A treatise on money

What Hacker News says

1. billfruitMar 2022
   What about Keynes, "Treatise on Money"?.
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2. notahackerNov 2021
   DeLong was definitely trolling Graeber, but Graeber brought it on himself with overreaction to reviews which brought up the error. (A reviewer opened an article by saying it was an impressive book he was considering setting as a text for his students and a few paragraphs of summary of points Graeber made which are good, before highlighting a mistake and another argument he considered weak. Graeber wrote a screed about how the reviewer was "part of a strategy of deligitimization... without even being aware he was doing so" and insisted the Apple quote was the only error in his book and it was actually the editors' fault...)

   Debt is a thought-provoking book, but it's a book with no shortage of sloppy errors and dubious ancillary claims mostly incidental to its actual arguments. One DeLong probably should have picked up when he was compiling his lists is referring to Keynes' Treatise on Money his "most famous work", which is a bit like calling Wings Paul McCartney's most famous band.

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3. notahackerSep 2020
   To be fair to the late Graeber, DeLong was intentionally provoking him from the start. To be fair to DeLong, he was doing it because Graeber had dramatically overreacted to relatively mild critical takes on his work on the Crooked Timber economics blog whose contributors thought his book intellectually stimulating enough to hold a multi-author 'seminar' on it - accusing them of being part of a 'strategy of delegitimization'. Which just goes to show that academic debate can easily head in the same direction as arguments on the rest of the internet.

   As for the actual Debt: The First 5000 Years book, it's engaging, thought-provoking, less opinionated than I was expecting and right about a lot of big things. But his critics aren't wrong that it's also wrong about a lot more small details than the founding of Apple Computer (one I'm surprised none of the academic economists scrutinising his book picked up on: he describes Treatise on Money as Keynes 'most famous work' which is akin to calling Wings Paul McCartney's most famous band. That's particularly surprising in the middle of a passage about Keynes' work which is actually well-informed). Still think it's worth reading for people vaguely interested in the subject matter though.

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4. notahackerJun 2017
   The details are notoriously weak[1] and it doesn't entirely shy away from imposing Graeber's view that debt is always and everywhere a bad thing, but the actual core argument that money tended to arise as a means of recording debt settlements rather than a veil over barter is a reasonably well supported one.

   [1]There are long lists of mostly-trivial stuff various bloggers have pointed out Graeber got obviously wrong, which afaik don't include the apparent Tyndale translation error you've spotted or the claim that Keynes' Treatise on Money was his most famous work that stuck out like a sore thumb to me...

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