Do you honestly think slagging "the progressive left" and complaining about the author's refusal to condemn the left as "bloodily autophagic" really adds much to this discussion? We're here to talk about a book of anthropological history; obviously it's gonna involve some politics, but maybe don't start by trying to declare all leftists auto-cannibalistic lackies of Robespierre. It's just a bit uncivilized.
This is some amusingly poignant spam, given the context. Playing the gossip trap element (with references to her "neighbor", who was doing better than her), against a human desire to escape that trap (with references to being her own boss by relying on broad faceless markets for self-sufficiency)
Forgive me for commenting before reading, though I very much look forward to digesting this review - at the request of some subscribers I started blogging my way through this book but quit in disgust after a few chapters. (I did finish reading it however.) I'm someone with a fairly high tolerance for, let's say, ambitious nonfiction, but in terms of citation and responsible reference to evidence this is one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read. Just hundreds and hundreds of pages of inadequately sourced claims and a few instances of misreadings of the provided citations so egregious that it crosses the line into dishonesty.
Did you happen to write down your top ten disputations (and would you be willing to put a few of them here)?
I had a copy of this book, and I don't know how one manages to misplace something with a bright orange dust jacket and over a square foot of surface area, but I did. I was about 1/3 of the way in. So I'm cornered into sitting with the material I remember until I want to pay another 30 clams.
I was a few tens of pages past the introduction of Kandiaronk. I think G&W were getting underway with saying "you didn't prove that" at most/all of the critical junctures in the assumed timeline of the development of political theory. Footnoting that is going to be a b********** anyway... Did they end up postulating their own path, or does it continue with the "we really don't know, but there's lots of doubt to be cast"?
I read the first part of this review. An outline of a book like this is (to me) probably not the way to approach a review. One has to read it and digest it and then write about it, not alongside it. But especially if the reviewer were in a hurry - with a book like this, that might mean having started last year - writing alongside it might seem like the pragmatic choice.
I liked the bit about all the ruins of huge complexes that lacked farming. Farming is like the office, hunter-gathering is the gig economy, and the latter leaves a lot more time to do other stuff. Even thinking that they might have made that work is emotionally liberating.
I don't think Appiah shares their politics. He's a liberal cosmopolitan, while Graeber is a hardcore anarchist with a general leftist bent (though he's not really a leftist exactly either).
As far as voting is concerned, sure. But writing a book review isn't voting, and Appiah seems to me to be doing the right service as a book review writer.
Funny, but it was Appiah's review that interested me in the book. When I read it, I took it as an overall positive review but with some nits to pick with the authors about their interpretation of Enlightenment history and the interpretation of the archaeological evidence. And he ended his review on high note:
"Social prophets, including those in the anarchist tradition—from Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman to Paul Goodman and David Graeber—make the vital contribution of stretching our social and political imagination. Facing forward, we can conduct our own experiments in living. We can devise the stages we’d like to see."
What really interested me was Wengrow's response — which to me (with my undergrad background in Archaeology) seemed quite nuanced and reasonable.
In his response to their response, Appiah finally agrees that they did a good job of synthesizing vast amounts of data, but they ignored the counterarguments to their claims. I find that to be a fair comment, but OTOH, when creating such a vast tome, where hundreds of archaeological and historical examples were presented, would it have been productive to spend time arguing with each counterargument for each example. At the risk of falling into the trap of whaddaboutism, Ian Morris in his well-footnoted book _Why the West Rules_ doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the counterarguments to his narrative's examples.
I agree it wouldn’t have been productive for G&W to argue every counterexample. I really like that they found interpretations of archaeological evidence which support rotating governmental structures, decentralized systems. I also like their People’s-history style take on what the actual relationships were like between people and the rulers, where rulers existed (I think it was the Natchez society, with the Great Sun king and most of the villages well out of his reach.)
I think as long as each (or most) of G&W’s citations retains a percent possibility that it happened that way, they have created enough of a loophole in the progression-of-civilizations theory to call it into serious question and then deserve more scholarship to line up the pieces in their arguments.
Rousseau & Hobbes is tricky, the whole enlightenment is tricky, to treat quickly - I think they also didn’t mention Foucault - mentioning the big names brings out all the pros with their vested interests in received wisdom.
I’ve read enough Vine Deloria (and Momaday and others) to believe that indigenous societies existed, and can in some places continue to exist, in forms outside the European imagination of the colonial era.
If turning the dial of society back just enough until it hits right-sized agrarian utopia- if that’s not possible, if that mostly did not exist, if the polities were often less agrarian, more materially egalitarian with varying types of social structure - I’m ok with that. Looking at other possibilities of materially egalitarian social structure is important, I agree, whether we find them in history or in theories - if in history, at least somebody made it work at some point, which adds promise.
Saying “the anarchists didn’t support their arguments” is also common and an easy way to dismiss them. There’s some intersection between that being right, and the historical situation. I’d like to do a Scott and inch through DoE putting probabilities on all their assertions. It would take a very long time though.
I think the idea of utopia is a perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good issue. I’d like to see it go. Wendat society was a real place, so it would have had its unfairnesses, but people apparently weren’t dying of poverty. If leaving that balance behind was not inevitable, I see that as good. If it didn’t take bureaucracy- if administration worsened it - that’s very interesting and has a lot of implications.
Thanks for the reference, this is really interesting.
As “the consensus” that’s set up and knocked down - do you mean the idea of back to the land/neo-indigenous non-technological utopia?
Part of the reason I think activists were most of the intended audience for G&W is that there are still people who very much believe in that better-society, or consider it “directionally correct” (great phrase from Appiah’s review).
I think contemporary US tribal communities don’t have much use for them but in “pro-Indian” organizing in the society at large it’s harder to fend them off. I was at a gathering recently where some activists were flyering the exit driveway by going up to cars and giving them flyers about Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women. The tiny print at the bottom of the xeroxed-looking paper showed it the upcoming protest was sponsored by something-something Workers. I care about the MMIW issue, I think it’s important.
I also think “indigeneity” can be used as a badge of credibility or reliability. “Here we go getting closer to Rousseau!” say the non-tribal activists going to the MMIW protest organized by whichever left organization. Or the feeling of that.
I think Utopianism is behind some of the land acknowledgements, ie, “if we say this enough times we ourselves will return to the Better World before colonialism.” Descendants of that community have a path to take in terms of negotiating their heritage, tribal government, larger society, and that makes sense to feel and consider things about a hypothetical better world there. People saying that who are not descendants of that community are often either really caring & helpful, or they’re hoping to ride the transformation into their own utopia. I think land acknowledgements are valuable for different reasons but “This was Ohlone land, soon it will be again, here come the farm girls with flowers if you say this often enough” can be an element. So for G&W to knock it down - big name activist - is relevant. There’s a lot to unpack there in terms of real needs of indigenous communities, what it means in the modern day, what a helpful response is from an outsider to that community, etc. I recall Deloria writing about the anthropologists going to Indian communities and intrusively/destructively studying them in service of the prior iterations of debate about utopia. It can still go on.
I’ll read more of Turchin now. His book looks good.
But G&W never bring up the question of whether it's possible to organize a society on anarchistic principles. Just because Graeber was a self-styled anarchist, does that make everything he wrote an anarchist polemic?
As for an "80 year old view" that was "never consensus", V. Gordon Childe was still on my reading list when I was an archeology undergrad. And the theory they taught me was all about the evolution of states from tribes from bands and how do identify these transitions in the archeological record. Of course, a lot of my profs were Marxists, so they bought into that cultural evolution crap. My undergrad experience was 40 years ago, but the fact that people like Ian Morris are still recycling this dogma makes me think it's still consensus—at least in some circles.
Ok, I will. I admire someone who reads the whole book and reviews it. The discussion of “progressivism” at the beginning was a “skip this” clue. But I’ll go back. It’s 100 degrees here, looking like a long weekend with iffy A/C, what better to do than dive into this. I think the book is incredibly valuable for raising the questions it raises.
I bought the kindle version and stayed up until 245 tracing the quotes in the review and then wrote an essay which I haven’t yet read in daylight…and then posted it to the comments. I wasn’t mean though.
You’re in philosophy, right - you probably recall the 90s when (where I was) half the acreage of campus said “the encounter with the Other” to each other on a daily basis? Which writers were structuring and driving this? I just read Freddie’s blog entries about DoE from late 2021, one of his criticisms was “how is The Indigenous Critique of the West even a thing?” and all I can do is mutter “but it was such a popular idea it was in comparative literature course descriptions.”
I’m not sure the reviewer finished it. I paid for a kindle copy and am locating each of his quotes. So far the furthest in is p. 246. In an hour or so I’ll post.
Not Freddie - I mean this current review. I’ve made a list of all 45 quotes from the book and the furthest in is from p. 257. This doesn’t absolutely mean they didn’t read the whole thing but a few of the reviewer’s questions are answered in chapter 12,
My bad. I guess I missed Freddie's parenthetical comment "(I did finish reading it however)". Apologies to Freddie for mischaracterizing his statement—but no apologies for saying Freddie is overtly mischaracterizing G&W's work by dropping that "inadequately sourced" turd in his opinion. Give me some frigging specifics with links to back up your arguments, Freddie. And don't say you've documented it on your Substack site, because I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed.
LMAO, nothing sums up Freddie Deboer like "too lazy to read." Sure, buddy. (He did write some interesting comments on the first few chapters, if you'd like to know what some of the issues were.)
My updated opinion: Yes, Freddie claims to have read the book. My bad.
But I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed. Let him post his arguments here on this forum.
Well, this is a forum for soi-disant rationalists and people interested in rationalism. Maybe I'm be I'm being overly idealistic that we can engage in rational discourse about rationalism and adjacent topics, but a large percentage of the discourse on these threads seems to be non-rational, ill-informed, or informed by personal prejudices, or by ideological obsessions and ego.
Freddie called The Dawn of Everything "one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read." By doing that he dropped a rhetorical cherry bomb into the middle what up until then had been a fairly sensible discussion (albeit with a few ideological digressions). On top of that he smeared the book as being "indequately sourced" — which, if one actually has read this book, is clearly just bullshit.
I'm not expecting an answer from him because I don't think he's really capable of mounting a rational defense for his positions. I must admit I find people who behave like Freddie in public forums to be tiresome. I probably shouldn't have responded to him in the first place (i.e. fed the troll), but even if you don't like Graeber's politics, or G&W's thesis, there's still an immense amount useful information in The Dawn of Everything—and if you're a seriously interested in the questions of why civilizations arose, you'll be following up on the cited works for years to come.
It’s likely many of the same things that most other reviewers have found frustrating. Basically the constant accusations of incomplete and slipshod scholarship for everyone else combined with incomplete and slipshod scholarship. Graeber tends to be at his best when putting forward an intriguing hypothesis that may actually be consistent with the information we have and that challenges orthodoxy in some interesting way that supports an anarchist political agenda, and at his worst when claiming that therefore this alternative hypothesis is definitely true and that the orthodoxy is the result of a political agenda.
This is super concerning to me, since I really liked Debt and thought DoE was very interesting. I'm not an academic, I read it via Audiobook and I didn't check the citations.
I know I'm asking a lot for a forum reply, but how bad are we talking about here? Is this a "author's point is totally shut down by their own citations" situation? Or more a case that they are stretching thin evidence too far.
that is debating, the book debates Rousseau, Dunbar, Harari plus a bunch of anthropoogists and archeologists, I would not expect general acceptance, it visit a couple of dozen of archeological and historical sites with novel questions, and has 150 pages of notes BTW, do not discount this book because DeLong and Appiah, check the end of Appiah's reply to Wengrow "I hope I made plain, there’s much more to the book than that. Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable. Readers who imagine foragers on the Sahlinesque model of the San will encounter foraging societies with aristocrats and slavery, while the book’s account of the Poverty Point earthworks is a riveting study of collective action. We get an intriguing proposal about the nature of the state. And this is just to begin a long list of fascinations. That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities” emerges vibrantly from these pages."
The bigger problem is simply not citing statements of fact that seem very much in need of citation, but I found three or four cases of the authors misrepresenting what a given citation does say, and that was only in two chapters worth of really looking for that kind of thing.
Everything that David Graeber has ever written is equally "problematic" in these sorts of ways.
Debt: The First 5000 Years is probably the book I have the most ambivalent reaction to of any I have ever tried to read - it both poses a bunch of fascinating ideas that I keep thinking about, and also disgusted me so much with how fast and loose it plays with the facts that I couldn't finish it. If he just said, "economists make up a lot of just-so stories, so let me make up another one and you can decide whether it's got some value and interest", it would have been an amazing book. But the fact that it keeps being "economists are the worst people in the world because they just make up just-so stories and claim they are incontrovertible fact, while here I've discovered the one true fact about the history of money" just disgusted me.
I just read his book on Bullshit Jobs, because it ties in to a paper I'm writing on the concept of bullshit generally, and it kept being frustrating how much weight he wants to put on a single survey to say, "look, the majority of work is bullshit, because 37% of workers admit it, and 37% of the rest are only working to support their bullshit!", and then how credulously he took everything his Twitter followers said to him about what their jobs were like.
The big thing is the idea that debt can arise before money, and can make the need for a unit of measurement natural even if no one has currency. The idea that debt can be prior to money and that money can be prior to barter reverses a lot of naive ideas I had.
The first chapter about the history of credit in the early fertile crescent civilizations and how it worked without coinage is amazing. Yes, when Graeber first says "Debt" he means "Credit". But then he starts using "Debt" in other contribed ways that sound confusing. The whole section on eastern religious views on "Debt" is like that and kind of ruins the great start of the book IMHO.
Danco also explains better than Kenny Easwaran below - no offense to Kenny, his was a short response - Graeber's argument about growth of bullion as a currency stemming from conquest. In Debt's logic, bullion is an extractive tool, because you can demand bullion from conquered peoples, but you cannot demand credit in the same way, it is much more bound into networks of reciprocity.
I also saw elsewhere that the "Bullshit Jobs" argument wasn't substantiated empirically by other researchers (I think Dur & Lent, 2019, is the main paper, but you may know of others). I doubt Graeber would have been surprised to find that out, given that the idea of having a bullshit job feels not only subjective, but also possible to manipulate experimentally relatively easily. To my mind, interpretations of words like 'socially useful' or 'bullshit' are so context laden as to make surveying people about this very challenging. You are right to say that Graeber is overexcited by a single survey and his qualitative data, but I think he is channelling a more Marxist theory of work and identity that isn't necessarily shared by the random people being surveyed.
For instance, if you read other authors from a similar space as Graeber on work, like Peter Fleming, part of the logic inherent in their conception of neoliberalism is that it ties jobs into identities. Fleming calls this the 'I, Job' function, but it's pretty evident that the link between jobs and identities doesn't exist in the same way for them (they're maybe getting this from the little Marx writes about the future after Communism has been 'achieved', wherein people can be painters in the morning and poets in the afternoon etc.).
If someone's job is a large part of their identity, as it will invariably be in a world where 40hrs+ a week are spent at work, then that will change their perception on whether their work is socially useful. IIRC, Graeber says most jobs in PR are bullshit, and it seems unlikely that most people in PR would agree with him. I think it's very hard to extricate identity from these sorts empirical data collection processes.
I was surprised that the numbers in Dur & Lent were so high if anything: "We find that approximately 8 percent of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17 percent are doubtful about the usefulness of their job."
Perhaps you've read more in this space that could persuade me otherwise, but I'm not fully convinced by the empiricism applied to Bullshit Jobs. I'd love to read your paper about bullshit when you're finished with it, that sounds fascinating!
I’ll have to check out the Dur and Lent piece! The one I link in the other branch of this thread (Soffia, Wood and Burchell, 2021) is good, and sympathetic to Graeber, but reject all his empirical claims.
I have a draft I’m showing people now. If you email me (last name at gmail) I can send it.
To me, the biggest problem with their scholarship is that DoE is always looking at quantitative questions using nothing but qualitative data. For instance, they wanted to "prove" that the hunter-gatherer / band / tribe / chiefdom is "false". But of course there were many groups that fit comfortably into that mold. So the only meaningful kind of claim would be a quantitative one, like "/Most/ early cultures didn't fit that progressive scheme." But they never make such claims, and never give us quantities. In the case of the civilization-pipeline hypothesis, they list exceptions, but don't tell us what fraction of the groups they looked at were exceptions. 10%? 60%?
Brad DeLong very publicly noticed that everything in Debt that he was something of an expert on (modern economic history) was either slapdash or wrong. This lead to quite the internet war of words.
Given how common that is for people to say about his work on their own areas of expertise, there's a decent chance in my mind that's how he was with everything.
I completely agree about distorted use of sources, and I checked cases over many chapters. It's too bad the book didn't go through an academic press review (I'm sure it had some sort of peer review, but either it was inadequate, or FSG was wildly irresponsible in publishing anyway). Some reviewers have praised the depth of its sources, but many discussions make broad claims without sourcing, and then source tangential details. If Graeber and Wengrow had been pulled up short by reviewers invested in accuracy, they might have been forced to rework their argument in more responsible form. It's not as if their central hypotheses aren't interesting.
Graeber never really liked to be forced to rework arguments into more responsible form. A decade ago, the people at Crooked Timber set up a "seminar" on his book Debt: The First 5000 Years (a format they've often done where 5-10 academics read some book, write up a post about it, let the author write up a post responding to all of them, and then have a discussion in the comments) and by the end he got so prickly about being politely asked for more support for some claims that they almost wished they had blocked him from future comment threads. I still found that seminar interesting enough that I decided to get the book and read it, but by about 2/3 of the way through I couldn't bring myself to finish it (even though it was also really fascinating and interesting!)
I much appreciate the lead, Kenny. I went in turn to look at the Beggs review of "Debt," which quotes Graeber saying he intended to write, "the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor." Reading the review, it's the final phrase which was the problem, just as I think it is in the case of "Dawn."
It's hard enough to retain scholarly rigor in small scale work. I think it's wise to realize that avoiding any sacrifices in rigor isn't possible in works of this aspirational scale, and to at least try to compensate for it with an approach long on humility.
LoL. Inadequately sourced claims?! 145 out of 643 pages (22% of this book) are footnotes and references. Give me a break! So, now let's talk about dishonesty...
A lot of reviewers mentioned how extensive the note apparatus seems to be, beowulf. But midway through, my margin notes began to say things like, "*This* is where we need to see evidence." Nobody's claiming Graeber and Wengrow didn't look at a lot of books and articles.
Graeber and Wengrow use the notes for discussion, rather than embedding tangential strands in the text, which is fine, but when you do that in an academic text, to have 80+ pages of notes for a 500+ page text isn't unusual at all.
Cracking review; one sufficiently interesting and in-depth to make me think again about a book which forced me to rethink what I thought I knew in the first place. The delights of recursiveness...!
Very good professional level writing. IMO though, 9,600 words is too long for a book review. The main reason I read reviews is to see if the book is worth my time. At about 5,000 words we are talking about 20 page of double spaced text. By that point I start to wonder if I should just read the book itself.
Yeah, in grad school they used to force us to write 500-word reviews, but some of the detail was useful - I just skipped some whole paragraphs that didn't appear to be useful.
9,600 words is merely 'above average' for book reviews on ACX/SSC; there have been many longer ones. I enjoy them because of, not despite, the length, when they're written well, and I think I'm pretty typical of the readership here. If you read reviews mainly to figure out if the book is worth your time you're definitely better served elsewhere; that's not how most book reviews here are written (thank goodness).
Normally I’d agree with you on this - and I downvoted most of the longer reviews - some were just baggy, tedious and repetitive. But this one’s pretty damn good and ends with some sound speculation on why humans took so long to get round to building civilisations & stuff. Spoiler alert ~200,000 years of high school level gossip & social shaming that’s now back with a vengeance via social media 🥳
IMO it's right on the edge in terms of length. Scott really needs to impose a upper limit on the length, because a 60-page review is a qualitatively different type of artistic creation than a 4-page review. That's why I think it scandalous that last year's winner was 60 (?) pages long, because why would I read it unless I'm really into Georgism, in which case I'd tend to give the review a high rating?
If it’s not your particular niche interest, at some point you start thinking, “Hmm, ‘Heart of Darkness’ was only 38,000 words. I didn’t start to feel impatient halfway through that….” So much to read, so little time.
Maybe you're wanting a more inverted pyramid writing style, where you can quit at any point and not miss the main point. But that's in tension with the natural essay writing style, in which the entire essay builds to the main point. I've seen book reviews (even within the same publication department) of both types, some are focused on "What's this book about and was it well said?" and some are more focused on "This book sparked some interesting idea, and let me tell you what it was, and how the book sparked it." Each has its advantages, but each will disappoint someone looking for the other thing.
I bailed on this too early. The best stuff was at the end. Excellent essay. I think we might be doing it a disservice labeling it just a ‘book review’.
>Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation. In its long life as one of the foundational documents of the Western world it has been, at times, blamed for the bloody slaughter of The Terror, and, at other times, lauded as the inventor of the progressive Left.
Interesting that these "two" interpretations of Rousseau are posed as alternatives, when it was precisely the progressive Left (i.e., the Jacobins) who carried out the Terror. The purported two are in fact one.
Is it fair to portray the progressive Left as a monolith in which everyone who agreed with the basic thrust of Rousseau would also inevitably execute and support the Terror?
There is evidence that standards of living actually went down with the beginning of agriculture. People became shorter, for example. The gifts of “civilization” initially only benefited the elite. Only with industrial societies has the lot of the many been substantially bettered. I think of agrarian societies as a social trap in and of themselves- where the poor are the majority controlled by a mafia-like elite - an elite who only foster literacy and innovation etc when it helps them . So how did humanity get in that trap initially? Good question.
A person could "benefit" by never expending resources on offspring if you're measuring by how much they get to eat. But evolution has not primed us to see that as an actual benefit. Agriculture greatly expanded the population, and thus was a Darwinian "benefit".
Perhaps my response was too subtle. A substantial fraction of us are perfectly aware of Darwinian selection effects, and don't give a damn about what happens to to the frequency of our alleles in the gene pool.
If you need further clarification, consider Watts's Trunclade's poem in Watts's "Blindsight"
Which is why you need to carefully select a godparent of your children who would be willing to take them in if they were orphaned rather than assuming there'd be an abundant supply of people competing for access to them.
Surely that's only true when you live in a settled society that can forceably transfer the earnings of the young to the benefit of the old -- or at least in a tribe that through some kind of group sympathy is willing to do that voluntarily.
I mean, otherwise in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself.
And at that, I would guess if one were deliberately childless in a primitive tribe, you better have *something* else to contribute -- being a shaman or brilliant about the local animal habits -- or it seems likely they will accidentally leave you behind the next time the tribe moves for the winter.
A settled society, yes - but it suffices for there to be a way to save earnings for one's old age. Social security is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is not the only possibility. A trustworthy banking system need not do anything forcible.
Actually, according to the article TGGP linked it isn't that "in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself." -
even _with_ children:
"Grandparents continued to work hard to support their grandchildren and produced more than they ate. At almost no time in their adult lives, did adults produce less than they consumed. When people became too old and frail to work, death followed quickly. Suicide and euthanasia of the enfeebled were frequently reported."
That's a good point, but I wonder if it isn't quite as sharp a distinction as people steeped in modern Western notions might at first think. You still need the state to compel the young population to redeem the IOUs written to you by older people (i.e. your retirement savings), perhaps people now long dead. It's part of our modern heritage that transforming debts into dollars sterilizes them in some sense -- we no longer consider who contracted the debt or why.
But if the debt were framed some other way, we might not. Suppose you gave a goat to a neighbor farmer and he agreed to pay it back any time you asked. Decades go by, the neighbor farmer dies, and his property (and debts) are inherited by his great-nephew. You turn up one day, when you are old, and ask the young great-nephew for the goat. We might actually debate to what extent the great-nephew owes you the goat, notwithstanding his uncle's promise, since he (the great-nephew) wasn't party to the old man's promise.
But if you gave the goat to the neighbor and he gave you $200 on the spot, and then many years later you go to the great-nephew owner and offer him $200 for a goat (assuming the price of goats has not changed), we would consider it weird for him to refuse on the grounds that he didn't agree to give you the $200 in the first place.
When individuals are concerned, we can find strong reasons to distinguish between a direct IOU and a dollar, but we are talking throughout here really about collective debts and IOUs, so it's harder. To what extent does the younger generation owe you labor for your redeemed dollars, which represent obligations an older generation contracted in return for your labor when you were young? (I agree with you that they actually do, but I'm steeped in the same tradition. I'm trying to think like someone who isn't, someone for whom almost all social transactions are direct, not mediated by money.)
We might say, well, the younger generation inherits some responsibility for the debts incurred by the older. But then from *that* point of view public pensions start to also make similar sense. After all, that, too, is argued to be a payment of some kind of intergenerational debt (to which the young did not consent at the time, being too young or not yet born). "You took care of us as children, or at least built/maintained the world we inherited, with many good things, so we owe you support when you are old."
Did you read the link? It's not about a society that "forceably transfers the earnings of the young to benefit the old". Instead it says that in the past old people just consumed less as they get less productive.
I'm skeptical that things were that clear-cut, because if agricultural society was just strictly worse for everyone but the elites, why would it have ever taken off in the first place? Most people, even very poor peasants, were not literal slaves: They weren't kept bound to the land by force, and could theoretically leave whenever they wanted. Occasionally some of them did leave, either to live in the wilderness on their own or to join one of the many nomadic hunter-gatherer bands that still existed at the time. But most of them chose to stay, and presumably wanted to stay. In fact, exile from civilization was often threatened and used as a punishment! Why would that be the case if it was such a bad deal for them? Maybe after a certain point you could just social and cultural inertia, but that would take centuries. How would an obviously terrible system endure that long to begin with?
I think the answer here is that agriculture, stationary settlements, formalized laws, and everything else we associate with civilization provided a level of *stability* that hadn't been possible before. So yes, the average peasant had considerably less to eat than to average hunter-gatherer. He was probably less healthy overall. But he wasn't literally starving to death, and was actually far less likely to starve to death than the hunter-gatherer, because agriculture and the construction of storehouses allowed a large surplus of food to be saved for emergencies. The hunter-gatherer faced the threat of starvation whenever there was a natural disaster, but the peasant only faced the threat of starvation if things went wrong for several harvest cycles in a row, which was considerably less likely (though likely much worse on the occasions when it did occur, given that the peasant had far less flexibility in finding alternative food sources). People can live well into their 60s and 70s even with a fairly poor diet, so while the hunter-gatherer may have benefitted from a higher median nutritional intake, the peasant benefitted from a far lower rate of variability.
And that's not even getting into all the other forms of danger that the hunter-gatherer faces on a semi-regular basis: exposure to the elements, predatory beasts, fatal or incapacitating accidents, and worst of all, encounters with enemy humans. The peasant wasn't entirely protected from these dangers either, but they were noticably less likely in the relative safety of an established settlement. (One counterpoint is that the threat of disease was far worse in civilized areas due to the much higher population density, but that's outweighed by all the other ways that people in agricultural societies were safer.) Living in subpar health with a low chance of death was preferable to living in better health with a much higher chance of death, both on the individual level (again, most people *chose* to stay in agricultural societies) and on the group level (longer average lifespans = more time to have extra children = exponentially larger populations).
And speaking of children, only around half of the infants born in hunter-gatherer societies lived to adulthood. In some tribes, the child mortality rate was as high as 2 in 3! In contrast, the child mortality rate in ancient civilizations was "only" 1 in 3. This is abysmal by modern standards (the worst child mortality rate in the world today is Afghanistan's, at 1 in 10, and that's an extreme outlier - it's many times lower even in other extremely poor nations), but compared to the hunter-gatherers, it was nothing short of miraculous! So there were some very real advantages to agricultural living, and not just for the small minority of royals and nobles in charge.
A factor you seem to have discounted is the importance of geography. Precise knowledge of ancient life is dependent on location in a way that isn’t as true of more recent history. But the availability of food sources is very uneven across the landscape. And the various native cultures of pre-Colombian western N America show this. (I reference them b/c it’s the only area I have any real knowledge of, but it seems likely true elsewhere.) The Puebloan agriculturalists - builders of Chaco, Mesa Verde, etc. - managed to sustain their basic way of life in a difficult environment for many centuries, but generally avoided even more marginal land nearby. There are no known ‘Anasazi’ sites of any significance in most of the Great Basin, which is basically next door. Yet the Paiute were living there, in a very materially ‘modest’ way and continued to do so right up to the reservation era, c. 1900, when the conquest by white society was complete.
I think the argument from people who believe in the agricultural trap is that it only happens in the first place when it must, when the alternative (via geography, inclimate weather, and overpopulation) is starvation for many people. As long as people *can* fade over the horizon in small groups when they dislike the local social structure, they will, and it never takes off.
This is predicated on the observation that as long as the geography and climate (and low population density) support it, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not, as you aver early on, and as is the common assumption, dangerously unstable -- that in fact it is quite stable, and almost never involves feast-and-famine cycles. I think this is based around some modern hunter-gatherer tribes, who don't suffer from the problems one might assume they do. When food in one place is more scarce, they just move where it isn't. As long as you're not dealing with some very large scale and very fast-moving environmental fluctuation (which by definition are exceedingly rare) their mobility allows them to surf over any local weirdness (which actually *would* present a problem for a stationary agricultural society that couldn't just up stakes and move when the rainfall in this valley was 50% lower than last year).
I’m pretty sure the Paiute of the Great Basin are a close fit for demonstrating that. The nutritional yield of the land was relatively low but fairly reliable. B/c it was a harsh environment and not abundant they had no serious competition over a very wide area, and they had developed such an intimate understanding of the landscape that they could forage with reliable success. Seems like a textbook ‘hunter-gatherer society’. But I’m not as familiar w/them as I am w/some other tribes/groups.
One of the things economists know (or at least used to know) is that alternatives matter--a lot. Full time agriculturalism occurs when a wide area has been "hunted out" and "gathered out". If a peasant can easily "go back" to being a hunter-gatherer, he may well. In fact, James Scott's Against the Grain is largely about that. But at some point, there just isn't enough easily available food for the peasant who wants to flee. And at that point, he may well have lost enough of the practical knowledge of a foraging lifestyle to make it possible anyway.
Why would an area get "hunted out" and "gathered out"? My guess would be human population increase. More people are born and fewer die when times are good. Then, when times are bad, you hunt and gather more than the ecosystem can recover from. You're eating your "natural capital".
Do you honestly think slagging "the progressive left" and complaining about the author's refusal to condemn the left as "bloodily autophagic" really adds much to this discussion? We're here to talk about a book of anthropological history; obviously it's gonna involve some politics, but maybe don't start by trying to declare all leftists auto-cannibalistic lackies of Robespierre. It's just a bit uncivilized.
This is some amusingly poignant spam, given the context. Playing the gossip trap element (with references to her "neighbor", who was doing better than her), against a human desire to escape that trap (with references to being her own boss by relying on broad faceless markets for self-sufficiency)
I thought it was an intentional snarky juxtaposition of the two different attitudes towards the same Rousseau and the same Revolution.
Forgive me for commenting before reading, though I very much look forward to digesting this review - at the request of some subscribers I started blogging my way through this book but quit in disgust after a few chapters. (I did finish reading it however.) I'm someone with a fairly high tolerance for, let's say, ambitious nonfiction, but in terms of citation and responsible reference to evidence this is one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read. Just hundreds and hundreds of pages of inadequately sourced claims and a few instances of misreadings of the provided citations so egregious that it crosses the line into dishonesty.
Just a heads-up on the great user name!
Are you still planning to review the book as a whole on Substack?
ugh no probably not, I kind of moved on from it intellectually
Did you happen to write down your top ten disputations (and would you be willing to put a few of them here)?
I had a copy of this book, and I don't know how one manages to misplace something with a bright orange dust jacket and over a square foot of surface area, but I did. I was about 1/3 of the way in. So I'm cornered into sitting with the material I remember until I want to pay another 30 clams.
I was a few tens of pages past the introduction of Kandiaronk. I think G&W were getting underway with saying "you didn't prove that" at most/all of the critical junctures in the assumed timeline of the development of political theory. Footnoting that is going to be a b********** anyway... Did they end up postulating their own path, or does it continue with the "we really don't know, but there's lots of doubt to be cast"?
I read the first part of this review. An outline of a book like this is (to me) probably not the way to approach a review. One has to read it and digest it and then write about it, not alongside it. But especially if the reviewer were in a hurry - with a book like this, that might mean having started last year - writing alongside it might seem like the pragmatic choice.
I liked the bit about all the ruins of huge complexes that lacked farming. Farming is like the office, hunter-gathering is the gig economy, and the latter leaves a lot more time to do other stuff. Even thinking that they might have made that work is emotionally liberating.
I don't think Appiah shares their politics. He's a liberal cosmopolitan, while Graeber is a hardcore anarchist with a general leftist bent (though he's not really a leftist exactly either).
As far as voting is concerned, sure. But writing a book review isn't voting, and Appiah seems to me to be doing the right service as a book review writer.
Thank you for this link!
Wengrow replied https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/
Funny, but it was Appiah's review that interested me in the book. When I read it, I took it as an overall positive review but with some nits to pick with the authors about their interpretation of Enlightenment history and the interpretation of the archaeological evidence. And he ended his review on high note:
"Social prophets, including those in the anarchist tradition—from Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman to Paul Goodman and David Graeber—make the vital contribution of stretching our social and political imagination. Facing forward, we can conduct our own experiments in living. We can devise the stages we’d like to see."
What really interested me was Wengrow's response — which to me (with my undergrad background in Archaeology) seemed quite nuanced and reasonable.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/
In his response to their response, Appiah finally agrees that they did a good job of synthesizing vast amounts of data, but they ignored the counterarguments to their claims. I find that to be a fair comment, but OTOH, when creating such a vast tome, where hundreds of archaeological and historical examples were presented, would it have been productive to spend time arguing with each counterargument for each example. At the risk of falling into the trap of whaddaboutism, Ian Morris in his well-footnoted book _Why the West Rules_ doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the counterarguments to his narrative's examples.
Thanks for sharing Wengrow’s response.
I agree it wouldn’t have been productive for G&W to argue every counterexample. I really like that they found interpretations of archaeological evidence which support rotating governmental structures, decentralized systems. I also like their People’s-history style take on what the actual relationships were like between people and the rulers, where rulers existed (I think it was the Natchez society, with the Great Sun king and most of the villages well out of his reach.)
I think as long as each (or most) of G&W’s citations retains a percent possibility that it happened that way, they have created enough of a loophole in the progression-of-civilizations theory to call it into serious question and then deserve more scholarship to line up the pieces in their arguments.
Rousseau & Hobbes is tricky, the whole enlightenment is tricky, to treat quickly - I think they also didn’t mention Foucault - mentioning the big names brings out all the pros with their vested interests in received wisdom.
I’ve read enough Vine Deloria (and Momaday and others) to believe that indigenous societies existed, and can in some places continue to exist, in forms outside the European imagination of the colonial era.
If turning the dial of society back just enough until it hits right-sized agrarian utopia- if that’s not possible, if that mostly did not exist, if the polities were often less agrarian, more materially egalitarian with varying types of social structure - I’m ok with that. Looking at other possibilities of materially egalitarian social structure is important, I agree, whether we find them in history or in theories - if in history, at least somebody made it work at some point, which adds promise.
Saying “the anarchists didn’t support their arguments” is also common and an easy way to dismiss them. There’s some intersection between that being right, and the historical situation. I’d like to do a Scott and inch through DoE putting probabilities on all their assertions. It would take a very long time though.
I think the idea of utopia is a perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good issue. I’d like to see it go. Wendat society was a real place, so it would have had its unfairnesses, but people apparently weren’t dying of poverty. If leaving that balance behind was not inevitable, I see that as good. If it didn’t take bureaucracy- if administration worsened it - that’s very interesting and has a lot of implications.
Sorry, ranting.
Thanks for the reference, this is really interesting.
As “the consensus” that’s set up and knocked down - do you mean the idea of back to the land/neo-indigenous non-technological utopia?
Part of the reason I think activists were most of the intended audience for G&W is that there are still people who very much believe in that better-society, or consider it “directionally correct” (great phrase from Appiah’s review).
I think contemporary US tribal communities don’t have much use for them but in “pro-Indian” organizing in the society at large it’s harder to fend them off. I was at a gathering recently where some activists were flyering the exit driveway by going up to cars and giving them flyers about Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women. The tiny print at the bottom of the xeroxed-looking paper showed it the upcoming protest was sponsored by something-something Workers. I care about the MMIW issue, I think it’s important.
I also think “indigeneity” can be used as a badge of credibility or reliability. “Here we go getting closer to Rousseau!” say the non-tribal activists going to the MMIW protest organized by whichever left organization. Or the feeling of that.
I think Utopianism is behind some of the land acknowledgements, ie, “if we say this enough times we ourselves will return to the Better World before colonialism.” Descendants of that community have a path to take in terms of negotiating their heritage, tribal government, larger society, and that makes sense to feel and consider things about a hypothetical better world there. People saying that who are not descendants of that community are often either really caring & helpful, or they’re hoping to ride the transformation into their own utopia. I think land acknowledgements are valuable for different reasons but “This was Ohlone land, soon it will be again, here come the farm girls with flowers if you say this often enough” can be an element. So for G&W to knock it down - big name activist - is relevant. There’s a lot to unpack there in terms of real needs of indigenous communities, what it means in the modern day, what a helpful response is from an outsider to that community, etc. I recall Deloria writing about the anthropologists going to Indian communities and intrusively/destructively studying them in service of the prior iterations of debate about utopia. It can still go on.
I’ll read more of Turchin now. His book looks good.
I think at least one point that G&W make is worth noting:
Despite the old adage
"The Greeks invented all known forms of government"
(and, it is sometimes added, couldn't make any of them work...)
the _seasonal_ societies G&W document don't fall under any of the usual forms. Perhaps there are some customs we could adopt from them.
But G&W never bring up the question of whether it's possible to organize a society on anarchistic principles. Just because Graeber was a self-styled anarchist, does that make everything he wrote an anarchist polemic?
As for an "80 year old view" that was "never consensus", V. Gordon Childe was still on my reading list when I was an archeology undergrad. And the theory they taught me was all about the evolution of states from tribes from bands and how do identify these transitions in the archeological record. Of course, a lot of my profs were Marxists, so they bought into that cultural evolution crap. My undergrad experience was 40 years ago, but the fact that people like Ian Morris are still recycling this dogma makes me think it's still consensus—at least in some circles.
You should finish the review - the last bit gets beyond the book.
Ok, I will. I admire someone who reads the whole book and reviews it. The discussion of “progressivism” at the beginning was a “skip this” clue. But I’ll go back. It’s 100 degrees here, looking like a long weekend with iffy A/C, what better to do than dive into this. I think the book is incredibly valuable for raising the questions it raises.
Yes that little offhand about Rousseau made me roll my eyes almost as much as many passages in Graeber’s work do. But the review gets better.
I bought the kindle version and stayed up until 245 tracing the quotes in the review and then wrote an essay which I haven’t yet read in daylight…and then posted it to the comments. I wasn’t mean though.
You’re in philosophy, right - you probably recall the 90s when (where I was) half the acreage of campus said “the encounter with the Other” to each other on a daily basis? Which writers were structuring and driving this? I just read Freddie’s blog entries about DoE from late 2021, one of his criticisms was “how is The Indigenous Critique of the West even a thing?” and all I can do is mutter “but it was such a popular idea it was in comparative literature course descriptions.”
Yes, I'd like to know what Freddie's disputations are. But he's too lazy to read the book, so we'll probably never know.
I’m not sure the reviewer finished it. I paid for a kindle copy and am locating each of his quotes. So far the furthest in is p. 246. In an hour or so I’ll post.
Freddie said that he finished reading the book. He just stopped blogging about it.
Not Freddie - I mean this current review. I’ve made a list of all 45 quotes from the book and the furthest in is from p. 257. This doesn’t absolutely mean they didn’t read the whole thing but a few of the reviewer’s questions are answered in chapter 12,
I’ll write it up here in a bit.
I replied to beowulf888, who specifically referenced "Freddie" not having read the book. He was replying to your reply to FdB.
sorry - substack feeds me these "name replied to your comment" emails. The threads line up oddly.
My bad. I guess I missed Freddie's parenthetical comment "(I did finish reading it however)". Apologies to Freddie for mischaracterizing his statement—but no apologies for saying Freddie is overtly mischaracterizing G&W's work by dropping that "inadequately sourced" turd in his opinion. Give me some frigging specifics with links to back up your arguments, Freddie. And don't say you've documented it on your Substack site, because I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed.
LMAO, nothing sums up Freddie Deboer like "too lazy to read." Sure, buddy. (He did write some interesting comments on the first few chapters, if you'd like to know what some of the issues were.)
My updated opinion: Yes, Freddie claims to have read the book. My bad.
But I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed. Let him post his arguments here on this forum.
Freddie's substack is much better than this one tho, and the discussions there are consistently of a higher quality.
But...why? What rule says he has to do this? Why do you feel entitled to it? And why not ask politely?
Well, this is a forum for soi-disant rationalists and people interested in rationalism. Maybe I'm be I'm being overly idealistic that we can engage in rational discourse about rationalism and adjacent topics, but a large percentage of the discourse on these threads seems to be non-rational, ill-informed, or informed by personal prejudices, or by ideological obsessions and ego.
Freddie called The Dawn of Everything "one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read." By doing that he dropped a rhetorical cherry bomb into the middle what up until then had been a fairly sensible discussion (albeit with a few ideological digressions). On top of that he smeared the book as being "indequately sourced" — which, if one actually has read this book, is clearly just bullshit.
I'm not expecting an answer from him because I don't think he's really capable of mounting a rational defense for his positions. I must admit I find people who behave like Freddie in public forums to be tiresome. I probably shouldn't have responded to him in the first place (i.e. fed the troll), but even if you don't like Graeber's politics, or G&W's thesis, there's still an immense amount useful information in The Dawn of Everything—and if you're a seriously interested in the questions of why civilizations arose, you'll be following up on the cited works for years to come.
It’s likely many of the same things that most other reviewers have found frustrating. Basically the constant accusations of incomplete and slipshod scholarship for everyone else combined with incomplete and slipshod scholarship. Graeber tends to be at his best when putting forward an intriguing hypothesis that may actually be consistent with the information we have and that challenges orthodoxy in some interesting way that supports an anarchist political agenda, and at his worst when claiming that therefore this alternative hypothesis is definitely true and that the orthodoxy is the result of a political agenda.
This is super concerning to me, since I really liked Debt and thought DoE was very interesting. I'm not an academic, I read it via Audiobook and I didn't check the citations.
I know I'm asking a lot for a forum reply, but how bad are we talking about here? Is this a "author's point is totally shut down by their own citations" situation? Or more a case that they are stretching thin evidence too far.
Wengrow replied https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/
that is debating, the book debates Rousseau, Dunbar, Harari plus a bunch of anthropoogists and archeologists, I would not expect general acceptance, it visit a couple of dozen of archeological and historical sites with novel questions, and has 150 pages of notes BTW, do not discount this book because DeLong and Appiah, check the end of Appiah's reply to Wengrow "I hope I made plain, there’s much more to the book than that. Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable. Readers who imagine foragers on the Sahlinesque model of the San will encounter foraging societies with aristocrats and slavery, while the book’s account of the Poverty Point earthworks is a riveting study of collective action. We get an intriguing proposal about the nature of the state. And this is just to begin a long list of fascinations. That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities” emerges vibrantly from these pages."
The bigger problem is simply not citing statements of fact that seem very much in need of citation, but I found three or four cases of the authors misrepresenting what a given citation does say, and that was only in two chapters worth of really looking for that kind of thing.
This is the issue with Graeber, I automatically discount anything he writes after encountering the serious flaws in Debt.
Brad DeLong has a good thread covering some of the issues: https://twitter.com/delong/status/1455173184127324161
As much as I enjoy reading DeLong, he came off as a guy with an ax to grind. Academic cat fights are never pleasant to witness.
Very common for Graeber.
Everything that David Graeber has ever written is equally "problematic" in these sorts of ways.
Debt: The First 5000 Years is probably the book I have the most ambivalent reaction to of any I have ever tried to read - it both poses a bunch of fascinating ideas that I keep thinking about, and also disgusted me so much with how fast and loose it plays with the facts that I couldn't finish it. If he just said, "economists make up a lot of just-so stories, so let me make up another one and you can decide whether it's got some value and interest", it would have been an amazing book. But the fact that it keeps being "economists are the worst people in the world because they just make up just-so stories and claim they are incontrovertible fact, while here I've discovered the one true fact about the history of money" just disgusted me.
I just read his book on Bullshit Jobs, because it ties in to a paper I'm writing on the concept of bullshit generally, and it kept being frustrating how much weight he wants to put on a single survey to say, "look, the majority of work is bullshit, because 37% of workers admit it, and 37% of the rest are only working to support their bullshit!", and then how credulously he took everything his Twitter followers said to him about what their jobs were like.
The big thing is the idea that debt can arise before money, and can make the need for a unit of measurement natural even if no one has currency. The idea that debt can be prior to money and that money can be prior to barter reverses a lot of naive ideas I had.
The first chapter about the history of credit in the early fertile crescent civilizations and how it worked without coinage is amazing. Yes, when Graeber first says "Debt" he means "Credit". But then he starts using "Debt" in other contribed ways that sound confusing. The whole section on eastern religious views on "Debt" is like that and kind of ruins the great start of the book IMHO.
Alex Danco has a decent summary: https://alexdanco.com/2020/05/15/debt-the-first-5000-years/
Danco also explains better than Kenny Easwaran below - no offense to Kenny, his was a short response - Graeber's argument about growth of bullion as a currency stemming from conquest. In Debt's logic, bullion is an extractive tool, because you can demand bullion from conquered peoples, but you cannot demand credit in the same way, it is much more bound into networks of reciprocity.
If you have access to academic journals, this article gave the most charitable possible complete debunking of every single empirical claim Graeber makes in the book: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067
I appreciated that Gananath Obeyesekere admitted to Marshall Sahlins' charge of engaging in “historical fiction, makeshift ethnography”:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/05/12/the-apotheosis-of-captain-cook-vs-how-natives-think/
Though I still prefer when people try to act against their biases and get things right:
https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/science-is-political?s=r
I also saw elsewhere that the "Bullshit Jobs" argument wasn't substantiated empirically by other researchers (I think Dur & Lent, 2019, is the main paper, but you may know of others). I doubt Graeber would have been surprised to find that out, given that the idea of having a bullshit job feels not only subjective, but also possible to manipulate experimentally relatively easily. To my mind, interpretations of words like 'socially useful' or 'bullshit' are so context laden as to make surveying people about this very challenging. You are right to say that Graeber is overexcited by a single survey and his qualitative data, but I think he is channelling a more Marxist theory of work and identity that isn't necessarily shared by the random people being surveyed.
For instance, if you read other authors from a similar space as Graeber on work, like Peter Fleming, part of the logic inherent in their conception of neoliberalism is that it ties jobs into identities. Fleming calls this the 'I, Job' function, but it's pretty evident that the link between jobs and identities doesn't exist in the same way for them (they're maybe getting this from the little Marx writes about the future after Communism has been 'achieved', wherein people can be painters in the morning and poets in the afternoon etc.).
If someone's job is a large part of their identity, as it will invariably be in a world where 40hrs+ a week are spent at work, then that will change their perception on whether their work is socially useful. IIRC, Graeber says most jobs in PR are bullshit, and it seems unlikely that most people in PR would agree with him. I think it's very hard to extricate identity from these sorts empirical data collection processes.
I was surprised that the numbers in Dur & Lent were so high if anything: "We find that approximately 8 percent of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17 percent are doubtful about the usefulness of their job."
Perhaps you've read more in this space that could persuade me otherwise, but I'm not fully convinced by the empiricism applied to Bullshit Jobs. I'd love to read your paper about bullshit when you're finished with it, that sounds fascinating!
I’ll have to check out the Dur and Lent piece! The one I link in the other branch of this thread (Soffia, Wood and Burchell, 2021) is good, and sympathetic to Graeber, but reject all his empirical claims.
I have a draft I’m showing people now. If you email me (last name at gmail) I can send it.
Samuel Bowles came up with a category he calls "guard labor" which he regards as socially wasteful:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/lowtrust_societ_1.html
To me, the biggest problem with their scholarship is that DoE is always looking at quantitative questions using nothing but qualitative data. For instance, they wanted to "prove" that the hunter-gatherer / band / tribe / chiefdom is "false". But of course there were many groups that fit comfortably into that mold. So the only meaningful kind of claim would be a quantitative one, like "/Most/ early cultures didn't fit that progressive scheme." But they never make such claims, and never give us quantities. In the case of the civilization-pipeline hypothesis, they list exceptions, but don't tell us what fraction of the groups they looked at were exceptions. 10%? 60%?
Brad DeLong very publicly noticed that everything in Debt that he was something of an expert on (modern economic history) was either slapdash or wrong. This lead to quite the internet war of words.
Given how common that is for people to say about his work on their own areas of expertise, there's a decent chance in my mind that's how he was with everything.
I completely agree about distorted use of sources, and I checked cases over many chapters. It's too bad the book didn't go through an academic press review (I'm sure it had some sort of peer review, but either it was inadequate, or FSG was wildly irresponsible in publishing anyway). Some reviewers have praised the depth of its sources, but many discussions make broad claims without sourcing, and then source tangential details. If Graeber and Wengrow had been pulled up short by reviewers invested in accuracy, they might have been forced to rework their argument in more responsible form. It's not as if their central hypotheses aren't interesting.
Graeber never really liked to be forced to rework arguments into more responsible form. A decade ago, the people at Crooked Timber set up a "seminar" on his book Debt: The First 5000 Years (a format they've often done where 5-10 academics read some book, write up a post about it, let the author write up a post responding to all of them, and then have a discussion in the comments) and by the end he got so prickly about being politely asked for more support for some claims that they almost wished they had blocked him from future comment threads. I still found that seminar interesting enough that I decided to get the book and read it, but by about 2/3 of the way through I couldn't bring myself to finish it (even though it was also really fascinating and interesting!)
https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/
I much appreciate the lead, Kenny. I went in turn to look at the Beggs review of "Debt," which quotes Graeber saying he intended to write, "the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor." Reading the review, it's the final phrase which was the problem, just as I think it is in the case of "Dawn."
It's hard enough to retain scholarly rigor in small scale work. I think it's wise to realize that avoiding any sacrifices in rigor isn't possible in works of this aspirational scale, and to at least try to compensate for it with an approach long on humility.
Yes. Graeber would be so much more tolerable if he had some humility.
Graeber's "Debt" was also notorious among academics for its sloppiness.
LoL. Inadequately sourced claims?! 145 out of 643 pages (22% of this book) are footnotes and references. Give me a break! So, now let's talk about dishonesty...
Yeah, and if you pick a few citations at random and actually look them up, apparently you will be very disappointed by what you find.
A lot of reviewers mentioned how extensive the note apparatus seems to be, beowulf. But midway through, my margin notes began to say things like, "*This* is where we need to see evidence." Nobody's claiming Graeber and Wengrow didn't look at a lot of books and articles.
Graeber and Wengrow use the notes for discussion, rather than embedding tangential strands in the text, which is fine, but when you do that in an academic text, to have 80+ pages of notes for a 500+ page text isn't unusual at all.
MOD DECISION: Minor warning (25% of a ban)
Cracking review; one sufficiently interesting and in-depth to make me think again about a book which forced me to rethink what I thought I knew in the first place. The delights of recursiveness...!
I thought-so too.
Very good professional level writing. IMO though, 9,600 words is too long for a book review. The main reason I read reviews is to see if the book is worth my time. At about 5,000 words we are talking about 20 page of double spaced text. By that point I start to wonder if I should just read the book itself.
Yeah, in grad school they used to force us to write 500-word reviews, but some of the detail was useful - I just skipped some whole paragraphs that didn't appear to be useful.
9,600 words is merely 'above average' for book reviews on ACX/SSC; there have been many longer ones. I enjoy them because of, not despite, the length, when they're written well, and I think I'm pretty typical of the readership here. If you read reviews mainly to figure out if the book is worth your time you're definitely better served elsewhere; that's not how most book reviews here are written (thank goodness).
Oh yes we love long reviews, and on Wednesdays we wear pink 👩🎤
The impatient guys wear chartreuse on Wednesdays. :)
Agreed. Maybe if the author began with a TL:DR of 500 words then that might help organize the rest of the post.
Yeah, from the comments I may have given up on it before the best part, wondering where is this going. I’ll go back and finish.
Copy that
Someone should start a substack where they review the contests reviews
Normally I’d agree with you on this - and I downvoted most of the longer reviews - some were just baggy, tedious and repetitive. But this one’s pretty damn good and ends with some sound speculation on why humans took so long to get round to building civilisations & stuff. Spoiler alert ~200,000 years of high school level gossip & social shaming that’s now back with a vengeance via social media 🥳
I'm also on the record thinking many of the reviews submitted to the contest were too long, but this one felt just right to me as well.
IMO it's right on the edge in terms of length. Scott really needs to impose a upper limit on the length, because a 60-page review is a qualitatively different type of artistic creation than a 4-page review. That's why I think it scandalous that last year's winner was 60 (?) pages long, because why would I read it unless I'm really into Georgism, in which case I'd tend to give the review a high rating?
If it’s not your particular niche interest, at some point you start thinking, “Hmm, ‘Heart of Darkness’ was only 38,000 words. I didn’t start to feel impatient halfway through that….” So much to read, so little time.
Maybe you're wanting a more inverted pyramid writing style, where you can quit at any point and not miss the main point. But that's in tension with the natural essay writing style, in which the entire essay builds to the main point. I've seen book reviews (even within the same publication department) of both types, some are focused on "What's this book about and was it well said?" and some are more focused on "This book sparked some interesting idea, and let me tell you what it was, and how the book sparked it." Each has its advantages, but each will disappoint someone looking for the other thing.
I bailed on this too early. The best stuff was at the end. Excellent essay. I think we might be doing it a disservice labeling it just a ‘book review’.
I loved it all the way through, and I will not read the book anymore. I feel this was enough.
>Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation. In its long life as one of the foundational documents of the Western world it has been, at times, blamed for the bloody slaughter of The Terror, and, at other times, lauded as the inventor of the progressive Left.
Interesting that these "two" interpretations of Rousseau are posed as alternatives, when it was precisely the progressive Left (i.e., the Jacobins) who carried out the Terror. The purported two are in fact one.
s/ But one has positive sounding words and the other has negative sounding words - how could they be the same?!?! /s
Is it fair to portray the progressive Left as a monolith in which everyone who agreed with the basic thrust of Rousseau would also inevitably execute and support the Terror?
I would not say “everyone” or “inevitably.” I would say “a majority” and “with high frequency.”
There is evidence that standards of living actually went down with the beginning of agriculture. People became shorter, for example. The gifts of “civilization” initially only benefited the elite. Only with industrial societies has the lot of the many been substantially bettered. I think of agrarian societies as a social trap in and of themselves- where the poor are the majority controlled by a mafia-like elite - an elite who only foster literacy and innovation etc when it helps them . So how did humanity get in that trap initially? Good question.
A person could "benefit" by never expending resources on offspring if you're measuring by how much they get to eat. But evolution has not primed us to see that as an actual benefit. Agriculture greatly expanded the population, and thus was a Darwinian "benefit".
"A person could "benefit" by never expending resources on offspring"
As a childfree person myself, Yup! ( Though, for me, the benefit is time, not food. )
Way to totally miss the point if his comment
Perhaps my response was too subtle. A substantial fraction of us are perfectly aware of Darwinian selection effects, and don't give a damn about what happens to to the frequency of our alleles in the gene pool.
If you need further clarification, consider Watts's Trunclade's poem in Watts's "Blindsight"
“My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight."
Is that sufficiently clear?
My offspring help hunt and forage, raise my reputation in the tribe and protect our village from gangs of Hobbesian savages who don’t read ACX reviews
I know you're joking, but having kids is a net cost which is merely selected by evolution:
http://www.econlib.org/was-having-kids-ever-a-paying-venture/
Which is why you need to carefully select a godparent of your children who would be willing to take them in if they were orphaned rather than assuming there'd be an abundant supply of people competing for access to them.
Surely that's only true when you live in a settled society that can forceably transfer the earnings of the young to the benefit of the old -- or at least in a tribe that through some kind of group sympathy is willing to do that voluntarily.
I mean, otherwise in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself.
And at that, I would guess if one were deliberately childless in a primitive tribe, you better have *something* else to contribute -- being a shaman or brilliant about the local animal habits -- or it seems likely they will accidentally leave you behind the next time the tribe moves for the winter.
A settled society, yes - but it suffices for there to be a way to save earnings for one's old age. Social security is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is not the only possibility. A trustworthy banking system need not do anything forcible.
Actually, according to the article TGGP linked it isn't that "in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself." -
even _with_ children:
"Grandparents continued to work hard to support their grandchildren and produced more than they ate. At almost no time in their adult lives, did adults produce less than they consumed. When people became too old and frail to work, death followed quickly. Suicide and euthanasia of the enfeebled were frequently reported."
That's a good point, but I wonder if it isn't quite as sharp a distinction as people steeped in modern Western notions might at first think. You still need the state to compel the young population to redeem the IOUs written to you by older people (i.e. your retirement savings), perhaps people now long dead. It's part of our modern heritage that transforming debts into dollars sterilizes them in some sense -- we no longer consider who contracted the debt or why.
But if the debt were framed some other way, we might not. Suppose you gave a goat to a neighbor farmer and he agreed to pay it back any time you asked. Decades go by, the neighbor farmer dies, and his property (and debts) are inherited by his great-nephew. You turn up one day, when you are old, and ask the young great-nephew for the goat. We might actually debate to what extent the great-nephew owes you the goat, notwithstanding his uncle's promise, since he (the great-nephew) wasn't party to the old man's promise.
But if you gave the goat to the neighbor and he gave you $200 on the spot, and then many years later you go to the great-nephew owner and offer him $200 for a goat (assuming the price of goats has not changed), we would consider it weird for him to refuse on the grounds that he didn't agree to give you the $200 in the first place.
When individuals are concerned, we can find strong reasons to distinguish between a direct IOU and a dollar, but we are talking throughout here really about collective debts and IOUs, so it's harder. To what extent does the younger generation owe you labor for your redeemed dollars, which represent obligations an older generation contracted in return for your labor when you were young? (I agree with you that they actually do, but I'm steeped in the same tradition. I'm trying to think like someone who isn't, someone for whom almost all social transactions are direct, not mediated by money.)
We might say, well, the younger generation inherits some responsibility for the debts incurred by the older. But then from *that* point of view public pensions start to also make similar sense. After all, that, too, is argued to be a payment of some kind of intergenerational debt (to which the young did not consent at the time, being too young or not yet born). "You took care of us as children, or at least built/maintained the world we inherited, with many good things, so we owe you support when you are old."
Did you read the link? It's not about a society that "forceably transfers the earnings of the young to benefit the old". Instead it says that in the past old people just consumed less as they get less productive.
I'm skeptical that things were that clear-cut, because if agricultural society was just strictly worse for everyone but the elites, why would it have ever taken off in the first place? Most people, even very poor peasants, were not literal slaves: They weren't kept bound to the land by force, and could theoretically leave whenever they wanted. Occasionally some of them did leave, either to live in the wilderness on their own or to join one of the many nomadic hunter-gatherer bands that still existed at the time. But most of them chose to stay, and presumably wanted to stay. In fact, exile from civilization was often threatened and used as a punishment! Why would that be the case if it was such a bad deal for them? Maybe after a certain point you could just social and cultural inertia, but that would take centuries. How would an obviously terrible system endure that long to begin with?
I think the answer here is that agriculture, stationary settlements, formalized laws, and everything else we associate with civilization provided a level of *stability* that hadn't been possible before. So yes, the average peasant had considerably less to eat than to average hunter-gatherer. He was probably less healthy overall. But he wasn't literally starving to death, and was actually far less likely to starve to death than the hunter-gatherer, because agriculture and the construction of storehouses allowed a large surplus of food to be saved for emergencies. The hunter-gatherer faced the threat of starvation whenever there was a natural disaster, but the peasant only faced the threat of starvation if things went wrong for several harvest cycles in a row, which was considerably less likely (though likely much worse on the occasions when it did occur, given that the peasant had far less flexibility in finding alternative food sources). People can live well into their 60s and 70s even with a fairly poor diet, so while the hunter-gatherer may have benefitted from a higher median nutritional intake, the peasant benefitted from a far lower rate of variability.
And that's not even getting into all the other forms of danger that the hunter-gatherer faces on a semi-regular basis: exposure to the elements, predatory beasts, fatal or incapacitating accidents, and worst of all, encounters with enemy humans. The peasant wasn't entirely protected from these dangers either, but they were noticably less likely in the relative safety of an established settlement. (One counterpoint is that the threat of disease was far worse in civilized areas due to the much higher population density, but that's outweighed by all the other ways that people in agricultural societies were safer.) Living in subpar health with a low chance of death was preferable to living in better health with a much higher chance of death, both on the individual level (again, most people *chose* to stay in agricultural societies) and on the group level (longer average lifespans = more time to have extra children = exponentially larger populations).
And speaking of children, only around half of the infants born in hunter-gatherer societies lived to adulthood. In some tribes, the child mortality rate was as high as 2 in 3! In contrast, the child mortality rate in ancient civilizations was "only" 1 in 3. This is abysmal by modern standards (the worst child mortality rate in the world today is Afghanistan's, at 1 in 10, and that's an extreme outlier - it's many times lower even in other extremely poor nations), but compared to the hunter-gatherers, it was nothing short of miraculous! So there were some very real advantages to agricultural living, and not just for the small minority of royals and nobles in charge.
A factor you seem to have discounted is the importance of geography. Precise knowledge of ancient life is dependent on location in a way that isn’t as true of more recent history. But the availability of food sources is very uneven across the landscape. And the various native cultures of pre-Colombian western N America show this. (I reference them b/c it’s the only area I have any real knowledge of, but it seems likely true elsewhere.) The Puebloan agriculturalists - builders of Chaco, Mesa Verde, etc. - managed to sustain their basic way of life in a difficult environment for many centuries, but generally avoided even more marginal land nearby. There are no known ‘Anasazi’ sites of any significance in most of the Great Basin, which is basically next door. Yet the Paiute were living there, in a very materially ‘modest’ way and continued to do so right up to the reservation era, c. 1900, when the conquest by white society was complete.
I think the argument from people who believe in the agricultural trap is that it only happens in the first place when it must, when the alternative (via geography, inclimate weather, and overpopulation) is starvation for many people. As long as people *can* fade over the horizon in small groups when they dislike the local social structure, they will, and it never takes off.
This is predicated on the observation that as long as the geography and climate (and low population density) support it, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not, as you aver early on, and as is the common assumption, dangerously unstable -- that in fact it is quite stable, and almost never involves feast-and-famine cycles. I think this is based around some modern hunter-gatherer tribes, who don't suffer from the problems one might assume they do. When food in one place is more scarce, they just move where it isn't. As long as you're not dealing with some very large scale and very fast-moving environmental fluctuation (which by definition are exceedingly rare) their mobility allows them to surf over any local weirdness (which actually *would* present a problem for a stationary agricultural society that couldn't just up stakes and move when the rainfall in this valley was 50% lower than last year).
I’m pretty sure the Paiute of the Great Basin are a close fit for demonstrating that. The nutritional yield of the land was relatively low but fairly reliable. B/c it was a harsh environment and not abundant they had no serious competition over a very wide area, and they had developed such an intimate understanding of the landscape that they could forage with reliable success. Seems like a textbook ‘hunter-gatherer society’. But I’m not as familiar w/them as I am w/some other tribes/groups.
I think (definitely not an expert) this is basically the story for much of pre-European Australia
One of the things economists know (or at least used to know) is that alternatives matter--a lot. Full time agriculturalism occurs when a wide area has been "hunted out" and "gathered out". If a peasant can easily "go back" to being a hunter-gatherer, he may well. In fact, James Scott's Against the Grain is largely about that. But at some point, there just isn't enough easily available food for the peasant who wants to flee. And at that point, he may well have lost enough of the practical knowledge of a foraging lifestyle to make it possible anyway.
Why would an area get "hunted out" and "gathered out"? My guess would be human population increase. More people are born and fewer die when times are good. Then, when times are bad, you hunt and gather more than the ecosystem can recover from. You're eating your "natural capital".