At 2025-02-16T16:46:44+0100, onf wrote: > > Surely this oversight has nothing to do with the ownership of most > > consumer debt [] by those occupying the commanding heights of our > > economies. > > Hm, that's really interesting. Do you happen to have any sources to > back this up?
While my remark made a salty allusion to Yergin and Stanislaw's _The Commanding Heights_ (Free Press, 1999), a work more responsive to your question is David Graeber's _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ (Melville House, 2011; revised 2014). Graeber, now deceased, got punked on pretty solidly in the literary and economic press for making a howler of a mistake about a detail of tech sector history in the original edition. I don't recall the details, but it was something like crediting Steve Jobs with the development of Microsoft Windows--something about that silly to people in our field. The furor died down; no one pointing and laughing seems to have commented on whether the error made any difference to his thesis. My supposition is that discouraging relatively well-compensated tech workers from reading or considering the book at all was the true objective of the ridicule. We're better served by instead reading _Dilbert_ comics and embracing futility. I see there's now a 10th Anniversary edition with a foreword by Thomas Piketty, known for _Capital in the 21st Century_. I'm slowly working my way through a new translation of Marx's _Capital_. Either this new translation is a breakthrough, or the reputed difficulty of its initial chapters has been overstated. It has darkly amused me to read claims of his about the "labor theory of value" in chapter 1 that squarely contradict the words some people stuff in his mouth. That reminds me of how the people who most frequently quote Adam Smith seem not to have read anything by him _but_ a list of quotes curated by someone else. I was at the U.S. Libertarian Party national convention in 2016; Smith's views on speculators and the East India Company would, I think, have baffled most of the people there, "free market" advocates to a man (and occasional woman). I'm guilty myself of not reading from cover-to-cover (including all foot/endnotes, if they are commentary in nature); that's the standard I set for myself and I meet it only occasionally. (It pays off handsomely if you're reading, say, G. M. Fraser's Flashman novels.) But it seems hazardous to rely exclusively on, say, a Koch Foundation-funded outlet to selectively filter the works of an economist for your intellectual edification. The building material in one's mind may consequently wind up being something less sturdy than stone. Regards, Branden
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