David Graeber Spins some Threads out of His Own Gizzard

I'm enjoying David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years.  Honest I am,  no matter what they tell you.  It is energetic and fluent: I bet he is a slashing debater.  And he's telling me all kinds of stuff I didn't know about what "anthropologists know" about debt.  I use quotations because in my own right I haven't the slightest notion what "anthropologists know" and he might just be a guy with a briefcase 20 miles from home.  No matter--I especially like the stuff about the provenance of our money system.  He notes that all economists say the sequence was money-barter, with debt working its way in sideways, while all anthropologists know it was debt-money-barter.  I'd say he's right enough about economist; whether he is right about anthropologists is an issue on which I have to be agnostic but it certainly makes a good story.

But when you come to a paragraph like this, you really have to reach for the smelling salts:

 Since colonial days, Americans have been the population least sympathetic to debtors. In a way this is odd, since America was settled largely by absconding debtors, but it’s a country where the idea that morality is a matter of paying one’s debts runs deeper than almost any other. In colonial days, an insolvent debtor’s ear was often nailed to a post. The United States was one of the last countries in the world to adopt a law of bankruptcy: despite the fact that in 1787, the Constitution specifically charged the new government with creating one, all attempts were rejected on “moral grounds” until 1898.  

--Graeber, David (2011-07-12). Debt: The First 5,000 Years (p. 16).

 Melville House. Kindle Edition. 

Oh, where to begin. In   the first, the Constitution never "specifically charged" anyone to make bankruptcy law; all it did was provide that no one but Congress had the power.  Second, it is not true that "all attempts were rejected" until 1898; we had Federal bankruptcy laws from 1801 to 1803; from 1841 to 1843 and again from 1867 to 1878.   Meanwhile virtually every state abolished debtors' prisons in the early 19th Century.  Many states adopted "stay laws" to fend off collection (in the teeth of the Constitutional prohibition against state bankruptcy).  Almost every new state admitted in the mid-19th Century adopted a "homestead law" to protect some or all of the debtor's real estate.   Moreover the late 19th Century was also the golden age of the "railroad receivership" which, while it did not bear the B-name, certainly seemed to have functioned as a device to thwart the efforts of many creditors to vindicate their claims.  The 19th Century also saw the rise of the limited liability company which  from the beginning functioned like a bankruptcy discharge insofar as it capped the liability of the investor .   Just in general, as  David Moss documents, "Americans had long displayed a penchant for forgiving or otherwise relieving distressed debtors..." Indeed it appears that the very fertility and ingenuity of 18th-Century states in devising debtor-protection policies is the reason why the drafters assigned the bankruptcy power to the Constitution in the first place.

A deeper problem is that Graeber doesn't seem to grasp what bankruptcy law is about.  He's really discussing the bankruptcy discharge, whereby a debtor may be excused from liability on his debts. But bankruptcy has a history as a collection device--often punitive--that long precedes its function of an organ of debtor relief (last time I checked, the French still punished banqueroute as a crime, and the Italians used banca rotta as a means to collect debts).   In a footnote, Graeber says that "England already had a national bankruptcy law in 1571." I think most bankruptcy scholars would agree that England did not have anything like the modern discharge until 1705.  Bankruptcy was typically "involuntary"--adverse to the debtor--and why not?  One wouldn't think of volunteering for bankruptcy in those days anymore than one would volunteer for a root canal.  If Graeber understand this, he isn't letting on.

Beyond that, it is difficult to evaluate the "argument," because it is difficult to figure out exactly what he is saying. Examples:  "Least sympathetic to debtors..."  "Morality is a matter of paying one's debts..."  How the hell does he know that--in the teeth, for example, of the examples set forth above?  Is he aware that through much of the 20th Century we were the virtually the only country in the world to have a self-executing off-the-rack bankruptcy discharge available to virtually any debtor for the price of a failing fee (we've tightened the screws a bit lately--and other countries have loosened theirs--but the situation is not a lot different)?  Still more: "Settled largely by absconding debtors..."  Is he thinking of the "what-was-your-name-in-the-stats" fandango, whereby settlers were said to move to new states, fleeing obligations in the old?   Does he know whether this really happened, or whether it subsists only as a folk song?   Anyway, if it did happen, isn't it evidence that the United States was in fact compassionate to debtors, not the other way around?    As to nailing ears to the wall, I'd love to know what kind of evidence he has for that.  It's a favorite bit of bankruptcy folklore; I suspect it always existed far more in legend than in fact.

Starting from a record like this, you come up with two choices: don't know, or don't care.  I vote for "don't care," and for one very specific reason.  That is: Graeber after all this free-floating hubba hubba offers up a footnote in which he actually mentions the 1867-78 bankruptcy act ("briefly," he says), and  the 1801 act ("foundered").  This would seem flatly to contradict his statement that " all attempts were rejected" until 1898.  Apparently these troublesome details would have destroyed the linearity of the presentation.  So the book remains, as I say, a highly entertaining book and perhaps even instructive, but for the moment I think I'll file it under "fiction."

Graeber's Debt

I've just now put down (“finished” might be a bit strong) David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 Years . I find myself remembering what Harold Demsetz used to (maybe still does) say of John Kenneth Galbraith: he said "I can't find a testable hypothesis."  Same thing here. This is a highly entertaining read, brimming with ideas—or at least anecdotes that suggest ideas. It's easy enough to get a general notion of what he is up to but you'll play the very devil trying to figure out exactly what it is he is trying to say.

Graeber does have one worthwhile core point that he believes underlies much what he says. In a nutshell, we were born with a sense of obligation; debt emerges from the primordial ooze. All our sense what we owe to others begins there; it may ramify and permutate in a thousand ways but we all emerge from under the same. This is a fascinating and provocative idea, surely wrong in particular but no matter, still worth trying to clarify and understand.

A second fundamental idea is trickier. That is: Graeber seems to be trying to distinguish an older, more humane (?) form of obligation from a harder, more impersonal variety that we might call, for lack of a better name “economic.” This too is an interesting and provocative idea though at this point it is hardly a new one. Indeed, Graeber here seems to be flirting with a modern anthropology that is perhaps as old as Hesiod or Rousseau, if not Marx, saying nothing of so much of 19th and 20th Century anthropology—postulating a “primitive” past which can clarify our understanding and also provide a stage for criticism of the present.

The fact that this sort of thing has been tried before without success is no reason to try it again, but here is where Graeber gets maddeningly slippery. He makes much turn, for example on occasion of creation of coinage—an event that seems to occur simultaneously in various places around the world at, give or take, around 600 BC. Here we encounter, it seems, a new device for imposing state power: impose coins, use coins to collect taxes, uses taxes to build military might, all at the expense—the impoverishment—of “the poor,” particularly the peasants.

This is surely a plausible account of some events in some places at some times but it is far from clear how it fits into the larger story. For example, is he saying that state power creates coinage, or that coinage creates state power? If the former, of course we would like to know what does create state power. If the latter, it might be useful to spell out just how the new “coining empires”differ from other occurrences of human oppression—going back to, say, the rise of an agricultural surplus around, perhaps, 3000 BC. The very fact of an agricultural surplus yields priests, clerks, warriors and slaves, not so? Are we to believe that there is something about these earlier forms that are necessarily more humane than we get in the “coinage empires?”

I'd grant that Graeber's story seems most plausible—and he himself seems most energized—when he is talking about polities that impose themselves on weaker and less sophisticated neighbors—what he seems to have observed in brutally clear form in Madagascar under the French. But this isn''' the only form of debtor-commerce. Yet curiously, Graeber says little or nothing about “ordinary” or “every day” commerce. Indeed at one point he tries to show how a particular kind of exchange-counter is used not in the m market-place, but precisely for non-market transactions—marriage alliances, for example, or compensation for injury. He dismisses the market place, with seeming irony, as women's work. Yes, well, fine, but what is going on the market place? What is this woman's work, and how has it been carried out for all these thousands of years? It's an odd exclusion for a book with so vast a claim to coverage. Yet it's the kind of thing you come to expect from this stimulating, suggestive, yet ultimately exasperating, book.

And by the way, no, I do not repent of what I said the other day.

Best Books of the Year

It's time to name the best books of the year so naturally, serious people are asking, what will Buce name as the best books of the year?

Happy to oblige, at least with a shortlist of five.  But first, some groundwork.  One, I can kick out a lot of  (seemingly) not-very-good books because I just didn't finish them.  I'm sure I cost myself something that way, but I've finally  come to terms with the fact that it's not a moral judgment on me if I simply cast the book aside.  I do, however, stick to some books that drive me nuts, where the driving-me-nuts factor is aggravated by the intuition that they nonetheless seem to have something to offer.  See, e.g., this one.  I'm also setting aside narrative accounts of the financial crisis.  I think I've read about 40 of those so far since aught-eight and I'm not at all sure it is anything to be proud of.   At this point, they are too easy: they overlap and they tend to blur.  I suspect I have already forgotten the particular identities of several.  I'm also setting aside  David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 years, because I still can't make up my mind whether it is a really original piece of work or an overrated con job--maybe in ten years it will be easier to judge (but not for me, heh).  More perversely, I'm setting aside Daniel  Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, as just too popular: among other things, it is the only book read this year by both Mr. and Mrs. Buce.  And I guess Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise:  it's too soon (I read it just a couple of weeks ago), and much as I liked it, still it might turn out to be a flash in the pan.

With some hesitancy, then, I open the envelope and find that the first nominee is Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites.  This too is a choice I might regret once the hype wears off but it does seem to be one of the rare left-critique books of contemporary society that really seems to have something new to say, something eyond the usual talking points.  Second, Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower:  a wonderful biography by almost any measure, with a personal resonance for me because it parallels so much of my own life, but also fascinating study in the nature--the mystery--of leadership--what works and what doesn't, and how do you know?   Third, I'll have to make room for The Emperor of All Maladies  Siddartha Mukherjee's great history of cancer.  It sprawls, and a fair amount of it is a bit beyond me but it is at least a tour de force and probably bears intrinsic merit to match.  The experience was matched, I think, by the fact that at more or less the same time I was listening to Frank Snowden's marvellous lecture course on epidemics, from Yale.  That's another one, FWIW, on which Mr. and Mrs. Buce agree: we'd both rank it as the best audio/video learning we did all year.  

Number four is a tougher sell: Kent Flannery and  Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality.  I've inflicted it on at least two friends who seem to wonder why the hell I bothered.  I can take their point: it is sprawling; it is diffuse, and the authors are maddeningly unwilling to draw conclusions or even to offer summaries.  I suspect their response would be: look, what we have shown is that the world is a complicated place and evolves in mysterious ways.  We've shown it to you in all its richness and diversity and we don't apologie for not trying to trick it up with facile soundbytes.

Which leaves room for one more, and I'm going to go with  The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's unmatchable history of Bell Labs.  Like the Ike biography, it is fascinating for its intrinsic merits but also as a vehicle for further thought: what kind of society, what kind of leadership does it take to produce so successful an institution--or must we write it all off to good luck?

 Perhaps gratuitously, I'll note at least one big book that I did not read last year.  That would be  Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power  the umpteenth installment of Robert Caro's biography of the great drawler.   Johnson certainly deserves the full treatment and I guess nobody can fault Caro's diligence in research.  I read some of Caro's earlier Johnson stuff, but I kind of got off the train with Caro's account of the infamous 1948 primary.  I don't doubt, as Caro argues, that Johnson probably stole that election; I just can't come to terms with Caro's efforts to sanctify his opponent, Coke Stevenson. By everything I've ever heard  or read, Texas politics was a nest of scoundrels in those days and Stevenson was no better than par for the course.  I mention Caro now, however, partly to remind myself that there is one Caro book I really do want to go back and read: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which I've heard described as one of the best studies of public administration ever written, right up there with James Q. Wilson's   Bureaucracy.

And here's a book I did not read and probably should: Katherine Boo's, Beyond the Beautiful Forever.  That one might be Mrs. Buce's favorite of the year, and from all I hear, it deserves every bit of the credit she gives it. 

And one final item.  Oddly enough, the book that I may have given most thought to over the past few months is Timothy Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.  I say "oddly" because I don't think I realized how impressed I was with it at the time I read it: I liked it but since then it has been coming back and back. Might be partly because it dovetails so well with Gertner's Bell Labs book of which I wrote above.  But in fact, I didn't read Wu this year: I finished it back in the fall of 2011.  As time passes, it really looks like a keeper..