence in the first edition that was instantly removed the moment anyone noticed it. The only reason anyone has heard of it since is because you have reproduced it probably 457 times in a your endless attempts at defamation.
Look, I don't know you, DeLong, and I don't know or particularly care why you have decided to go on a five-year mission to use whatever dishonest means you can think of to destroy another scholar's intellectual reputation (a mission at which you seem to have failed pretty miserably, considering some of the honours I've noted above), but I'm starting to get tired of this. Your first effort at outright personal libel constituted an obvious potential legal case. The endless dishonesty about the book is less clear ground from a civil law perspective, but from the point of view of professional ethics, it's a very clear case of a violation, in fact, short of actual plagiarism, it's about the clearest case of a violation of professional ethics I can imagine. Universities have ethics codes, Berkeley does too, and using calculated dishonesty to try to defame another scholar, with clear and even admitted malicious intent - let alone, doing it perhaps a hundred times - isjust the kind of violation over which it is possible to make a formal complaint. Do you really want me to have you hauled up before your university's ethics board? Because I'm seriously considering it.
(Oh and there's no point in taking down the tweets and blogs containing the most obvious, demonstrable lies because I have screen-shots.)
Why isn't this from Graeber completely dispositive on whether he is a loon or not?
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it 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..."
Genuinely curious: it seems to me (and to people I talk to) to demonstrate that Graeber not only does not do his homework but does not even know what doing his homework might be...
There was a garbled sentence in the first edition that I didn't catch in proofreading but was instantly removed as soon as anyone noticed it. DeLong has seized on this and endlessly reproduced it, quite possible hundreds of times, pretending it's still in the text.
Why does he do this sort of thing? I honestly have no idea. I've never seen anyone else behave remotely like it.
The point that the morality of debt is based on the fact that it's a promise already appears on page 4. Similarly the very last paragraph, begins "What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence..."
And so on. Might want to read more than "chunks" of a book before lecturing the world on what's not in it.
Cool, are you the author? If so, thanks for joining in on the discussion. I hadn't heard of your book before people brought it up on here, but I just added it to my Amazon wishlist and plan to get it soon.
The extent of my knowledge of your book (I'm assuming you are the author), is only what people are discussing here, but my quick impression was that the person you responded to characterized your view of debt pretty well.
He seems to have a mental image of "debt" as something that a loan shark puts you in so that he can break your legs afterwards, rather than the vast majority of the world's responsible debt arrangements which wind up beneficial to both parties.
planetguy said:
"He seems to have a mental image of "debt" as something that a loan shark puts you in so that he can break your legs afterwards, rather than the vast majority of the world's responsible debt arrangements which wind up beneficial to both parties."
This seems extremely in-line with what you just posted:
"What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence..."
This does strike me as needlessly negative, too, as many debts are mutually beneficial, no?
Debts for investment are mutually beneficial. However, history shows it has all too often been in the interests of society's upper class to create lots and lots of debt that was not for investment and is thus very difficult to pay back.
Dave, Dave, don't be so defensive! I mean, I spend time googling for my name too, but I manage to resist the temptation to throw myself into any discussion of my work, it just comes across badly. I mean, I did go and buy a copy of your book, hardback too, and I did just go and give you a semi-positive review in which I heartily recommended large chunks of it. I really did enjoy quite a lot of it.
You're right, page 4 does mention the idea that a debt is a promise. But it's immediately pooh-poohed as an idea that's "dangerous because it's self-evident". And the last paragraph does call a debt a "promise corrupted by both math and violence", but it's not clear how anything is "corrupted" here. So yeah, you acknowledge this self-evident idea, but only to dismiss it without a proper argument.
Also while you're here (actually yours is exactly the kind of book that I read while wishing that I could argue with the author about certain points, so it really is a privilege to have you here and I hope that doesn't sound like a backhanded compliment), the other point I think you dismiss without enough of a fight is the idea that all human interactions are based on reciprocity. There is of course one counter-example, the child-parent relationship in which the parent is generally happy to give selflessly, but that's a special case which seems to be more-or-less hard-coded into our genes; our minds are programmed to give selflessly to our children since from our genes' point of view they're nearly equivalent to ourselves. Once we step outside the parent-child relationship, however, your other examples of non-reciprocal human behaviour (apart from outright theft, extortion and other forms of behaviour where one party isn't consenting) don't ring true. Two labourers working on the same project will, of course, pass each other hammers, but there is an expectation of reciprocity even in group work, as anyone who has ever worked in a group with someone not pulling their weight will know.
In conclusion, you've written an interesting history of debt, but I think you've started off with some kind of antipathy towards debt which has stopped you from really gaining a good perspective on it. I still don't understand the objection to the basic concept of debt: that if Alice has something and Bob needs it then Alice can lend Bob that thing and get it back in the future, for mutual benefit. I find that to be a glorious example of human interaction at its best. But then again, I've already paid off my mortgage.
Hopefully "Dave, Dave" will ignore this (maybe unwitting) trolling.
There's many ways where those with surplus wealth can give it to those with insufficient wealth. Anyone here on HN can name multiple forms of investment/subsidy (such as venture capital, or the goverment subsidy which led to computers and the internet), and some may even be at work at more advanced forms of credit unions (such as Mike Leung's work on participatory credit unions).
Furthermore, anyone who's skimmed the book's first chapter can see that this poster's original post was beyond uninformed, taking a point _Debt_ carefully discusses in the first few pages, and presents it as if the author never anticipated it. Same with the book's discussion of commercial reciprocity vs. mutual aid in chapter 5.
David just helpfully posted here to point out the obvious...
Yes, the house rental trick was big in the European middle ages: sometimes the lender would just pretend to "buy" the borrowers' house, and charge him "rent" for his own house until he "buys" it back.
Still, the remarkable thing from the Medieval documents we have from the Middle East is that most people actually did follow the rules: they used to do profit-sharing instead of interest; lenders would become partners instead.
As for the pruzbul I believe that was introduced by Rabbi Hillel around the time of King Herod, a much later period. The remarkable thing is that jubilees were institutionalized in one form or another in much of the Middle East for many thousand years before that and it didn't cause significant economic disruption.
Yes, the house rental trick was big in the European middle ages: sometimes the lender would just pretend to "buy" the borrowers' house, and charge him "rent" for his own house until he "buys" it back.
Still, the remarkable thing from the Medieval documents we have from the Middle East is that most people actually did follow the rules: they used to do profit-sharing instead of interest; lenders would become partners instead
