probably a few of these on the way as a CT seminar is in the works and I have volunteered to contribute.
First thought is that although Graeber makes a very convincing case on "the myth of barter", the general shape of the "economists' creation myth" is that using numeraire money as a unit of account and medium of transactions is a massively more convenient way to organise things, and that this becomes increasingly more and more necessary as the economy develops complexity, diversity and specialisation. And this is not only true, but shown to be so by all of Graeber's own examples. I mean ....
didjeridu. Before long, women from the hosts' side come and attack the musicians.
"The visitors in this particular example were famous for their 'much prized serrated spears' - their hosts had access to good European cloth. The trading begins when the visiting party, which consisted of both men and women, enters the camp's dancing ground of 'ring place' and three of them began to entertain their hosts with music. Two men start singing, a third accompanies them on the
Men and women rise and begin to dance. The dzamalag opens when two Ginwinggu women of the opposite moiety to the singing men "give dzamalag" to the latter. They present each man with a piece of cloth and hit or touch him, pulling him down on the ground, calling him a dzamalag husband and joking with him in an erotic vein. Then another woman of the opposite moiety to the pipe player gives him cloth, hits and jokes with him.
This sets in motion the dzamalag exchange. Men from the visiting group sit quietly while women of the opposite moiety come over and give them cloth, hit them and invite them to copulate; they take any liberty they choose with the men, amid amusement and applause, while the singing and dancing continue. Women try to undo the men's loin coverings or touch their penises, and to drag them from the 'ring place' for coitus. The men go with their dzamalag partners, with a show of reluctance, to copulate in the bushes away from the fires which light up the dancers. They may give the women tobacco or beads. When the women return, they give part of this tobacco to their own husbands, who have encouraged them to go dzamalag. The husbands, in turn, use the tobacco to pay their own female dzamalag partners ...
New singers and musicians appear, are again assaulted and dragged off to the bushes; men encourage their wives 'not to be shy', so as to maintain the Gunwinggu reputation for hospitality; eventually those men also take the initiative with the visitor's wives, offering cloth, hitting them and leading them off into the bushes. Beads and tobacco circulate. Finally, once participants have all paired off at least once, and the guests are satisfied with the cloth they have acquired, the women stop dancing and stand in two rows and the visitors line up to repay them.
Then visiting men of one moiety dance towards the women of the opposite moiety, in order to ' give them dzamalag'. They hold shovel-nosed spreads poised, pretending to spear the women, but instead hit them with the flat of the blade. 'We will not spear you, for we have already speared you with our penises'. They present the spears to the women. Then, visiting men of the other moiety go through the same actions with the women of their opposite moiety, giving them spears with serrated points. This terminates the ceremony, which is followed by a large distribution of food".
This all sounds like quite fun, in a sort of Ice Storm, car-keys-in-the-fruit-bowl kind of way, and I certainly agree that it has very little resemblance to classically described barter. But none the less, I think David Graeber would have to agree that it sounds like a fucking inconvenient way to buy a blanket. Compared to, say, pre paid debit cards.
Serious point - it is very convenient to have a numeraire for spot exchanges, and to have a unit of account to facilitate forward or noncontemporaneous exchanges, and to make that "money" item as generic as possible in order to allow it to be used in as many types of transaction as possible. Once you have a unit of account and exchanges based on that unit of account, then as far as I can see, if you combine that with the general category of "making promises" or "saying you're going to do something and then doing it", then you're well on the way to the characteristics that Graeber identifies with the social-legal institution of debt. So I think that he wins the battle and loses the war on the Myth of Barter - the very fact that so many different societies converge on something like the institution of debt-money (and that non-debt-money societies tend to adopt it quite quickly once exposed to the technology) rather militates against the kind of deep anthropological study that he wants to form the basis of the social sciences, and in favour of the functionalist black-box approach which is basically the mark of modern economics.
Once you have a unit of account etc
ReplyDeleteIsn't quite a big part of Graeber's argument showing that it didn't actually happen that way round, i.e. the unit of account (etc) grew out of the social-legal institution of debt?
I also think - and this will likely be the theme of my own Graeber piece when I get all umpteen hundred fucking application files off my desk - that the virtues of the chapter on how economists don't get diffuse reciprocity become the vices of his own final chapter. After banging on and on about how economists can't see the truth because their models blind them to it, he comes up with claims e.g. that the US declared war against Iraq because Iraq had shifted away from denominating oil prices in USD, and that the reasons for German and French opposition to Gulf War II lay in their adoption of the euro.
ReplyDeleteI think he does try to make that point but I think he plays a lot of fast-and-loose when doing so. For example, tally-sticks. Are they debts? Well, they're records of a transaction. But if a record of a transaction, plus a promise to pay, equals a debt, then this puts a bit of a hole in all the other claims he wants to make about the institution of debt.
ReplyDeleteEffectively, I'm saying that the "economists' creation myth" doesn't have a problem with the unit of account being invented as a matter of convenience to handle forward transactions rather than spot transactions; they would have more of a problem if debt-money was actually inconvenient and always had to be imposed by government coercion, but Graeber's case on this (IMO like all libertarian/anarchist cases made to the effect that some amazingly useful and convenient government institution is an imposition on the peoples) is as far as I can see quite weak.
Another way of looking at this, I suppose is that you could have done "Tax: The First Five Thousand Years" and explained in detail that the first taxes were military tributes extorted by conquerors, but that wouldn't really prove wrong the "myth of government" theory that governments typically financed themselves by an income tax because it was an efficient way to provide public goods.
Or, I suppose, yet another way to look at is that of course the answers to a lot of questions about big, difficult problems of social organisation were first found by medieval kings and rulers in the early days of civilisations, because these were the first people who were ever faced with the question of how to organise a social and economic unit bigger than a clan compound. But this doesn't really tell us much about the true nature of debt, tax, etc, any more than the fact of all sorts of technologies having been invented by the military. When the functional explanation is sufficiently powerful and convincing, it crowds out the relevance of the historical-anthropological explanation.
ReplyDeleteOr to put it more pithily, it is true that no modern society has its history in a freely agreed social contract made by independent autonmous individuals, but that doesn't mean that you could organise a modern economy on the basis of having to hold a wife-swapping party every time you wanted to buy a blanket.
Henry: yes, this! Also, in the last chapter he goes on about how the banks have "filled their balance sheets with bad assets", seemingly not realising that a "bad asset" in context is exactly what he's been talking about for all those pages - it is a debt contract (specifically a mortgage) which the borrower has chosen not to pay, and which he can't be forced to pay because California is a non-recourse state! And that US mortgage contracts have this property specifically because the statute law underlying the social relations of debt has been redrafted about a dozen times to enhance its economic efficiency.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever bought a blanket. For all I know I've been missing out all these years.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could. Maybe I'm just not being imaginative enough.
ReplyDeleteOh God, what is it with the Iranian Oil Bourse thing? It just won't die. I've never heard anyone explain clearly how they think it works, either.
ReplyDeleteAlso, inconvenient though it would be to have an orgy every time you wanted a blanket, would it be any worse than having to use the word "moiety"?
The wife-swapping bit has to go into your final piece, surely. But yes - you've put your finger on what really annoyed me about the book. It's a kind of Original Sin theory of institutions - if debt (as he semi-speculatively argues) once, thousands of years ago had a lot to do with slavery, then it is forever about slavery, in some sublimated form, no matter how society has changed in the meantime.
ReplyDeleteAnd also - the implicit assumption throughout that there is something morally wonderful about systems based on diffuse reciprocity, and that the only reason why we wouldn't all want to be doing the wifeswapping parties is teh coercive state and its propaganda machine. Lou Brown, who I think will be contributing, has some nice anthropological work on how Madagascar women are all over inheriting teh cash as opposed to the property-tied-up-in-the-obligations-to-the-ancestors. As I recall her work, she suggests that the former, unlike the latter, allows you to get away from all your male relatives seeking to sponge on you using this or that excuse about what the ancestors want.
Alex - is there any good takedown that you're aware of of the Iranian bourse stuff? I'm aware that there is a literature on the topic, but I don't want to buy the petrodollars book (as far as I can see from essays by the author, it's a few facts woven into a fairly fantastic narrative), let alone read it. Not that there isn't plenty of good reason to be cynical about US monetary policy a-la-Arthur-Burns, but to see seignorage-goodies as the primary driving force of US imperialism etc is thoroughly cracked.
A lot of Graeber's history is pretty off, best I can tell. My dad, who's a very well read amateur, thought the survey of Europe was ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteI think there's a much more interesting book burried in there, and which I think (from memory) he's already written. Basically the social attitudes surrounding money and debt are both integral to how it works, are very fluid and change all the time. And he's right, that slavery never seems to be very far from the surface as debt become a more powerful coercive force (see some of the debates and realities in the US over both the mortgage debt, and student debt).
When it comes to economists and money. The problem I have with it is threefold.
1) It allows economists to pretend that money is somehow independent of society/culture - and they can treat it is some kind of disembodied store of value (whatever the fuck that might be). This is ridiculous.
2) It allows economists to pretend money is money is money, regardless of society, culture, power, politics, etc. Equally ridiculous.
3) It allows economists to pretend that money somehow exists independently of governments. Which simply isn't true, and never has been true except in very limited circumstances.
Actually the easiest argument against the petrodollar argument for the Iraq war is:
ReplyDelete"Do you really think the Bush administration were that subtle and sophisticated? For real?"
But the general argument seems to either be based upon misunderstandings of how the petrodollar thing works (for which Michael Hudson's 1970's prescient book, Super Imperialism, still holds up remarkably well), or variants of the underpants gnomes argument. The point about petrodollars is that the money got recycled into dollar denominated assets, giving the US free money.
Now if the argument had been that the Iraq war (or Iran war, that the current administration, as well as the US military, clearly don't want) had been about getting the new government to place oil money in US assets as the Saudis/Gulf states do - well maybe. But they don't make this argument, and there's not a shred of evidence to support it.
My review is actually going to be pretty favourable - I don't think I agree with Graeber on much, but it's a book that you can feel like you can have an argument with, and that it's arguing intelligently back. I also think that when you look at the way that, say, the IMF/EU/Troika go about things, there is a lot to the Graeber thesis that people use the debt social institution as a way of creating moral pressure on people to do things against their interests.
ReplyDeleteAs I recall her work, she suggests that the former, unlike the latter, allows you to get away from all your male relatives seeking to sponge on you using this or that excuse about what the ancestors want.
A modern equivalent is the invention of the Amazon Kindle DRM system, which makes it impossible to have your lovely books "borrowed" all the time.
My bottom line, which maybe reflects some of Cian's problems with money, is that Polanyi is a better starting point than Graeber (or in particular, Graeber's version of Simmel). Also, James Buchan. I've never been able to figure out his politics, but Frozen Desire is really very good, and beautifully written to boot.
ReplyDeleteJames Buchan's book is wonderful. The best thing I've ever read on money. I've never met anyone else who has read it. His book on Adam Smith is supposed to be very good also, though I've yet to read it.
ReplyDeleteI believe his politics are best described as 'disinterested' and 'detached'.
Keith Hart's book, the Memory Bank, has a similar perspective, in many ways, to Buchan on money, though his professional bias is strongly anthropological (So DSquared will hate it). Worth reading, particularly as he's made it freely available as a mobi/epub/pdf.
A modern equivalent is the invention of the Amazon Kindle DRM system, which makes it impossible to have your lovely books "borrowed" all the time.
ReplyDeleteYou might want to work on this argument so it's less transparently a troll.
I realised when I typed it that actually it would be better to have the ebooks without the DRM, but having an excuse not to part with paper books to people who don't give them back is truly a pleasure.
ReplyDeleteThat "last chapter problem" crops up ever so often in great big books that do detailed, penetrating surveys of Societal Problem X, doesn't it though?
ReplyDeleteEvery time I get near the end of the book and the author does that turn of "enough with the painstaking research, fact heaps, and close reasoning, let's talk about my personal political beliefs," I feel like I've once again been tricked into reading the book-length version of this.
One of the wierdest versions of the "last chapter" problem that I encountered was in Hacker's "Winner Takes All Politics". After a brilliant, iconoclastic, take on US politics - it ends with a conventional take on the Obama presidency that completely ignores the rest of the book's analysis.
ReplyDeleteCian - I asked Pierson about this after the book was published - he shuffled his feet uneasily and muttered that they were really more interested in providing the diagnosis than the prescription. It's a general problem with the norms of US non-fiction publishing. The author spends most of the book describing the reasons we're fucked. Then in the last chapter, she is supposed to come up with the Magic Solution that will wipe all our troubles away, or the reviewer gets very unhappy. Since, if you're talking about a half way interesting set of problems, there isn't any good solution, this generates issues.
ReplyDeleteAll this said, I think that the issues of Graeber's book are a little different. He isn't trying to generate solutions or please the publisher. I think that the problem is that he thinks he knows what is going on in the modern world sufficiently well that he doesn't need to do any proper research on it, beyond a few bits and pieces (there is that fun fact about the tons of gold buried under the streets of New York) on stuff that is a little removed from his main argument. And unfortunately, he doesn't.
"...he thinks he knows what is going on in the modern world [...] unfortunately, he doesn't."
ReplyDeleteThis is not, I think, independent of his personal politics.
"Then in the last chapter, she is supposed to come up with the Magic Solution"
ReplyDeleteI think this is not true across disciplines; it's very much expected in Political Science or Sociology, somewhat suspect in History, and rather unorthodox, if not downright taboo, in Anthropology.
Of course, in the Problematic Last Chapter, the Magic Solution isn't the only way to inject one's personal politics; there's also the Exciting Extrapolation, the Sweeping Generalization, the ever-popular Dire Prediction, etc. etc.
I don't think the Last Chapter Problem is so much a sop to reviewers as a consequence of the fact that an author doesn't develop an interest in a topic without reasons, and all too often has a hard time not sticking those reasons onto the end of the book, regardless of what the study of the topic has actually unearthed.
Economics replaces all the weirdness of reality with phony math and junk like walrasian auctioneers. "Debt" succeeds in making economics weird again and I loved it for that. I even warmed up to anarchists after reading it. I used to think they were just hotheads who wanted to fight with cops. After following Graeber on twitter for a while I'm back to thinking they're just hotheads who want to fight with cops.
ReplyDeleteI tried to point out to him on Twitter that changing an individualised obligation into a money transaction isn't necessarily anti-egalitarian (or, importantly for a Graeber-informed left, vice versa), but he just told me off for not being Ulrike Meinhof.
ReplyDeleteExample: if you are poor enough, the electricity company will not behave as if your money is as good as anyone's, and instead make you pay higher prices and fuck around looking for a corner shop that lets you top up your meter key. In this case, credit-rating people and treating them as differentiated individuals embedded in a relationship of obligation rather than atomised, stateless cash customers has clear and evident reactionary consequences.
Example 2: if you live in Italy, it's quite probable that you will be better served through the informal/gift-obligation network than through the money economy or the official structures of the state. Cool. This is all very well if you have access to it, but if you are a gypsy or a wrong-kind-of-suntan immigrant you are specifically excluded from it and you can expect a good kicking if not worse if you try to use it. At which point you discover that the official structures don't work because everyone who can uses the unofficial system.
The reference to gold reserves interested me so I looked the book up on Amazon.
ReplyDeleteIt's not reassuring about his fact-checking. e.g he says they have 5,000 tonnes (266 million troy ounces). But 5,000 tonnes is about 160 Mtoz. That's not 'one quarter to one fifth of all the gold taken from the earth' but one quarter to one fifth of the gold held by central banks (it's about 1/30th of the gold taken from the earth). He says it includes the Fed's gold, but the Fed owns no gold.
And so on. They don't really detract from the point, but as he took them from the Fed's pamphlet on the gold holdings (the language is similar) it's a bit worrying he gets them so wrong.
Come to think of it, the canonical example of replacing a customary obligation in kind with a cash payment is the end of feudalism, and our ancestors cared enough to fight three civil wars and cut the king's head off in order to do that fucker in.
ReplyDeleteActually, that's such a canonical episode in history that I presume he must have engaged with it.
I don't know if Graeber actually says non-monetary diffuse reciprocity societies are better. The anthropological record (and I'm pretty sure his book) is full of inegalitarian and cruel non-monetary societies. Every kind of leftism is just trying to adapt the good parts of human nature to urban and industrial scale. Economics has everyone focused on self-interest and incentives, I'm just happy somebody is talking about everyday reciprocity, the way people actually act most of the time.
ReplyDeleteJust realised I had three separate comment windows open, all replying to you on different threads. Not a stalker, honest.
ReplyDeleteAnyway... What do you think of this comment from Chris D. on the causes of the crash?
In a parallel universe, the high Asian savings rate would have had a happy ending. In driving down bond yields, it would have encouraged western firms to invest in new plant and technology thus making us all richer. But it didn’t. Because of the lack of investment opportunities, the savings glut was invested in the housing bubble, which burst.