Gabriel Rosser **Rossman** on David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years"
Gabriel Rosser Rossman:
How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture: At Unfogged there’s a review (and a very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
This is not exactly stuff written in the cuneiform of Mesopotamian diplomacy, the barbarian law codes of mediaeval Ireland, or the field notes of Victorian anthropologists, but something that occurred in suburban California around the time I was born and concerns the extremely well documented origins of one of the world’s biggest firms. If Graeber gets this wrong, how can we trust him about the stuff that’s harder to check, like all that business about barbarian law codes…
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Graeber addresses problem #2 head on and tries to explain this away by some convoluted argument that I can’t even reproduce but I find his argument much less plausible than the more parsimonious explanation that the Chinese are buying t-bills (a) as a store of value (b) as a medium of exchange and (c) as a tacit export subsidy that suits their domestic politics…. This deliberate obtuseness about how a reserve currency works and the paranoid understanding that it is provincial tribute is by far the worst part of the book. I’m trying to draw a fact/value distinction between my lack of sympathy for his political positions and his empirical claims as I’d like to think that when reading someone with whom I disagree I can distinguish between their empirical claims that are well-supported, debatable, and downright nuts. That is to say I don’t think these chapters upset me because they are normatively “anti-American” but because as an empirical matter they badly fail to understand how (for better or worse) American power works.
This business about tribute is at the end so I’d like to say that I recommend the book but that you stop on page 365, right before he gets his Chomsky on, but I honestly worry whether I can trust the parts of the book I’m not as informed about. This is the 13th chime of the clock, the brown M&Ms in the Van Halen dressing room; pick your metaphor, but this business about Apple computer and especially about Chinese t-bill holdings ultimately makes me take a “trust but verify” attitude towards a book that I found both extremely enjoyable and intellectually inspirational…
Indeed:
Unfogged: The Thirteenth Chime POSTED BY LIZARDBREATH: I picked up Debt: The First 5000 Years….[H]e uses Apple Computers as an example:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
I don't know all that much about the history of Apple or of the computer business generally, but I'm pretty sure that's as wrong as it could possibly be. Apple was founded by two guys, neither of whom (AFAIK) worked for IBM (maybe for a very short time? But certainly not extendedly). It was notoriously a rigid, top-down hierarchy, it was founded in the '70s, not the '80s, and who had a laptop until the very end of the '80s? That's a whole lot of wrong for one sentence. Has anyone read the book with enough background knowledge to say if this is a fluke, or if the whole thing is like this?
That sentence is fascinating. Not only is every single thing in it wrong, but it betrays a specific worldview so perfectly. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
The Apple stuff is so amazingly wrong. (They didn't work for IBM, by the way. Jobs worked for Atari and Wozniak worked for HP. IBM existed, but was based in New York, and in any case didn't make personal computers until 1981. (playing catch-up with Apple)). They founded Apple using their laptops! That's the one that gets me. "Look, I've drawn up a sketch of a new sort of 'personal' computer here on my ThinkPad! It'll be far smaller than today's mainframes!" Posted by: Sifu Tweety ...
Do anthropologists even need to distinguish between fact and myth, in their normal work? Posted by: CharleyCarp
"and really, that sentence is 200 kinds of wrong"; I'm genuinely impressed he managed to get so much wrong in such a small area. isn't there an area of math that covers these "packing" problems? maybe he should switch to that. Posted by: alameida...
Texaco is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Populist) petroleum engineers who broke from Standard Oil in Texas in the 1920s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people using their catalytic converters and vulcanized tires to travel from place to place and exchange ideas more efficiently. Posted by: Cryptic ned...
The sentence would be more forgivable if it was written a few hundred years in the future and the timescales for things like "Apple founded" and "laptops available" got flattened out, I guess. "They had large garages to house their zeppelins, and communicated by telegraph on those occasions when the holonet failed." Posted by: essear...
if you don't use the "p" "/p" paragraph tags for each paragraph ogged will punish you with a random distribution of font sizes and line spacing. it's sort of his version of fire and brimstone, but with less burning. and also less kerning. Posted by: alameida...
Crooked Timber is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Tory) SEO specialists who broke from Pajamas Media in the 2010s, forming a rigid organizational structure of twenty to forty bloggers with their Kindle Fires crossposting to each other's LiveJournals. Posted by: Cryptic ned...
UNC is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Baptist) basketball specialists who broke from Duke in the 1850s, forming a rigid zone defense of twenty to forty sports marketing majors with their white baseball caps going to each other's frat parties. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
The Holy Roman Empire is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Belgian) technocrats who broke from the Byzantine Empire in the 1300s, forming little anarcho-syndicalist communes that supported themselves by mechanized textile production in their huts. Posted by: Cryptic ned...
Christianity is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Gaulish) fortune tellers who broke from the Catholic Church in the 3rd century AD, forming large groups of several thousand praying to their icons of the saints in each other's temples. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
Playboy magazine is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly lesbian) women who broke from the Knights Templar in the 6th century, forming little fantasy football leagues over Twitter. Posted by: real ffeJ annaH...
Planet Earth is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly silicon-based) lifeforms who broke from the Moon six thousand years ago, forming little accretions of twenty to forty solar masses with their photosynthesis in each other's primordial soups. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
These Tardis-like garages into which a 40 person circle, complete with laptops, could fit: who built them? There appear to have been several. Forty people is a big payroll. Prior to the deluge of VC money, startups, even in Silicon Valley, couldn't have met it. One would need revenue in the high tens of millions. The problem with the sentence isn't so much that it's wrong in detail. It's that he wasn't thinking about the physical (or fiscal) reality behind his words. Posted by: jim...
I'm actually not sympathetic to authors who make serious errors of fact. Yes, of course it's possible to get the details right in a large book about a general topic. You do it by knowing what you intend to say, and having a reason to say it before you write about it. Posted by: AWB
Also, you can look shit up! It's allowed! Books don't come into being without someone actually writing those sentences, and they might as well be sentences written about something you know something about. Otherwise, they don't need to be written, right? Posted by: AWB...
The Wrongest Sentence Ever has got to be a weird fuck-up, though. It doesn't make sense as deliberate deceit, because there are millions of people who'll know it's wrong. It's like saying that George Washington was gave the Gettysburg Address -- it's just too transparently wrong to be deliberate. Posted by: Walt Someguy...
You know what the biggest problem with copyright law is? Any company can buy the rights to an original work without ever compensating the original artist at all, and then they have those rights forever, and anybody who even mentions that work in any context without paying up is subject not only to mandatory fines, but jail time. Not only that, but rights-holders get a tax writeoff if they destroy old works that are in danger of becoming public domain. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
You're a sick man, Tweety. Posted by: LizardBreath...
My favorite anecdote about copyright is when the Otis family used the rights they'd acquired in the course of advocating the bricking up of Hetch Hetchy to steal the name "Lakers" from the Minnesota Populist Party. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
... which was enough to trick Wilt Chamberlain into signing a contract with them. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
I wouldn't even know the story if Mike Davis hadn't been able to make Chinatown before Firestone dynamited the subway tunnels. A small victory, to be sure. Posted by: Sifu Tweety
The whole history of LA and copyright in this country are really intertwined, like when Cesar Chavez fought back against attempts to use the extensive copyrights on grain-based recipes to kill off LA's Mexican population by forcing them onto nutrient-poor all-meat diets. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
Remember when Inhofe held up Crichton's book on the senate floor and declaimed that it had pages and pages more footnotes than the executive summary of the IPCC's report on climate change? They tried to make a movie out of it but you can't use the term "US Senate" in a feature film without paying out the ass to the Treasury department. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
"hey, Wizard of Oz and Apple mistake, throw the whole thing out." Well, if one of the mistakes is so bad that it shows that the author isn't a good critical thinker, it could deepen the distrust. I use the breezy phrase "everyone in LA is blond, tanned and blinged out" to immediately write off an author. That is a person who doesn't see past stereotypes, so they aren't going to bring me anything new. Posted by: Megan
"everyone in LA is blond, tanned and blinged out" Oh man, though, that's totally true, at least in LA proper. Once you get to the outer burbs east of La Cienega everybody's toothless and stringy from all the meth, but in the city of LA it's definitely true. Posted by: Sifu Tweety ...
LB digs in, yo. It's what she does. Between undergrad at Princeton and her post-law school job defending Big Pharma she's gotten pretty good at it, too. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
You mean: her post-law school job defending Big Pharma in small groups of 20-40 attorneys who write their briefs using consensus-based authorship, she's gotten pretty good at it, too. Posted by: Annelid Gustator...
My favorite story about a generalist/popular writer faking information is about Mike Davis. Apparently one of the conversations with an expert in one of his books is entirely fictional. But the weird thing is that it turns out Davis actually had an interview scheduled with this expert, but showed up for the interview with the account of the interview he wanted already written. He then simply asked the expert to sign off on the account. He was just like, "this is what I need you to say, will you say it?" And the guy said "sure." I'd look up details, but I'm lazy, and I'm typing awkwardly because there is a child asleep in my lap, and I'm not sure if there is a 5 or a 10% chance that she is not actually mine. Posted by: rob helpy-chalk...
309: Ecology of Fear has some pretty scandalous errors in it, ranging from screwing around with weather statistics to make it sound like greater LA has the same incidence of twisters as tornado alley to, um, some other really bad stuff that I can't recall. That said, I think the overarching point of the book holds, and I used to teach it pretty frequently in a class on disasters. It's not as good as City of Quartz, though, which is a real masterpiece. Posted by: Von Wafer...
320: are you kidding? Emerson has been commenting here for two years, since his son was in diapers, when the site was still run by Glenn Reynolds and Jason Kottke and people called it a MUD. Posted by: Sifu Tweety...
On top of which, he most likely spent big chunks of the 80s and 90s in Madagascar doing his fieldwork, so background knowledge those of us coming in age during those years take for granted may have completely passed him by. Posted by: clark diversey...
I don't see what's racist about "people on Easter Island and on Iceland both ruined their islands by doing the exact same thing and stupidly cutting down all the trees." I don't get it at all, either. I'm really tempted to do enough reading to do a full-on defense of Diamond. It would be pointless, because it would take a lot of time, and the only real audience I would find is random internet people. But shit. It really seems like his critics go out of their way to misinterpret and nitpick. I'm especially bothered by the way the argument seems to rely on the idea that his narrative has the same form as classic racist narratives. We're arguing about causation here, not literature. Did chopping down all the trees on Easter Island contribute to the collapse of the society, and if so, how much? Posted by: rob helpy-chalk...
It's funny about getting into arguments. I started the thread thinking that the book was thought-provoking and worth reading, the Wizard of Oz bit gave me pause, but wasn't a real worry given that plenty of reasonable people (misguided in this respect as they clearly are) have believed it, and the Apple thing made me not want to rely on it for any facts I couldn't, or hadn't checked. But I did still find the argument that credit preceded coinage convincing. After arguing about it, I was starting to feel as if Halford was right about what I really meant, and the book was completely worthless. I had to go cool down before I remembered that I actually did want to finish it. Posted by: LizardBreath...
"Some anthropologists would like this to be a debate about whether Diamond is racist. I'd like to be talking about whether Diamond is right." Exactly. And this is important; its not just some random historical conjecture. You see libertarians arguing all the time that deforestation never caused the downfall of a civilization. Conversely, the collapse of civilizations like [Greenland] and Easter Island serve as strong parables for wise resource management. Posted by: rob helpy-chalk...
Still waiting for this to turn into a dating or food thread. Posted by: Flippanter...
"Clearly then, our project must be to encourage capitalism to touch itself." "Capitalism, I have a song by the Divinyls that I think you should hear. Listen carefully." Posted by: One of Many...
