my conscience is completely clear on charges of subtweeting Brad - I had forgotten it was him rather than several other people who had similar or stronger reasons to do so, who went studs-up on DG for that one
> **DD**: my conscience is completely clear on charges of subtweeting Brad - I had forgotten it was him rather than several other people who had similar or stronger reasons to do so, who went studs-up on DG for that one...
(just realised I replied in the app rather than here...)
I promise I wasn't! as I say in the comments I have forgotten it was you (rather than the dozens of other people who had at least as good reason to) that went in so hard on him for that one.
I put the “exam question” in there because I really don't know what to think myself - a lot of his research as you say was really bad, and the stuff that was bad in areas I knew has to cast a pall on the anthropological stuff where I've got no realistic way of confirming or denying. so I definitely wouldn't rely on any of his books for factual information.
but … there is and was an interesting theory there. and the factual accuracy is no worse than Michel Foucault. I think this falls under one of my bullet points that for the most part our time was better spent on the straightforward frontal attack - debt just fundamentally isn't the social institution that DG claimed, it's not particularly interesting that it was developed alongside imperial societies and the replacement of deep social connections with arms length transactional relationships was by and large a great idea.
(if I had to answer my own exam question, I would bring in the excruciating discussion of “the debt that a child owes to its parents” - compared to this absolutely awful attempt to draw massive conclusions from a misunderstood metaphor, everything else looks like a mere quibble)
(PS: "studs up" is just metaphor - an aggressive soccer tackle, going in with the sole of the boot)
And, well, debt **can** be the social institution that Graeber described. You are in debt to the moneylender. You borrow to plant an orchard. Agesilaos's lokhos comes through. And then you can't pay the interest on your mortgage. And so the moneylender graciously does you a favor—agrees not to demand cash-on-the-barrelhead but instead merely to add the interest to the principal. So now you are more in debt to the moneylender in money terms. And you are also in debt to the moneylender in favor gift-exchange terms—for he has done you a favor by not demanding cash, and you have done him a disfavor by welshing on your obligation to him; and so you owe him money, and a favor; and soon you will owe him much more... and it ends with the moneylender having done nothing but sit on his butt, and ultimately owning what was your land and having sold your wives and daughters into slavery and then taken your sons and yourself into personal permanent debt-bondage.
There is a reason that Peisistratos of the Athenai was a popular and successful politician, promising and delivering seisaktheia—the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of land...
> DD: I promise I wasn't! as I say in the comments I have forgotten it was you (rather than the dozens of other people who had at least as good reason to) that went in so hard on him for that one. I put the “exam question” in there because I really don't know what to think myself - a lot of his research as you say was really bad, and the stuff that was bad in areas I knew has to cast a pall on the anthropological stuff where I've got no realistic way of confirming or denying. so I definitely wouldn't rely on any of his books for factual information.... (PS: "studs up" is just metaphor - an aggressive soccer tackle, going in with the sole of the boot)...
> but … there is and was an interesting theory there. and the factual accuracy is no worse than Michel Foucault.
It is a quibble if the audience is living in Omaha Nebraska but a kick in the stomach to an audience living in the vortex of Silly Con Valley. The sort that causes one to close the book and move on to something interesting.
Re: "I am setting the exam question: 'David Graeber’s description of the founding of Apple Computer in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is about as absolutely wrong as it could possibly have been. Is this a quibble, and if so is it a quibble worth quibbling? (10 points).;"
I do have the feeling you are trolling me, personally...
How about these from David Graeber?
1. (a) What Graeber calls "research" is "reading the pamphlets the FRBNY hands out to middle-school children". (b) Rather than being "underneath" (or he later says "two blocks from") the WTC, the FRBNY's gold-vault basement is five blocks—half a mile—from the WTC: 'While I was growing up in New York, I would hear occasional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Supposedly, these vaults contained not just the U.S. gold reserves, but those of all the major economic powers. The gold was said to be kept in the form of bars, piled up in separate vaults, one for each country, and every year, when the balance of accounts was calculated, workmen with dollies would adjust the stocks accordingly, carting, say, a few million in gold out of the vault marked “Brazil” and transfering them to the one marked “Germany,” and so on. Apparently a lot of people had heard these stories. At least, right after the Towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001, one of the first questions many New Yorkers asked was: What happened to the money? Was it safe? Were the vaults destroyed? Presumably, the gold had melted. Was this the real aim of the attackers? Conspiracy theories abounded. Some spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly summoned to make their way through miles of overheated tunnels, desperately carting off tons of bullion even as rescue workers labored overhead. One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that the entire attack was really staged by speculators who, like Nixon, expected to see the value of the dollar crash and that of gold to skyrocket—either because the reserves had been destroyed, or because they themselves had laid prior plans to steal them.2 The truly remarkable thing about this story is that, after having believed it for years, and then, in the wake of 9/11, having been convinced by some more knowing friends that it was all a great myth (“No,” one of them said resignedly, as if to a child, “the United States keeps its gold reserves in Fort Knox”), I did a little research and discovered that, no, actually, it’s true...'
2. He provided an excuse for his Apple Computer mistake: He had known that what he said was perfectly true of 'a whole of series of other tiny start-ups created by people who’d dropped out of IBM, Apple, and similar behemoths. (Of them it’s perfectly true.)', and that the quote was 'not supposed to be about Apple'. And of them it is not perfectly true. Remember Graeber's claim: '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'. (a) Computer engineers in the 1980s were not "mostly Republican". (b) IBM had zero effective Silicon Valley presence. (c) Startups did not involve "twenty to forty" people. (d) There were no laptops. (e) Steve Jobs's Apple is the only truly attested garage I know of. (f) Startups were **never** democratic.
3. He provided another excuse for his Apple Computer mistake: He had been misled by Richard Wolff, or rather by a nameless graduate student: '@davidgraeber: oh ask Mr [Richard] Wolff... the Marxist economist whose student did a study of the origins of Apple and never published it. The laptops thing was a result of a compression of two sentences, that as silly.... I think Wolff was just kind of wrong about a lot of this; I tried to check with him but he didn’t answer the eemail. It’s upsetting; it’s also possible he was talking about a different early start-up; anyway won’t be in the 2nd edition!'
4. He provided yet another excuse for his Apple Computer mistake: It was all his publisher's fault: 'The passage got horribly garbled at some point into something incoherent, I still can’t completely figure out how, was patched back together by the copyeditor into something that made logical sense but was obviously factually wrong. I should have caught it at the proofreading stage but I didn’t. I did catch it when the book first came out, tried to get the publisher to take it out, and have been continually trying since July. All to no avail. I have absolutely no idea why a book can go through eight editions and it’s impossible to pull out a couple lines of obviously incorrect text but they just keep telling me, no, I have to wait until July...'
5. Graeber claims that otherwise, his book is INERRANT in the religious-fundamentalism sense: 'Allow me to reassure the reader.... That one [Apple] sentence gets repeated a thousand times. No other one does. That’s because it’s the only sentence flagrantly wrong.... I’ve communicated with, or read reviews by, scholars of Greece, Mesopotamia, and Islam, Medievalists, Africanists, historians of Buddhism, and a wide variety of economists, etc, etc, and none have noticed any glaring errors—in fact, the most frequent reaction is that it’s remarkable that someone who is not an area specialist actually more or less gets it right (remember, these are scholars often loathe to admit even their own colleagues in the field get it more or less right.) The book is pretty meticulously researched and has stood up to scholarly review...' I have talked to a lot of people about Graeber's book. A reaction I have never gotten has never been: 'it’s remarkable that someone who is not an area specialist actually more or less gets it right' from anyone, let alone a scholar 'loathe to admit even their own colleagues in the field get it more or less right'.
6. Graeber claims that all but one—the chairman, a public official nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate—of the voting members of the Federal Reserve are private bankers: 'Federal Reserve… is technically not part of the government at all, but a peculiar sort of public-private hybrid, a consortium of privately owned banks whose chairman is appointed by the United States president, with Congressional approval, but which otherwise operates without public oversight…' In fact, all seven of the voting members of the Federal Reserve Board are PASC public officials. And of the nineteen participants in FOMC meetings, the twelve voting members always consist of seven PASC public officials and five of the Regional Fed presidents. If you squint really, really hard, you could claim that, legally and legalistically, the Regional Fed presidents are "private bankers". But you would be lying: they are, rather, QUANGO animals.
Perhaps I am a little sensitive about David Graeber because he is, uniquely, the only person who has ever demanded that I be extraordinarily rendered to Chiapas and there tried before a war crimes tribunal of Zapatistas for having done staff work on behalf of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But everybody should be aware that David Graeber took no care with his book "Debt", and that you should not rely on any of his representations with respect to historical facts or patterns, but instead verify everything before you trust anything. And by all accounts Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything" is as slipshod.
I do think that if one wants to demonstrate how enormously big and generous you can be, Henry Farrell takes the prize. And if one wanted to so demonstrate for some reason, one could write, as Henry does:
> I think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. But there is value to the speculation – social scientists don’t do nearly enough of it. Sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities... <https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/>
Farrell admits that Graeber would interpret this as "another deliberate and vicious putdown".
Farrell protests that it is in fact a "somewhat complicated compliment".
I think Graeber's take on it would be correct.
And I would also say that it is not good—or tolerable—social science to make "a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claim" and then claim that you have proven them on the basis of "shallow" (or nonexistent) "foundations of evidence". I kinda think that people who want to be professors really ought to be committed to scholarly norms. And that for those who are not they should instead become internet shitposters.
I finished reading 'Abundance' yesterday and was thinking how both it and 'The Unaccountability Machine' share one of their themes: the way we use process to avoid decision-making. Even when there is no existing process, we use reductionist logic and pre-formed compartmentalization to invent an instutional solution that excuses us from independent thinking.
«share one of their themes: the way we use process to avoid decision-making.»
Ah the classic "centrist" argument that "it is just the system". But the results of that "invent an instutional solution that excuses us from independent thinking" somehow usually benefit some vested interests groups, and it happens often they are the same interest groups.
In my simplistic thinking that gives me the impression that more often than not that "process to avoid decision-making" is deliberately setup or protected by some vested interest groups because it works to their advantage, and when it does not the process is often smashed or restructured.
I had to stop reading Graeber's book because virtually every factual claim he made that I had some subject matter knowledge about was wrong (or at the very least highly tendentious). Even if none of them were load-bearing on their own, the frequency of questionable claims made me doubt everything in the book. So I think that evaluating whether something is a quibble or not is context-dependent.
Taking on Dan Davies' exam question: Yes, it is a "quibble" to point out how wrong Graeber's sentence about Apple is, but the bulk of its quibbling nature is offset by how funny it is — which transmutes the quibble into a critical argument. As explaining humor is counterproductive, I cannot be required to support this claim with evidence — just vibes. Or analogies! It's like pointing to Wittgenstein saying something along the lines of "all these scientists are claiming a chair is mostly empty space qué ridículo". The quibble turns into a devastating argument that sets reams of philosophy alight.
I like your idea of transmuting. In this bizarre case, gold was turned into lead, and sank an argumentative ship...
As a recovering photojournalist, let me say that I made more of an effort to double-check the accuracy of my captions that Graeber did with his tale about Apple.
It is not like he got an isolated fact wrong, he got literally the whole origin story of Apple, the most significant maker of personal computers in history, completely wrong.
At some point, even a "big picture" kinda guy has to pay attention to facts. Facts are the foundation; ideas are what you erect on top of them.
In the newspaper world, getting whole stories wrong is the kind of thing that gets you called into the executive editor's office, possibly followed by a trip to HR, unless you were one of the editor's favorites.
After writing my comments last night, my curiosity led me to look Graeber up, and I was sorry to learn that he was deceased. It seems he had a mind to question very basic ideas, excepting perhaps his own. I am actually sympathetic to the need to question ideas all the way down to their basic assumptions. But as an ex-debater, I also respect the need to get one's facts in order.
Then again, as an ordinary reader, I could not help laughing at how insanely wrong his account was. Literally, anyone who knew anything about the history of "personal computers" would know the story was bats--t. Yes, in the mid 1970s in the US we saw the first computers you could actually buy, typically in the form of kits, then the Apple II came out, and the rest was history.
You can have your own personal computer, but you cannot have your own personal facts.
I am typing this on an Apple Mac, which is a real thing, take my word for it!
The proper question is always whether whatever methodological issues there may be take away from or invalidate the entire point. Take housing prices-- yes, we want to use rental costs rather than the cost of owning housing. But that only matters if those measures diverge. It's really beyond dispute that, whatever the measure you use, housing costs in San Francisco ARE too high.
The issue with Graeber is that he gets basic facts very wrong. And that should give us very little confidence that his conclusion is correct, given that his project is to extrapolate a grand theory of debt from those facts in an inductive manner.
I haven't seen any criticism of Abundance that points to those kinds of base level methodological errors. And many of the critiques repeat easily-debunked nonsense (like the idea that housing is expensive because private equity buys up the housing stock and... I dunno, sits on it, while consciously choosing not to rent it out for... reasons?).
Generally, the story told in Abundance tracks the data and evidence and is pretty persuasive.
Q: Is this what you guys do for a living? This quibbling sounds like fun!
Is quibbling similar to pickleball, or badminton? Does it involve a racket? Or is it just plain old arguing? When I was in high school debate club we called this "debating."
Not to quibble...you say to-MA-to, I say to-MAH-to. This magistrate ONLY considers trifles, and is loving it. I did some deep research:
I do agree with Dan that over the course of time some of the screws do get loosened up a bit...which is good because it allows you think more freely, and it allows you to drop some of the non-essential things. You can tell when this desirable state has occurred because others start remarking that you must be "losing" it, and are thinking crazy thoughts. Then later they ask you "How did you figure that out?"
This is me showing I have not done the homework or the study, but I do have to ask: what is wrong with David Graeber’s description of the founding of Apple Computer?
Graeber wrote: '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...'
* Apple Computers is not a famous example.
* Its founders were not Republican
* None of them had worked for IBM
* It was founded in the mid-1970s, not the 1980s.
* It was not democratic-small-d.
* It took a year and a half for them to reach a headcount of 20
* There were no laptops
* There was only one garage—Paul and Clara Jobs's garage. The then-21-year-old Steve Jobs was living in the house of his adoptive parents. Jobs sold his VW Microbus and Woz sold his HP calculator to get the cash so they could start assembling Apple I's in the garage. HP **may** have been started in a garage. And from the mid-1980s on, starting in a garage in imitation of Apple (or claiming to do so) became a thing. But in the mid-1970s, no other attested garages I have been able to find.
As near as I can see, "founded by... computer engineers" and "in Silicon Valley" are the only words in Graeber's account that are not false.
> Peter Murphy: This is me showing I have not done the homework or the study, but I do have to ask: what is wrong with David Graeber’s description of the founding of Apple Computer?
I don't believe the "aging" theory of reduced interest in quibbling is a proper explanation, and I don't think you do either. Your interest in everything hasn't declined proportionally with your energy. You have a prioritization revealed by your behavior, and an implied theory, of which sorts of objections to arguments are worth formulating and expressing, and which are not. It would be more helpful for you to try to explain (and maybe first to clarify to yourself) how, precisely, your prioritization has changed. This might reflect a change in your endorsed theories — e.g. acquiring the wisdom to recognize which notional premises of an argument are load-bearing — or it might reflect (not necessarily endorsed) conditioning, e.g. tacitly recognizing which social moves will be validated, and which invite stonewalling or harassment.
Some errors are both unimportant in themselves, and unimportant to the argument. Relatedly, it's not helpful when someone reviewing an early incomplete draft of something I've written corrects things on the level of spelling errors, because in early drafts there may be whole paragraphs that need to be deleted or rethought, and sometimes the entire premise of the piece is confused.
Some errors call for close attention to their exact relation to the argument.
There are conditions under which house prices are relatively closely coupled to rents, either in the short run, or at least in a way that allows one to identify speculative bubbles (e.g. the 2007 crash was preceded by a large divergent between purchase and rent prices in the US). In those cases, it's unrewarding to point out the error because the corrected account can more or less be slotted into the argument in the same position with a similar effect, and it's not even unambiguously an error.
In other conditions, differential access to capital or selective regulatory accommodation can keep prices diverged from rents for a long time. This might meant that prices are a bad metric, but it also might mean that nominal rents are a bad metric, because they conceal rationing of housing by means other than its nominal financial cost, which equally well prevents people from affording it. Such cases necessarily involve distributed coordination to block common knowledge in order to keep opposition confused and incoherent, otherwise there would be no point in using indirect methods. It seems like there is specifically motivation to maintain ambiguity about the relation between housing’s status as a major savings vehicle vs its status as one of the necessities of life. If these cases are relevant, you might be reluctant to quibble because it doesn't make much difference to the argument, OR because you expect the authors and people sympathetic to them to consistently evade the point out of class loyalty, OR because you yourself are motivated to evade the point out of class loyalty, or some combination of the three.
Another class of errors can be motivated in ways not straightforwardly related to the argument at all. For instance, Graeber's errors are usually not particularly fatal to his arguments, they seem if anything more like a compulsion, as a signal of class membership. This is related to the idea of motive ambiguity: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/12/15/motive-ambiguity/ Making good arguments for true conclusions is just good behavior, and signals no loyalty. Making bad arguments for true conclusions signals loyalty to the coalition formed around those conclusions. People also "choke to submit": https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/choke-to-submithtml I don't exactly understand the relation between the sorts of motivated errors in this class, but it seems empirically clear that some errors are for the sake of being seen to make the error, rather than either by accident or to get one over on the reader in any straightforward way.
Overall it seems to me like the idea of a quibble functions as an excuse to oneself to avoid confronting people about disagreements that are a certain type of politically loaded, such that they expect the sort of evasion and invalidation I mentioned. Graeber‘s errors are there to provide people who want to maintain opposed positions with an excuse to dismiss his arguments, and I expect that that a version without such errors would not have been publishable through old-regime distribution networks like post-Maxwell academic journals, or book publishers with a large bookstore distribution network, discussed on crooked timber, etc. I think my work that I publish on my blog is a close equivalent that does not make such errors: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-domestic-product/ (It also deals with housing-as-investment in ways directly relevant to the Abundance agenda.) Established publishers or literary agents are welcome to try to prove me wrong by helping me get a book deal or something similar.
it is not a savings vehicle: it is vehicle to redistribute from poorer people (usually working class) to richer people (mostly middle class) via big rises in land prices and rents.
Not many people would be obsessed with housing as a redistribution vehicle if it actually depreciated like cars, as it should, because buildings also decay with time (so definitely not a savings vehicle).
It is the scarcity value of land near to "good jobs" (or scenic places) concentrations that neolib governments work hard to increase to earn the votes of property incumbents (which include most politicians, government managers, senior academics and journalists, ...) with upwards redistribution on a colossal scale.
Great point! You are not getting a deserved return on your wise investment, you are getting ill-gotten gains from possessing artificially-scarce property.
Re-distribution is the right word. Some might even say "stealing," but that is not polite.
How about DEI? Deliver Excess Income?
They make it scarce is by increasing required lot sizes, or by preventing multiple-unit housing, both of which occurred in my hometown, which is why I can't afford to live there anymore. I covered this story for the local paper, and still remember the recent arrival who led the drive to make the town expensive to live in. Should we have put up a wall, or demanded a $5 million dollar "investment" from him for the right to live here?
I live near New York, in Connecticut, and New York money has been buying up all the good real estate around here for decades, making it almost impossible for people to run farms here, which they used to, or to simply raise families here. But if you are one of society's "takers," you can outbid the locals for the right to live here, even if you only come up on the weekends.
Check out the New York Times Magazine for an amazing story about a quarter-billion-dollar crypto scam here featuring a local honor student, a VP at Morgan Stanley, a kidnapping, a quarter-million-dollar Lambo SUV, a half-million-dollar bar bill, and much much more!
This is America 2025: just livin' the dream!
BTW those journalists who are benefitting from scarcity are not the local ones out here, who are almost all out of work by now. The ones you think of are the well-known ones in the 'bubbles" of NY, DC, San Fran, Boston, etc., and they talk to each other, not Walmart shoppers.
Why quibble? Because people use words to persuade, as well as inform. Some of this persuasion takes the form of disinformation-through-euphemism. To take an example from our beloved financial services industry, the credit derivatives world calls people who buy risk: "protection sellers." Why oh why would they come up with that particular phrase? Could only a curmudgeon quibble with this sales job? Or to take another example, our beloved press calls Trumpazoids "populists," rather than "fascists." Another mere quibble?
For me I’m open to giving the Abundance guys a pass because they have generally been pro-government at times in the past. The flowering of UK Yimbys who seem to be previously ASI/Tufton types, less so, as their conversion to the benefits of building seems unlikely to contain a commitment to government action, rather than the market solutions they have spent years on.
«open to giving the Abundance guys a pass because they have generally been pro-government at times in the past.»
One of the authors is a «senior editor at The Atlantic magazine and a weekly news analyst for NPR» and the other is Ezra Klein, so hardcore "woke globalist reaganistas/clintonites" whose arguments are very predictable.
The "abundance" movement may be a reaction to Trump taking a lot of lower-middle and working class victims-of-globalization voters, and largely consists of "jam tomorrow" talk to try to take back the most gullible.
PS "Abundance" may be just a doubling down on the largely mythical "Bidenomics".
PS If "Abundance" is "jam tomorrow" talk then quibbles about its arguments are pointless (as for "Bidenomics"), its purpose is fulfilled if it results in a "feel good" effect among the target voters.
"David Graeber’s inaccurate portrayal of Apple’s founding—claiming it was started by Republican engineers from IBM in the 1980s using laptops in democratic circles—has been widely recognized as factually incorrect. However, most commentators agree that this error is minor and does not undermine his book’s central arguments. The Apple example was used to illustrate a broader point about non-hierarchical cooperation within firms, but Apple’s actual history does not fit this model. Critics note that, while such mistakes can raise doubts about factual reliability, the error is isolated and not foundational to Graeber’s main thesis about debt, markets, and social organization. Thus, the impact on his overall argument is minimal, though it has provided critics with an easy target for questioning his attention to detail"
So are you subtweeting DeLong here? Who famously embarked on an epic quibble-fest of Graeber but gave up before the heat death of the universe?
One thing about the method of reading that he advocates (https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-my-archives-my-reading) is that it has been tested empirically in a pedagogical setting, it isn't just introspection. That is significant when I consider methods advocated by people who are smarter than me. Does your advantage lie in your method, or in yourself?
In that context, I don't think "steelman" means the same thing that you think it means and the difference is material, not a quibble.
my conscience is completely clear on charges of subtweeting Brad - I had forgotten it was him rather than several other people who had similar or stronger reasons to do so, who went studs-up on DG for that one
Now you **are** trolling me!
Your conscious conscience may well be clear! Your subconscious conscience (subconscience?) is, I assure you, not clear!
But thanks much. Be as well as one can be in a world in which one is, personally, quite comfortable, but in which no man is an island. Yours,
J. Bradford DeLong
Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley
brad.delong@gmail.com :: @delong@mastodon.social :: @delong.social
+1 925-708-0467
http://braddelong.substack.com
====
Order Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010 <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>
About: <https://braddelong.substack.com/about>
P.S.: What is "studs up"?
> **DD**: my conscience is completely clear on charges of subtweeting Brad - I had forgotten it was him rather than several other people who had similar or stronger reasons to do so, who went studs-up on DG for that one...
(just realised I replied in the app rather than here...)
I promise I wasn't! as I say in the comments I have forgotten it was you (rather than the dozens of other people who had at least as good reason to) that went in so hard on him for that one.
I put the “exam question” in there because I really don't know what to think myself - a lot of his research as you say was really bad, and the stuff that was bad in areas I knew has to cast a pall on the anthropological stuff where I've got no realistic way of confirming or denying. so I definitely wouldn't rely on any of his books for factual information.
but … there is and was an interesting theory there. and the factual accuracy is no worse than Michel Foucault. I think this falls under one of my bullet points that for the most part our time was better spent on the straightforward frontal attack - debt just fundamentally isn't the social institution that DG claimed, it's not particularly interesting that it was developed alongside imperial societies and the replacement of deep social connections with arms length transactional relationships was by and large a great idea.
(if I had to answer my own exam question, I would bring in the excruciating discussion of “the debt that a child owes to its parents” - compared to this absolutely awful attempt to draw massive conclusions from a misunderstood metaphor, everything else looks like a mere quibble)
(PS: "studs up" is just metaphor - an aggressive soccer tackle, going in with the sole of the boot)
Trolling is not always a bad thing!
And, well, debt **can** be the social institution that Graeber described. You are in debt to the moneylender. You borrow to plant an orchard. Agesilaos's lokhos comes through. And then you can't pay the interest on your mortgage. And so the moneylender graciously does you a favor—agrees not to demand cash-on-the-barrelhead but instead merely to add the interest to the principal. So now you are more in debt to the moneylender in money terms. And you are also in debt to the moneylender in favor gift-exchange terms—for he has done you a favor by not demanding cash, and you have done him a disfavor by welshing on your obligation to him; and so you owe him money, and a favor; and soon you will owe him much more... and it ends with the moneylender having done nothing but sit on his butt, and ultimately owning what was your land and having sold your wives and daughters into slavery and then taken your sons and yourself into personal permanent debt-bondage.
There is a reason that Peisistratos of the Athenai was a popular and successful politician, promising and delivering seisaktheia—the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of land...
> DD: I promise I wasn't! as I say in the comments I have forgotten it was you (rather than the dozens of other people who had at least as good reason to) that went in so hard on him for that one. I put the “exam question” in there because I really don't know what to think myself - a lot of his research as you say was really bad, and the stuff that was bad in areas I knew has to cast a pall on the anthropological stuff where I've got no realistic way of confirming or denying. so I definitely wouldn't rely on any of his books for factual information.... (PS: "studs up" is just metaphor - an aggressive soccer tackle, going in with the sole of the boot)...
> but … there is and was an interesting theory there. and the factual accuracy is no worse than Michel Foucault.
Touché...
It is a quibble if the audience is living in Omaha Nebraska but a kick in the stomach to an audience living in the vortex of Silly Con Valley. The sort that causes one to close the book and move on to something interesting.
Re: "I am setting the exam question: 'David Graeber’s description of the founding of Apple Computer in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” is about as absolutely wrong as it could possibly have been. Is this a quibble, and if so is it a quibble worth quibbling? (10 points).;"
I do have the feeling you are trolling me, personally...
How about these from David Graeber?
1. (a) What Graeber calls "research" is "reading the pamphlets the FRBNY hands out to middle-school children". (b) Rather than being "underneath" (or he later says "two blocks from") the WTC, the FRBNY's gold-vault basement is five blocks—half a mile—from the WTC: 'While I was growing up in New York, I would hear occasional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Supposedly, these vaults contained not just the U.S. gold reserves, but those of all the major economic powers. The gold was said to be kept in the form of bars, piled up in separate vaults, one for each country, and every year, when the balance of accounts was calculated, workmen with dollies would adjust the stocks accordingly, carting, say, a few million in gold out of the vault marked “Brazil” and transfering them to the one marked “Germany,” and so on. Apparently a lot of people had heard these stories. At least, right after the Towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001, one of the first questions many New Yorkers asked was: What happened to the money? Was it safe? Were the vaults destroyed? Presumably, the gold had melted. Was this the real aim of the attackers? Conspiracy theories abounded. Some spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly summoned to make their way through miles of overheated tunnels, desperately carting off tons of bullion even as rescue workers labored overhead. One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that the entire attack was really staged by speculators who, like Nixon, expected to see the value of the dollar crash and that of gold to skyrocket—either because the reserves had been destroyed, or because they themselves had laid prior plans to steal them.2 The truly remarkable thing about this story is that, after having believed it for years, and then, in the wake of 9/11, having been convinced by some more knowing friends that it was all a great myth (“No,” one of them said resignedly, as if to a child, “the United States keeps its gold reserves in Fort Knox”), I did a little research and discovered that, no, actually, it’s true...'
2. He provided an excuse for his Apple Computer mistake: He had known that what he said was perfectly true of 'a whole of series of other tiny start-ups created by people who’d dropped out of IBM, Apple, and similar behemoths. (Of them it’s perfectly true.)', and that the quote was 'not supposed to be about Apple'. And of them it is not perfectly true. Remember Graeber's claim: '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'. (a) Computer engineers in the 1980s were not "mostly Republican". (b) IBM had zero effective Silicon Valley presence. (c) Startups did not involve "twenty to forty" people. (d) There were no laptops. (e) Steve Jobs's Apple is the only truly attested garage I know of. (f) Startups were **never** democratic.
3. He provided another excuse for his Apple Computer mistake: He had been misled by Richard Wolff, or rather by a nameless graduate student: '@davidgraeber: oh ask Mr [Richard] Wolff... the Marxist economist whose student did a study of the origins of Apple and never published it. The laptops thing was a result of a compression of two sentences, that as silly.... I think Wolff was just kind of wrong about a lot of this; I tried to check with him but he didn’t answer the eemail. It’s upsetting; it’s also possible he was talking about a different early start-up; anyway won’t be in the 2nd edition!'
4. He provided yet another excuse for his Apple Computer mistake: It was all his publisher's fault: 'The passage got horribly garbled at some point into something incoherent, I still can’t completely figure out how, was patched back together by the copyeditor into something that made logical sense but was obviously factually wrong. I should have caught it at the proofreading stage but I didn’t. I did catch it when the book first came out, tried to get the publisher to take it out, and have been continually trying since July. All to no avail. I have absolutely no idea why a book can go through eight editions and it’s impossible to pull out a couple lines of obviously incorrect text but they just keep telling me, no, I have to wait until July...'
5. Graeber claims that otherwise, his book is INERRANT in the religious-fundamentalism sense: 'Allow me to reassure the reader.... That one [Apple] sentence gets repeated a thousand times. No other one does. That’s because it’s the only sentence flagrantly wrong.... I’ve communicated with, or read reviews by, scholars of Greece, Mesopotamia, and Islam, Medievalists, Africanists, historians of Buddhism, and a wide variety of economists, etc, etc, and none have noticed any glaring errors—in fact, the most frequent reaction is that it’s remarkable that someone who is not an area specialist actually more or less gets it right (remember, these are scholars often loathe to admit even their own colleagues in the field get it more or less right.) The book is pretty meticulously researched and has stood up to scholarly review...' I have talked to a lot of people about Graeber's book. A reaction I have never gotten has never been: 'it’s remarkable that someone who is not an area specialist actually more or less gets it right' from anyone, let alone a scholar 'loathe to admit even their own colleagues in the field get it more or less right'.
6. Graeber claims that all but one—the chairman, a public official nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate—of the voting members of the Federal Reserve are private bankers: 'Federal Reserve… is technically not part of the government at all, but a peculiar sort of public-private hybrid, a consortium of privately owned banks whose chairman is appointed by the United States president, with Congressional approval, but which otherwise operates without public oversight…' In fact, all seven of the voting members of the Federal Reserve Board are PASC public officials. And of the nineteen participants in FOMC meetings, the twelve voting members always consist of seven PASC public officials and five of the Regional Fed presidents. If you squint really, really hard, you could claim that, legally and legalistically, the Regional Fed presidents are "private bankers". But you would be lying: they are, rather, QUANGO animals.
Perhaps I am a little sensitive about David Graeber because he is, uniquely, the only person who has ever demanded that I be extraordinarily rendered to Chiapas and there tried before a war crimes tribunal of Zapatistas for having done staff work on behalf of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But everybody should be aware that David Graeber took no care with his book "Debt", and that you should not rely on any of his representations with respect to historical facts or patterns, but instead verify everything before you trust anything. And by all accounts Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Everything" is as slipshod.
I do think that if one wants to demonstrate how enormously big and generous you can be, Henry Farrell takes the prize. And if one wanted to so demonstrate for some reason, one could write, as Henry does:
> I think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. But there is value to the speculation – social scientists don’t do nearly enough of it. Sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities... <https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/>
Farrell admits that Graeber would interpret this as "another deliberate and vicious putdown".
Farrell protests that it is in fact a "somewhat complicated compliment".
I think Graeber's take on it would be correct.
And I would also say that it is not good—or tolerable—social science to make "a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claim" and then claim that you have proven them on the basis of "shallow" (or nonexistent) "foundations of evidence". I kinda think that people who want to be professors really ought to be committed to scholarly norms. And that for those who are not they should instead become internet shitposters.
On the effects of aging on our intellectual approach:
"Our boy is growing up!" <sheds tear>
I finished reading 'Abundance' yesterday and was thinking how both it and 'The Unaccountability Machine' share one of their themes: the way we use process to avoid decision-making. Even when there is no existing process, we use reductionist logic and pre-formed compartmentalization to invent an instutional solution that excuses us from independent thinking.
yes! I think this may be a big part of the reason why I am attracted to it
It is presumptious of me, I know, but is there a quiet, unseen omnipresence in both books, called 'POSIWID'?
«share one of their themes: the way we use process to avoid decision-making.»
Ah the classic "centrist" argument that "it is just the system". But the results of that "invent an instutional solution that excuses us from independent thinking" somehow usually benefit some vested interests groups, and it happens often they are the same interest groups.
In my simplistic thinking that gives me the impression that more often than not that "process to avoid decision-making" is deliberately setup or protected by some vested interest groups because it works to their advantage, and when it does not the process is often smashed or restructured.
I had to stop reading Graeber's book because virtually every factual claim he made that I had some subject matter knowledge about was wrong (or at the very least highly tendentious). Even if none of them were load-bearing on their own, the frequency of questionable claims made me doubt everything in the book. So I think that evaluating whether something is a quibble or not is context-dependent.
Taking on Dan Davies' exam question: Yes, it is a "quibble" to point out how wrong Graeber's sentence about Apple is, but the bulk of its quibbling nature is offset by how funny it is — which transmutes the quibble into a critical argument. As explaining humor is counterproductive, I cannot be required to support this claim with evidence — just vibes. Or analogies! It's like pointing to Wittgenstein saying something along the lines of "all these scientists are claiming a chair is mostly empty space qué ridículo". The quibble turns into a devastating argument that sets reams of philosophy alight.
I like your idea of transmuting. In this bizarre case, gold was turned into lead, and sank an argumentative ship...
As a recovering photojournalist, let me say that I made more of an effort to double-check the accuracy of my captions that Graeber did with his tale about Apple.
It is not like he got an isolated fact wrong, he got literally the whole origin story of Apple, the most significant maker of personal computers in history, completely wrong.
At some point, even a "big picture" kinda guy has to pay attention to facts. Facts are the foundation; ideas are what you erect on top of them.
In the newspaper world, getting whole stories wrong is the kind of thing that gets you called into the executive editor's office, possibly followed by a trip to HR, unless you were one of the editor's favorites.
After writing my comments last night, my curiosity led me to look Graeber up, and I was sorry to learn that he was deceased. It seems he had a mind to question very basic ideas, excepting perhaps his own. I am actually sympathetic to the need to question ideas all the way down to their basic assumptions. But as an ex-debater, I also respect the need to get one's facts in order.
Then again, as an ordinary reader, I could not help laughing at how insanely wrong his account was. Literally, anyone who knew anything about the history of "personal computers" would know the story was bats--t. Yes, in the mid 1970s in the US we saw the first computers you could actually buy, typically in the form of kits, then the Apple II came out, and the rest was history.
You can have your own personal computer, but you cannot have your own personal facts.
I am typing this on an Apple Mac, which is a real thing, take my word for it!
The proper question is always whether whatever methodological issues there may be take away from or invalidate the entire point. Take housing prices-- yes, we want to use rental costs rather than the cost of owning housing. But that only matters if those measures diverge. It's really beyond dispute that, whatever the measure you use, housing costs in San Francisco ARE too high.
The issue with Graeber is that he gets basic facts very wrong. And that should give us very little confidence that his conclusion is correct, given that his project is to extrapolate a grand theory of debt from those facts in an inductive manner.
I haven't seen any criticism of Abundance that points to those kinds of base level methodological errors. And many of the critiques repeat easily-debunked nonsense (like the idea that housing is expensive because private equity buys up the housing stock and... I dunno, sits on it, while consciously choosing not to rent it out for... reasons?).
Generally, the story told in Abundance tracks the data and evidence and is pretty persuasive.
Q: Is this what you guys do for a living? This quibbling sounds like fun!
Is quibbling similar to pickleball, or badminton? Does it involve a racket? Or is it just plain old arguing? When I was in high school debate club we called this "debating."
Not to quibble...you say to-MA-to, I say to-MAH-to. This magistrate ONLY considers trifles, and is loving it. I did some deep research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOILZ_D3aRg
I do agree with Dan that over the course of time some of the screws do get loosened up a bit...which is good because it allows you think more freely, and it allows you to drop some of the non-essential things. You can tell when this desirable state has occurred because others start remarking that you must be "losing" it, and are thinking crazy thoughts. Then later they ask you "How did you figure that out?"
This is me showing I have not done the homework or the study, but I do have to ask: what is wrong with David Graeber’s description of the founding of Apple Computer?
Graeber wrote: '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...'
* Apple Computers is not a famous example.
* Its founders were not Republican
* None of them had worked for IBM
* It was founded in the mid-1970s, not the 1980s.
* It was not democratic-small-d.
* It took a year and a half for them to reach a headcount of 20
* There were no laptops
* There was only one garage—Paul and Clara Jobs's garage. The then-21-year-old Steve Jobs was living in the house of his adoptive parents. Jobs sold his VW Microbus and Woz sold his HP calculator to get the cash so they could start assembling Apple I's in the garage. HP **may** have been started in a garage. And from the mid-1980s on, starting in a garage in imitation of Apple (or claiming to do so) became a thing. But in the mid-1970s, no other attested garages I have been able to find.
As near as I can see, "founded by... computer engineers" and "in Silicon Valley" are the only words in Graeber's account that are not false.
> Peter Murphy: This is me showing I have not done the homework or the study, but I do have to ask: what is wrong with David Graeber’s description of the founding of Apple Computer?
Not familiar with David Graeber. Is he an actual person? If so, does he work in the White House these days?
This is hilariously wrong! Like: "didn't even bother to look it up in Wikipedia" wrong. Or is this AI slop in glorious action?
Reminds me of Mary McCarthy's comment about Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'"
Also reminds me of an author I once ran into who told me "If people knew how I wrote my books, they wouldn't buy them."
He was a sad case.
I don't believe the "aging" theory of reduced interest in quibbling is a proper explanation, and I don't think you do either. Your interest in everything hasn't declined proportionally with your energy. You have a prioritization revealed by your behavior, and an implied theory, of which sorts of objections to arguments are worth formulating and expressing, and which are not. It would be more helpful for you to try to explain (and maybe first to clarify to yourself) how, precisely, your prioritization has changed. This might reflect a change in your endorsed theories — e.g. acquiring the wisdom to recognize which notional premises of an argument are load-bearing — or it might reflect (not necessarily endorsed) conditioning, e.g. tacitly recognizing which social moves will be validated, and which invite stonewalling or harassment.
Some errors are both unimportant in themselves, and unimportant to the argument. Relatedly, it's not helpful when someone reviewing an early incomplete draft of something I've written corrects things on the level of spelling errors, because in early drafts there may be whole paragraphs that need to be deleted or rethought, and sometimes the entire premise of the piece is confused.
Some errors call for close attention to their exact relation to the argument.
There are conditions under which house prices are relatively closely coupled to rents, either in the short run, or at least in a way that allows one to identify speculative bubbles (e.g. the 2007 crash was preceded by a large divergent between purchase and rent prices in the US). In those cases, it's unrewarding to point out the error because the corrected account can more or less be slotted into the argument in the same position with a similar effect, and it's not even unambiguously an error.
In other conditions, differential access to capital or selective regulatory accommodation can keep prices diverged from rents for a long time. This might meant that prices are a bad metric, but it also might mean that nominal rents are a bad metric, because they conceal rationing of housing by means other than its nominal financial cost, which equally well prevents people from affording it. Such cases necessarily involve distributed coordination to block common knowledge in order to keep opposition confused and incoherent, otherwise there would be no point in using indirect methods. It seems like there is specifically motivation to maintain ambiguity about the relation between housing’s status as a major savings vehicle vs its status as one of the necessities of life. If these cases are relevant, you might be reluctant to quibble because it doesn't make much difference to the argument, OR because you expect the authors and people sympathetic to them to consistently evade the point out of class loyalty, OR because you yourself are motivated to evade the point out of class loyalty, or some combination of the three.
Another class of errors can be motivated in ways not straightforwardly related to the argument at all. For instance, Graeber's errors are usually not particularly fatal to his arguments, they seem if anything more like a compulsion, as a signal of class membership. This is related to the idea of motive ambiguity: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/12/15/motive-ambiguity/ Making good arguments for true conclusions is just good behavior, and signals no loyalty. Making bad arguments for true conclusions signals loyalty to the coalition formed around those conclusions. People also "choke to submit": https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/choke-to-submithtml I don't exactly understand the relation between the sorts of motivated errors in this class, but it seems empirically clear that some errors are for the sake of being seen to make the error, rather than either by accident or to get one over on the reader in any straightforward way.
Overall it seems to me like the idea of a quibble functions as an excuse to oneself to avoid confronting people about disagreements that are a certain type of politically loaded, such that they expect the sort of evasion and invalidation I mentioned. Graeber‘s errors are there to provide people who want to maintain opposed positions with an excuse to dismiss his arguments, and I expect that that a version without such errors would not have been publishable through old-regime distribution networks like post-Maxwell academic journals, or book publishers with a large bookstore distribution network, discussed on crooked timber, etc. I think my work that I publish on my blog is a close equivalent that does not make such errors: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-domestic-product/ (It also deals with housing-as-investment in ways directly relevant to the Abundance agenda.) Established publishers or literary agents are welcome to try to prove me wrong by helping me get a book deal or something similar.
«housing’s status as a major savings vehicle»
it is not a savings vehicle: it is vehicle to redistribute from poorer people (usually working class) to richer people (mostly middle class) via big rises in land prices and rents.
Not many people would be obsessed with housing as a redistribution vehicle if it actually depreciated like cars, as it should, because buildings also decay with time (so definitely not a savings vehicle).
It is the scarcity value of land near to "good jobs" (or scenic places) concentrations that neolib governments work hard to increase to earn the votes of property incumbents (which include most politicians, government managers, senior academics and journalists, ...) with upwards redistribution on a colossal scale.
Great point! You are not getting a deserved return on your wise investment, you are getting ill-gotten gains from possessing artificially-scarce property.
Re-distribution is the right word. Some might even say "stealing," but that is not polite.
How about DEI? Deliver Excess Income?
They make it scarce is by increasing required lot sizes, or by preventing multiple-unit housing, both of which occurred in my hometown, which is why I can't afford to live there anymore. I covered this story for the local paper, and still remember the recent arrival who led the drive to make the town expensive to live in. Should we have put up a wall, or demanded a $5 million dollar "investment" from him for the right to live here?
I live near New York, in Connecticut, and New York money has been buying up all the good real estate around here for decades, making it almost impossible for people to run farms here, which they used to, or to simply raise families here. But if you are one of society's "takers," you can outbid the locals for the right to live here, even if you only come up on the weekends.
Check out the New York Times Magazine for an amazing story about a quarter-billion-dollar crypto scam here featuring a local honor student, a VP at Morgan Stanley, a kidnapping, a quarter-million-dollar Lambo SUV, a half-million-dollar bar bill, and much much more!
This is America 2025: just livin' the dream!
BTW those journalists who are benefitting from scarcity are not the local ones out here, who are almost all out of work by now. The ones you think of are the well-known ones in the 'bubbles" of NY, DC, San Fran, Boston, etc., and they talk to each other, not Walmart shoppers.
On David Graeber: No it's not worth quibbling. He had a big, untold story to tell... and that is the value of the book.
Why quibble? Because people use words to persuade, as well as inform. Some of this persuasion takes the form of disinformation-through-euphemism. To take an example from our beloved financial services industry, the credit derivatives world calls people who buy risk: "protection sellers." Why oh why would they come up with that particular phrase? Could only a curmudgeon quibble with this sales job? Or to take another example, our beloved press calls Trumpazoids "populists," rather than "fascists." Another mere quibble?
For me I’m open to giving the Abundance guys a pass because they have generally been pro-government at times in the past. The flowering of UK Yimbys who seem to be previously ASI/Tufton types, less so, as their conversion to the benefits of building seems unlikely to contain a commitment to government action, rather than the market solutions they have spent years on.
«open to giving the Abundance guys a pass because they have generally been pro-government at times in the past.»
One of the authors is a «senior editor at The Atlantic magazine and a weekly news analyst for NPR» and the other is Ezra Klein, so hardcore "woke globalist reaganistas/clintonites" whose arguments are very predictable.
The "abundance" movement may be a reaction to Trump taking a lot of lower-middle and working class victims-of-globalization voters, and largely consists of "jam tomorrow" talk to try to take back the most gullible.
PS "Abundance" may be just a doubling down on the largely mythical "Bidenomics".
PS If "Abundance" is "jam tomorrow" talk then quibbles about its arguments are pointless (as for "Bidenomics"), its purpose is fulfilled if it results in a "feel good" effect among the target voters.
I put the question to Perplexity ai:
"David Graeber’s inaccurate portrayal of Apple’s founding—claiming it was started by Republican engineers from IBM in the 1980s using laptops in democratic circles—has been widely recognized as factually incorrect. However, most commentators agree that this error is minor and does not undermine his book’s central arguments. The Apple example was used to illustrate a broader point about non-hierarchical cooperation within firms, but Apple’s actual history does not fit this model. Critics note that, while such mistakes can raise doubts about factual reliability, the error is isolated and not foundational to Graeber’s main thesis about debt, markets, and social organization. Thus, the impact on his overall argument is minimal, though it has provided critics with an easy target for questioning his attention to detail"
You need to repeat the prompt, adding a requirement that the response use the word "quibble."
So are you subtweeting DeLong here? Who famously embarked on an epic quibble-fest of Graeber but gave up before the heat death of the universe?
One thing about the method of reading that he advocates (https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-my-archives-my-reading) is that it has been tested empirically in a pedagogical setting, it isn't just introspection. That is significant when I consider methods advocated by people who are smarter than me. Does your advantage lie in your method, or in yourself?
In that context, I don't think "steelman" means the same thing that you think it means and the difference is material, not a quibble.
Our host may also be somewhat subtweeting himself: he had his own epic run-in with DG's pathological inability to entertain criticism back in the day.
Indeed he did. It was glorious, in its own way...