Seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years – Introduction
Ah, the sudden appearance of all the essays on Graeber's book is now explained. One more worth reading, and setting the stage for the follow-ups on Crooked Timber, by Christ Bertram.
Seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years – Introduction:
(Via Crooked Timber)
The unmourned death of the double coincidence
Yet more on Graeber's book, this time from John Quiggin.
The unmourned death of the double coincidence:
Graeber shows, convincingly enough for me, that the story conventionally told by economists, in which money emerges as a replacement for barter systems, is nonsense. In fact, as he notes this point has been made by anthropologists many times and ignored just as often. Thanks to the marvels of auto-googling, I’ve been aware for some time that my namesake, Alison Hingston Quiggin gave the definitive demonstration long ago in her ‘Survey of Primitive Money’. Graeber sharpens the point by arguing that the real source of money is as a way of specifying debts.
(Via Crooked Timber)
The world economy is not a tribute system
Having just posted about DeLong and Rossman on Graeber's book, here is another essay on the topic, from Crooked Timber. Choice excerpt follows; I recommend reading the whole thing.
The world economy is not a tribute system:
In short – if there is evidence to support Graeber’s rather sweeping claims about the nature of the global economic system, he doesn’t provide it to the reader. Perhaps this evidence is buried in his sources somewhere. Perhaps not. But when one self-consciously makes grand claims that everyone else is wrong, one should have good evidence, and be prepared to produce it up front. Graeber, unless he’s keeping it very close to his chest indeed, has no evidence at all. This doesn’t seem to me to live up to the (admittedly high) standard that Graeber sets for himself.
(Via Crooked Timber)
How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture
Brad DeLong points to this lengthy review of David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years". I am in the process of reading Graeber's book in bits and pieces in between my, rather pressing currently, stretches of work and the review is coming at the right time for me. Of particular interest is the example about Apple Inc. that points out that Graeber's claims about facts cannot always be trusted. DeLong has a long blog post on this. The original essay by Gabriel Rossman is here:
(Via codeandculture.wordpress.com)
John Quiggin makes an excellent point
I don't often discuss macroeconomics here but this blog post by John Quiggin is well worth my attention and yours. He totally demolishes a review of his book by Steven Williamson, who is quoted as saying "Market efficiency is simply an assumption of rationality. As such it has no implications. If it has no implications, it can’t be wrong." Williamson is also quoted as saying "Like the “efficient markets hypothesis,” DSGE has no implications, and therefore can’t be wrong."
If you wonder why I have not gone over to my university's online library site to read the review, it's because I am utterly disgusted by the Williamson quotations and do not want to waste my time reading his review. Macroeconomics is supposed to be a science, not a part of analytic philosophy or logic; "economists" with such enormous blindfolds as Williamson have too much sway in the discipline and have corrupted its very core.
Like Tjalling Koopmans said in response to Milton Friedman's methodological emanations, every assumption you make in building a theory is automatically, and rather obviously, also a prediction of the theory. Saying "I like the assumption of rationality, I will always make it, and it's my mode so you can't tell me not to play with it to my heart's content" is odious nonsense. When the efficient market hypothesis or DSGE is part of a model that produces predictions that keep being smacked by the data, insisting that these assumptions (and since when is DSGE an assumption, rather than a whole modeling technique?) can't be wrong is tantamount to saying that your theory can't be useful and in fact is eminently ignorable. If you peddle it to the world and your students as science, you are at the minimum corrupting the notion of science itself.
What the Mafia can teach us about the fiscal spending multiplier
I don't normally post on macroeconomics, but I find this article irresistible. Hat tip to Greg Ip on Twitter (@gregip).
A quick note on macroeconomics teaching in graduate school
Via Brad DeLong, this post by Noahpinion.