Debt: The First 500 Posts (a thread for discussing David Graeber)

i didn't mean to be sneery, sorry if that was the impression. despite being sloppy with facts, i find Graeber a very generative thinker as well as a gripping (if occasionally purple) prose stylist. i read the whole book and saw him give a talk about it in 2011, and read at least a dozen blog posts and reviews (and hundreds of tweets) debating it

i refreshed my memory of Debt by skimming contemporaneous posts and interviews before writing my last post. unfortunately i don't have a copy of it handy (i've moved cities twice in the last 8 years and it's in a box in my moms basement), but here's a quote from the blog post by Graeber that i linked to in my last post where he reiterates the argument from Debt (emphasis mine):

19th century economists such as Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger[1] kept the basic framework of Smith’s argument, but developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge from such a situation. All assumed that in all communities without money, economic life could only have taken the form of barter. Menger even spoke of members of such communities “taking their goods to market”—presuming marketplaces where a wide variety of products were available but they were simply swapped directly, in whatever way people felt advantageous.

Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing”[2]

Just in way of emphasis: economists thus predicted that all (100%) non-monetary economies would be barter economies. Empirical observation has revealed that the actual number of observable cases—out of thousands studied—is 0%.

Similarly, the number of documented marketplaces where people regularly appear to swap goods directly without any reference to a money of account is also zero. If any sociological prediction has ever been empirically refuted, this is it.

Economists have for the most part accepted the anthropological findings, if directly confronted with them, but not changed any of the assumptions that generated the false predictions. Meanwhile, all textbooks continue to report the same old sequence: first there was barter, then money, then credit—except instead of actually saying that tribal societies regularly practiced barter, they set it up as an imaginative exercise (“imagine what you would have to do if you didn’t have money!” or vaguely imply that anything actual tribal societies did do must have been barter of some kind.

just to briefly restate my argument in light of this quote (that hopefully we can agree represents Graeber's argument):

- the fact that Jevons "developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge" from barter does not imply that economists (or even Jevons himself) predict that money originated from barter, or that barter is even widespread. the model may merely exist to illuminate the abstract merits of money relative to barter. it may seem weird to pursue this kind of exercise without making a claim about actual historical or empirical fact, but it's very common in economic theory

- even if we grant that economists predicted that all non-monetary societies used barter, it's not clear that the anthropological record is dispositive. there are 2 reasons for this:

1. societies to which anthropologists "fanned out" may not be representative of pre-historic societies where money originated and which we can't observe. specifically, there is potential for selection bias: maybe there is some common factor among certain societies that makes them less likely to invent money, and that factor is also correlated with them also being less likely to use barter. an example of such a factor may be having large populations. it's tempting to want to use ethnography to peer behind the curtain of history, but any inference requires assumptions

2. it could be that barter lead to money, not through the expansion of barter among people with "moral ties to one another" (of which there is no anthropological record), but through traders without moral ties to one another (of which there is record). later on in the post, Graeber gives the example of Mesopotamian trade accounts where it seems silver was used as medium of account

[T]he first records we have of money are administrative documents from Mesopotamia, in which money is used almost exclusively in keeping accounts within large bureaucratic organizations (Temples and Palaces), the system is based on a fixed equivalence between barley and silver, and that since silver was a trade item, this shows that Mesopotamian merchants must have been using silver as a medium of exchange in spot transactions with long-distance trade partners for that system to then be adopted as a unit of account in administrative transactions within Temples.

- none of this really matters, since nothing economists believe hinges on prehistoric barter, and most economists don't think money matters for the "real economy" that much (aside from episodes like debt crises or hyperinflation). i think Graeber's is spot on in his larger point: that economists severely restrict their "imaginations" by assuming economies of isolated, impersonal individuals with no moral obligations to one another. in the quote above he briefly mentions examples of how non-monetary societies are able to manage credit and debt through other means (the bit about "economic relations based on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams"). that point is well-taken (although it's hard to imagine strong bonds in economies with millions of participants, and the examples he gives are all of relatively small societies). imho there are better ways to make it than couching it in an irrelevant and speculative "gotcha" argument about barter and economics textbooks (although as we've mentioned that was a huge selling point for the book in the popular press, so it was wise from a marketing perspective)

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. Graeber's reason for using the example from economics textbooks stems from exactly the reason that it is used in economics textbooks. It illustrates a conceptual understanding of 'exchange' that is, once one begins to examine it fairly incoherent but is offered as a kind of epistemological root. that is, a conceptual 'starting point' that makes sense to develop economic understandings from, and his point is that the human relations that exchange and money emerge out of are too complex and social for this to make sense and that this is borne out by the fact that no evidence of barter economies preceding preceding monetary economies exists. I don't see how this is a 'gotcha,' its merely reiterating an illustration that economists have been very happy to preserve and offer as an entry point to understanding of their discipline for quite some time and this using this example to illustrate how the abstraction of 'economics' from much more quotidian aspects of human interaction is fundamentally flawed and an ass-backward simplification that starts from the wrong place.

Again I think it should be possible to argue with this point without trying to refute arguments he doesn't make. You already said the book says that what's wrong with it is that it argues that he claims that economics textbooks claim that the historical origin of money is in barter. He doesn't.

"the fact that Jevons "developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge" from barter does not imply that economists (or even Jevons himself) predict that money originated from barter, or that barter is even widespread. the model may merely exist to illuminate the abstract merits of money relative to barter. it may seem weird to pursue this kind of exercise without making a claim about actual historical or empirical fact, but it's very common in economic theory"

Yes exactly, it doesn't.

to reiterate:

"Economists have for the most part accepted the anthropological findings, if directly confronted with them, but not changed any of the assumptions that generated the false predictions. Meanwhile, all textbooks continue to report the same old sequence: first there was barter, then money, then credit—except instead of actually saying that tribal societies regularly practiced barter, they set it up as an imaginative exercise (“imagine what you would have to do if you didn’t have money!” or vaguely imply that anything actual tribal societies did do must have been barter of some kind"

On your other point, I'm not really interested in being drawn into arguing that money has not been disproven to have been prefigured by barter economies.

Graeber's reason for using the example from economics textbooks stems from exactly the reason that it is used in economics textbooks. It illustrates a conceptual understanding of 'exchange' that is, once one begins to examine it fairly incoherent but is offered as a kind of epistemological root. that is, a conceptual 'starting point' that makes sense to develop economic understandings from, and his point is that the human relations that exchange and money emerge out of are too complex and social for this to make sense and that this is borne out by the fact that no evidence of barter economies preceding preceding monetary economies exists.

i mostly agree with this. i don't think economists consider it their task to "characterize the human relations that exchange and money emerge out of" (more on that below). it's much less ambitious than that

Again I think it should be possible to argue with this point without trying to refute arguments he doesn't make. You already said the book says that what's wrong with it is that it argues that he claims that economics textbooks claim that the historical origin of money is in barter. He doesn't.

i can't parse this, but i'm still not clear on which arguments of his i'm refuting that he doesn't make. i'm trying to be transparent and stay close to the text of the post i'm quoting

"the fact that Jevons "developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge" from barter does not imply that economists (or even Jevons himself) predict that money originated from barter, or that barter is even widespread. the model may merely exist to illuminate the abstract merits of money relative to barter. it may seem weird to pursue this kind of exercise without making a claim about actual historical or empirical fact, but it's very common in economic theory"

Yes exactly, it doesn't.

we either agree or misunderstand each other here. Graeber is clear that he interprets this as a prediction, and that he considers the anthropological record an empirical test of that prediction:

Just in way of emphasis: economists thus predicted that all (100%) non-monetary economies would be barter economies. Empirical observation has revealed that the actual number of observable cases—out of thousands studied—is 0%.

what i'm saying is that the purpose of the model isn't to predict. rather than economists pivoting to an "imaginative exercise" after being embarrassed by the anthropological record's rejection of their prediction, it was an imaginative exercise all along. this happens all the time in economic theory. to illustrate gains from exchange economists going back to Ricardo contrast exchange with "autarky", a hypothetical state of the world where no one can trade with each other. that doesn't mean that economists believe there was a time in history when no one exchanged with each other. the point is to use the stark and abstract comparison to illustrate gains from exchange. same with barter and money

Graeber misses this, but he's right on the broader point: that economics is unimaginative about social relations. whether you think that's a flaw or a virtue is up to taste. Graeber, a self-described anarchist and student of Marshall Sahlins, finds the possibilities inherent in the multitude of social relations in small-scale tribal societies thrilling. economists implicitly only consider large-scale societies where most people have no relation to each other yet are still connected indirectly through a complex web of economic transactions. whether you see this as close-minded or pragmatic (given most people live in large societies) is a matter of taste. (Graeber later on in the post accuses economists of themselves inventing large impersonal societies, but i think that's giving them way too much credit). i read 'The Original Affluent Society' and 'The Art of Not Being Governed' when i was a teen and they blew my mind, but ultimately i think a return to primitivist small-scale society is unfeasible and probably undesirable. and it's hard for me to see what lesson we're supposed to draw for existing economies today if we stay large-scale from examples like these:

The first example is from the Amazonian Nambikwara, as described in an early essay by the famous French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. This was a simple society without much in the way of division of labor, organized into small bands that traditionally numbered at best a hundred people each. Occasionally if one band spots the cooking fires of another in their vicinity, they will send emissaries to negotiate a meeting for purposes of trade. If the offer is accepted, they will first hide their women and children in the forest, then invite the men of other band to visit camp. Each band has a chief and once everyone has been assembled, each chief gives a formal speech praising the other party and belittling his own; everyone puts aside their weapons to sing and dance together—though the dance is one that mimics military confrontation. Then, individuals from each side approach each other to trade:

If an individual wants an object he extols it by saying how fine it is. If a man values an object and wants much in exchange for it, instead of saying that it is very valuable he says that it is worthless, thus showing his desire to keep it. ‘This axe is no good, it is very old, it is very dull’, he will say… [8]

In the end, each “snatches the object out of the other’s hand”—and if one side does so too early, fights may ensue.

The whole business concludes with a great feast at which the women reappear, but this too can lead to problems, since amidst the music and good cheer, there is ample opportunity for seductions (remember, these are people who normally live in groups that contain only perhaps a dozen members of the opposite sex of around the same age of themselves. The chance to meet others is pretty thrilling.) This sometimes led to jealous quarrels. Occasionally, men would get killed, and to head off this descending into outright warfare, the usual solution was to have the killer adopt the name of the victim, which would also give him the responsibility for caring for his wife and children.

"what graeber does try to disprove is the argument (which he attributes to economists without citation, but which i've never seen one argue) that all non-monetary economies used barter, and that the historical sequence is 'first there was barter, then there was money, then there was credit'"

he does not try to disprove this argument as he never alleges that economists make this 'historical' argument. He claims that their persistent use of this myth as underpinning a very introductory thought experiment is *indicative* of the abstraction of economics from sociality. (and etc)

Its fine to disagree with points he makes in the book! Happy for you do do so. My only qualm was that it should be possible to disgree with the book without suggesting he says things he doesn't and then dismissing those misattributed ideas. to do so on the subsequent grounds that he is playing fast and loose with the facts seems deeply rude though. I'm not suggesting that there may not be disputable facts in the text, but its not very confidence inspiring when the first one you bring up is not in fact something he says in the text.

i will say that graeber does not in fact miss this unless when you say "graeber misses this" what you mean is that it is possible to take one small quote from a blog post and subject it to a very unsympathetic reading that suggests he means something he gives no other indication of meaning. With those very specific caveats then yes, "graeber misses this."

Hugely disappointed that @anthropologytod chose to put this nasty ad hominem attack on the late David graeber in as the frontispiece to this issue, w @davidwengrow s reply shoved in at back. This is not a book review, it’s dancing on a grave pic.twitter.com/T0LXXOsWbz

— Brenna Hassett (@brennawalks) March 10, 2022

article and response here https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678322/2022/38/1

Started The Dawn of Everything the other day. Apart from the main thrust I'm enjoying the things they throw out there without further analysis, like middle ages europe was, globally, an 'obscure and uninviting backwater', or that the western idea of 'a government of bureaucratic officaldom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams' came from china, where it existed for centuries before being adopted by the west. The second chapter dealt with such a handful of different, related, questions, and tackled them from so many different angles, that it was hard to grasp the big picture, but it's getting a bit more focussed now. I should probably be taking notes to appreciate it fully though.

I highly recommend The Dawn of Everything, it's hugely entertaining, educational, and enlightening. I am very much there for the anticapitalism/anarchism but, not to trivialise, without it - certainly without the first couple of chapters and their rather confusing notion of the origin of inequality - it would make a great pop science book on early civilisation.

They are disdainful of others' simple classification schemes e.g. old/middle/new kingdoms of ancient egypt, but very keen on their own, in particular their
trinity of domination (control over violence (sovereignty), control over information (bureaucracy), and charismatic competition (politics)) and
trinity of freedoms (freedom to move, freedom to disobey, freedom to reimagine society) (and I feel like there was a third one making a trinity of trinities but I can't recall it any more). These taxonomies are certainly thought provoking but it feels a bit like they cherry pick their data or stretch definitions, especially when claiming their societies fit into patterns of implementing one, two, or three of the forms of domination. But in a way that makes it more fun to engage with.

I've started on Debt. In the first chapter he quotes this Steven Wright joke (differently worded but same idea) to make some point about debt and violence. i don't get it (as a joke), please explain:

I owed my friend George $25. For about three weeks I owed it to him. The whole time I had the money on me -- he didn't know it. Walking through New York City, 2:30 in the morning and got held up. He said, "Gimme all your money." I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "George, here's the 25 dollars I owe you." The the thief took a thousand dollars out of his own money and he gave it to George. At gunpoint he made me borrow a thousand dollars from George.

is the joke-teller a person and is their friend a bank and is the thief the government and is it that when the government finds that the person it aims to tax has only $25 it is happy to give a huge sum to the bank in order that it can be loaned to the person thereby increasing the government's taxation income ? idgi either

The point he's making in the book is that who owes what to whom - whether something is a loan or a liability - is (or can be) dependent not on simple economics but on the balance of power (and the threat of violence). But - I just don't get it as a joke! I love Steven Wright but if I heard that in a set I'd just go... what?

Some years ago I was in a band and we made a record, which entailed expenses for studio time and mastering and CD pressing and sleeve printing.

At the time I was a wealthy person and I paid for a bunch of these things up front, but I still wanted to be reimbursed. There were a bunch of different expenses and incomes involved, because we also had paid gigs.

The keyboard player was a mathematician, and did some wizard shit where he like, turned to the guitarist and said, "okay, you give her $16 (pointing to the bassist). I will give you $4. Now everyone gives Puffin $22."

To this day I don't quite understand what happened, and it's possible that someone got screwed, but in the moment I just went with it because he sounded really confident.

The joke up to the part where he repays George as they’re being robbed is pretty standard Borscht-belt comedy. The coda about the $1000 is Wright pushing the joke into slightly surreal (and less funny) territory IMO.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a gem

at the beginning of this book, he mentions the barter thing and instead posits that what came first was a "gift economy" -- which sadly reminds me first and foremost of Burning Man -- but fortunately the book is mostly about anarchists and organizing as opposed to an economic argument I am somewhat skeptical about.

Gift and status and subsequent understandings were something conquistadors got heavily confused by in several stories I've heard.

Partially through having an overconfident idea of their own status

I need to read Matthew Restall's work on the interaction between Spain and Mesoamerican infrastructure because he talked about that in interviews i heard a couple of months ago.
Montezuma etc giving great wealth as gift to show how very wealthy they were and conquistadors seeing it as an act of fealty not something with an expectation of being matched and possibly increased.

& part of the gift giving economy was to escalate the value of the gift given leaving the other party needing to match it or be in debt I think. Think I saw Gaeber hismelf talking about that in a talk from around teh time Debt came out.

yeah ... that's part of the awkwardness I felt around that term. Like, there are obligations and cultural assumptions around the value of the gift in these cultures, at least that's how I read it. And then you have the term appropriated by Burning Man (and contemporary things like it) where the "gift economy" is just supposed to be about "giving" and not as part of a transaction. So I feel like it is something often misunderstood.