A non-economist makes economic claims that just so happen to reflect the political views of his political contemporaries, but it is the job of anyone who disagrees to cite an entire body of literature, reviewed to a high but unspecified standard?
I'd totally agree with you had Graeber not been an influential anthropologist (wherein one academically studies human activity, culture, trade, economics, social structures, institutions etc. from a rigorous historical lens)
Your demand would have made sense if Debt was a peer-reviewed scholarly work and not a political screed aimed at a lay readership.
But then again, there is enough nonsense in there than can be picked apart without being a domain expert. For example, Graeber claims Adam Smith's famous "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest" thesis is wrong because shopkeepers of the time mostly sold goods on credit and thus the customers were in fact depending on their benevolence. This blithe conflation of credit with benevolence should evoke laughter from anyone who is even remotely familiar with how businesses are run.
And dunking on Smith is how Graeber builds his grand neo-liberal economics conspiracy theory.
I've not the read Greaber's book, though I intend to, but Adam Smith is regularly misinterpreted in an extreme right-wing way (e.g. the Adam Smith Institute) so it's possibly to disagree with that interpretation without disagreeing with Adam Smith.
> The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets.
> As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty, and a pernicious restriction on the capacity of each nation to increase its collective wealth. Yet the mercantile system benefited the merchant elites, who had worked hard to keep it in place. Smith pulled no punches in his assessment of the bosses as working against the interests of the public. As he put it in The Wealth of Nations: ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’
> The merchants had spent centuries securing their position of unfair advantage. In particular, they had invented and propagated the doctrine of ‘the balance of trade’, and had succeeded in elevating it into the received wisdom of the age. The basic idea was that each nation’s wealth consisted in the amount of gold that it held. Playing on this idea, the merchants claimed that, in order to get rich, a nation had to export as much, and import as little, as possible, thus maintaining a ‘favourable’ balance. They then presented themselves as servants of the public by offering to run state-backed monopolies that would limit the inflow, and maximise the outflow, of goods, and therefore of gold. But as Smith’s lengthy analysis showed, this was pure hokum: what were needed instead were open trading arrangements, so that productivity could increase generally, and collective wealth would grow for the benefit of all
Greaber's interpretation of Smith is just as shallow as extreme right-wing one. And what's worse is Greaber's whole cloth invention of Adam Smith's supposed morality.
Simply, as a meta note / rational argument's sake ->
Let's assume X (Smith) makes statement S (X -> S). A few hundreds of years later, Y (Graeber) makes statement S' that refutes S and says Y -> S' and negates ~ (X -> S). Now what I'd expect is a Z, that counter-refutes Y. For example, Z -> S''. Instead, you're going back to saying yeah, we all know X -> S, so how can Y -> S' be ever true...
I think Debt is a terrible book but that's not a convincing or even substantive review. Even more bizzare is the author admitting to dunking on the book without even having read it!
Does Noah Smith consider himself left-wing? I've always tagged him as "right-wing but not totally insane" as he often seems to be explaining bits of reality to his audience who consider them politically incorrect, like renewables and climate change not being a hoax, or him explaining that being 'woke' is okay, as long as you aren't rude to white men.
I followed the stoush between DeLong and Graeber closely, and my strong impression is that Graeber was thin-skinned, vengeful, often inaccurate and unable to stand criticism. DeLong was a bit trolly, but nothing a competent, stable writer shouldn't have been able to handle. This impression is also borne out by my own reading of Graeber's work, and his reprehensible actions as a working academic:
I have the same impressions of Graeber in this back and forth but it doesn't change the fact that Graeber has a point
I mean making a Twitter bot to spam someone "stay away!" every day seems a lot more thin-skinned and vengeful than Graeber's response here. And Graeber points out that most of the "factual errors" pointed out by DeLong do basically nothing to detract from the main theses Graeber makes in his book.
It's clear DeLong has it out for him and the "takedown" is just a collection of "gotchas" on minor details pasted together to try to attack the overall validity of the book
Can you provide a well researched body of literature that counters Graeber’s thesis as opposed to just stating an opinion?