Two David's + a Michael + SB-F c/o Big $
Four looks: money madness, dreamy democracy, deluded rich kids, praised posers
Beset by three lawyers on 2.5 continents, financial entanglements, postmortem dunning, and sundry bills, no coos, I reckon high time to tally a few sharp sums.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. May 1st 2014. Three stars on Amazon.
Over two years since Occupy, reflecting on how this anthropologist's study might have inspired OWS, the same year this appeared, does David Graeber, after so much analysis of the past, suggest present-day solutions for a more equitable future? I read this with interest and as a non-economist, I admit such books are rare. What drew me in was the all-encompassing range of Graeber's obsession (he admits as his last of many notes, and these should be consulted by readers as well as the main text-- this is one where print is preferable to e-book for ease of reference, to being a workaholic).
On the other hand, his upending of the old barter-credit-currency model and his substitution of one where markets need states to expand their plunder, enslave workers who will then mine or forge or hammer out or I suppose now type out for the enrichment of their masters to whom they are indebted, is lively and accessible. The master-slave-coinage complex he demonstrates accompanies and funds the rise of empires and capitalist enterprises. He tells this well, ranging from the imposition of veils on women as early as 1400 BCE Assyria, the message of the Rosetta Stone, the cruelty of Cortes and Luther against uprisings, and how tally sticks and indentured servitude connect. In recent decades the contract assuming workers would be silent as long as they and their children found better incomes and better conditions has now ushered in the expectation that we fund our own subservience. We invest in the markets we are told must finance our own future, as the social contract weakens and capital gain turns a mantra for all.
The conversion of moral obligations into financial transactions, and the replacement of social ties with calculated ones that erode trust in each other and shift it to paper and metal, provides the ethical critique of a materialist reductionism which changes relationships and worldviews into cold hard cash. Or, as Graeber insists, a trust in a system that backs up this cash, by invisible hands and shadowy entities, who play a Ponzi scheme that more and more reveals its lack of substance. He is at his best as he shows the integration of religion and the military into this predicament, and how in modern times the faith has moved from one intangible force to another, as praising this feels natural.
But after so many hundreds of pages detailing this, especially in ancient times and Malagasy examples of alternative societies, which he had encountered the remnants of in his fieldwork, the pace can tire out the patient. By the time he reaches the 1971 separation of the gold standard from the dollar, as Nixon had to finance the Vietnam War, tellingly, the suggestions Graeber offers for better solutions seem fragmentary and vague. Of course, we all can applaud the mutual aid that replaces rapacious capitalism or divisive state-socialism with more humane possibilities, but these remain utopian and sketchy in the closing chapters. Similarly, he lauds the "non-productive" poor and chides any who seem to think that the less affluent among us don't deserve the better things we all crave, but he lets off the hook any who rack up their own personal debt, as he denies buying "fripperies" has contributed at all (well, maybe a widow's mite?) to the larger problems of concentrated wealth and global mismanagement of profit. The rich may bear more blame, but he seems to excuse those poorer.
Despite my sympathies with most of this book, therefore, his later remarks--where he reasons that expecting others to pay back student debt because he (or I, too) did is akin to asserting that if he got mugged, his neighbors should too--seems to weaken some of the ethical impact and force with which this critique began. After all, it started in response to a professor's question why Third World nations should not pay their debts to banks. As an anarchist, Graeber while correctly attacking our longtime and current fealty to our lords as masters and bankers seems to write off the obligations owed by us, the little people. This may anticipate Occupy, but it seems to detract from the morality he seeks to advance along with wealth redistribution or a jubilee with global and national debt forgiveness.
(P.S. I read this on a Kindle and obviously the charts he embeds are not correctly viewable, and the amount of small grammatical slips (as opposed to typos) needs comment. I enjoyed much of this and his endnotes themselves as third of the book convey important qualifications and suggestions. But I wish it was proofread better and that a Kindle could be adapted to offer the reader the experience he or she deserves to do Graeber justice.)
P.P.S. Probably the first library title borrowed on this contraption, pre-Goodreads-me.
The Democracy Project. July 20th 2014. Amazon review. Blogtrotter w/ review links.
Having found myself intrigued by this anthropologist-activist who was among the first, as he narrates here, to generate the "We are the 99%" slogan and Occupy Wall Street movement, I followed my reading of his dense but not dull academic study of “Debt: The First 5000 Years” (reviewed by me in April 2014) with his more casual 2013 narrative of OWS, its origins, impacts, and relevance within grassroots, participatory direct action as the genuine democratic exercise of rights. He insists that the lack of a platform or agenda spoke to the Occupy strengths, by its refusal to play into party politics, rather than as a left-wing balance to the Tea Party's anti-government (but less rarely anti-business, at least after the GOP co-opted it, an issue that merits attention more than the aside here, but it may not be that germane in Graeber's view given his anti-corporate as well as anarchist focus). I agree here, even if my friends and media disagree. Graeber reminds readers that bipartisan "status-quo" presidents no matter their claims for "change" continue to prop up what's broken.
As I've opined often among my pro-Democratic Party friends and family, Graeber raises a critique few leftists promote; they capitulate to the lesser of two evils or "they won't let Obama win" retorts. He castigates the handling of the 2008 crisis with a new president who exhibited "perversely heroic efforts to respond to an historic catastrophe by keeping everything more or less exactly as it was." (95) This can be confirmed by Timothy Geithner's subsequent defense while he promoted his own book in Spring 2014; and by Matt Taibbi's concurrent exposure of {Obama's Attorney General} Eric Holder's role as he kept kid gloves on as he handled "legal justice" for those victimized by Wall Street's banking powers in '08. George Packer finds in his narrative history another pattern of how the law was used to suppress the common folks, buried by robo-signings and instant judgements from judges, not those in charge.
This fits well with these two recent accounts I've studied which address the mess we're in these decades post-Reagan, and all who've succeeded him: George Packer's "The Unwinding" about a disintegration of American stability under the corporate-political oligarchy, and Matt Taibbi's "The Divide" about the refusal of Obama's administration to pursue justice against Wall Street bankers while doggedly beating down and hounding the poor and weak among us who cannot counter the power of the law and order forces, paid by the government which enables these same banks to launder drug money, profit off debtors, expand prisons, and sustain an increasingly unequal economy.
Graeber shows close-up at OWS a common complaint: the "U.S. media increasingly serves less to convince Americans to buy into the terms of the existing political system than to convince them that everyone does." (109) This is a bit too compressed, but his point is that--take Ralph Nader's campaign--that the media portrays such candidates and platforms as if only the 2.7% who voted for the fringe favor them. The media refuse to offer such alternative advocates the opportunity to speak out, and consigns them to the realm of fringe or freakish figures who don't merit the gravitas afforded the Democrats and to a lesser or greater extent depending on the channel chosen, the GOP. Therefore, a false choice perpetuates, and dismissal of spontaneous uprisings that may present a challenge to the parties who persist in representing the 1% more than the rest of us continues. Those who take to the streets or camp out near City Hall or big banks get ridiculed as dangerous bums or deluded rich kids.
While I remain cautious about his claim that over half of all British female students engaged in sex work to pay off tuition and that nearly a third went to prostitution, and his factoid that 280,000 American women with college debt signed up for sugar daddies needs more than one HuffPo citation to sway me, I agree that student debt (I heard recently costs have gone up 1200% since 1978) and the wider indentured status this incurs among many of us cripples us. For degrees are now the ticket into many professions, and that entry fee rises as banks profit off the money they lend to students and their families, continuing to deepen the hold that loans and interest have over many Americans now. Coupled with his own studies and the pressing need for reform or a debt jubilee (I disagree with the latter response as unfair to those of us who paid our dutiful share; unsurprisingly he advocates for cancellation, as his previous book naturally called for), an overhaul of this compromised calculus slipping lucre in bankers’ clutches and lobbyists’ pockets seems a logical stance to take. {A heartland, not elitist—I taught thousands of “mature” matriculators trapped by Fannie this and Franny that—problem needing redress by and for hundreds of millions enmeshed in inflated scams of credential upsell for a term Graeber popularized, bullshit jobs. Soon, a hapless Biden Admin “put paid” to this. Update: caution generated by the excesses of guilt-trip indoctrination disguised as education, the A.I. Chat GPT advent, canonical humanities revival as STEM gets nibbled by ‘bots, as coding might not write your Palo Alto meal ticket, all shift playing fields.}
The trouble is, "corporate lobbying" as he relabels it by its reality as "bribery" stymies progress. Each Congress member needs to raise, he says, $10,000/week from the time he or she is in office to prepare for the next election. Contrary to our national myth that we can separate the system from its overthrow as if we are revolutionaries anew, Graeber contends the economic and political control is so linked now that it cannot be reformed by representatives, complicit in the status quo. He shows how the appeals of the indebted smack of peasants begging for their land and relief from burdens, such is what Americans have been reduced to. As to "white working-class populism," he correctly chides this for its anti-intellectualism, and Graeber to his credit takes a moment to consider the lasting appeal of it for so many. Within its determination to call for liberty, there's "an indignation at being cut off from the means of doing good," within a society bent in equating our life's range with only the satisfaction of our self-interest. (124) People want to achieve for themselves and conduct their own decisions, and not expect the State to cater to all of their needs. A sensitive issue; a commendable insight. This is explored idiosyncratically in James C. Scott's 2013 "Two Cheers for Anarchism." (Taibbi, Packer, and Scott's three books have been recently {i.e., mid-2010s on Amazon + Blogtrotter} reviewed by me.)
Midway, Graeber tackles liberal mockery of OWS. He confides that the left as they dominate media tend to project their guilty conscience by their coverage. "Liberals tend to be touchy and unpredictable because they share the ideas of radical movements--democracy, egalitarianism, freedom--but they've also managed to convince themselves that these ideals are ultimately unattainable. For that reason, they see anyone determined to bring about a world based on these principles as a kind of moral threat." (150) He reminds us that what John Adams feared as "the horrors of democracy" as if anarchy (often a negative term from Plato on) does not negate "core democratic principles," but takes them "to their logical conclusions." (154) In a truly eye-opening chapter "The Mob Begin to Think and to Reason," he shows Gouverneur Morris, gentry of Knickerbocker NYC, witnessing at planning for the Constitutional Congress "butchers and bakers" arguing the merits of the Gracchi or Polybius. (A sign of how far we've fallen from a classical education for the masses?)
He cautions those who'd toss bombs or instigate violence, and he shows as in the chapter "How Change Happens" not only the way direct action and affinity groups and peaceful assemblies reach consensus, but he notes in passing the dangers of coercion. The Iraqi Sadrists attempted to form a mass working-class base for self-governance, but the zones they opened with the wedge of "free clinics for pregnant and nursing mothers" took on, as they required security, the social apparatus and then political platforms supporting charismatic leaders turned cultural voices co-opted into the state and in formal institutions.
This book as with "Debt" skips about although it stays animated with Graeber's confident presence. In a few places the style stumbled and careful editing might have smoothed out a couple of rough spots in the prose. I liked the glances at humor as in the Occu-pie pizza, "99 percent cheese, 1 percent pig" provided those at OWS early on. Books on anarchism sometimes need a lighter touch, after all. And as with other studies, I needed to see how workplace strategies might evolve to prefigure change, in an increasingly unstable and detached electronic and dispersed environment where freer standards may contend against online surveillance, weak wages, globalization, and reductive profit.
He touches on this, however, in "Breaking the Spell" as he glances at the "productivist bargain" that assumes work is a moral good rather than an economic position. He shows if in passing how labor discipline can make one worse, not better, if it does not become virtuous to allow us to help others. Why not make mothers, teachers, caregivers the "primordial form of work" rather than models of production lines, wheat fields, or iron foundries? Mutual creation and a shift, as he admits Occupy might formulate a key demand, to "change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be" is a small step, if one meriting a book and movement of its own. (289) He tells us how the weight of bureaucracy grew, under capitalism and communism, and how the latter term underlies what society, our circle of friends, our family runs on: amicability, cooperation, practical assistance.
I wish the book, after its vignettes as early on he and a handful of activists met at the Irish Hunger Memorial and then Zuccotti Park to jumpstart OWS, had covered more of the blow-by-blow on the street examples of how consensus might or might not have worked, and how across the world (not only in this perhaps understandably Manhattan-centered p-o-v from one who is based now in London LSE academia after his departure from Yale) people met to for better or worse try to coordinate progress. I saw at the L.A. encampment examples of both, and Graeber appears to gloss over a lot of the mess. It's a mixture: a study of democracy historically and at OWS, and part personal testimony. But this makes it uneven in pacing and scope; it's valuable behind-the-scenes, yet you want to peer in deeper.
In closing, Graeber teaches a different civics lesson. "No government has ever given a new freedom to those it governs of its own accord." (239) Grassroots turn tough. Laws may need to be broken.
Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise + Fall of a New Tycoon. February 24th 2024. Three stars on Goodreads.
I can't figure out why Lewis and his publisher didn't wait another few months to cover the trial and conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried. This book appeared at the start of October 2023. It ended with SBF under house arrest at his parents' house. Anyhow, I may be the first reviewer to have chosen this title due not to any inherent fascination with cryptocurrency, or financial shenanigans, but out of my interest in effective altruism, since I've always found utilitarianism the most convincing of ethical applications.
There's some background on it, going back to the influence of its proponent Peter Singer at Princeton, and a tiny bit about its Cambridge University founders, but not enough to adequately cover the context within which EA helped start Alameda and FBT. As for the mysteries of blockchain and bitcoin, I confess that I sided with the author in not completely knowing what the heck it was all about, beyond a general definition.
Lewis writes a lively depiction. I wished he'd questioned SBF's parents, and how their privileged professor ranks at Stanford influenced their son in a particularly odd fashion. Hard to believe a child of the elite would be so detached from everyday life and from common sense, whatever his place "on the spectrum" may have rationalized a hyper-rational faux naif.
David McWilliams, The History of Money: A New History of Humanity. May 20th 2025. (November 11th 2025 published, ARC Edelweiss.) Four stars on Goodreads.
It starts with grain. Durable, fungible, portable, tangible. It can be stored, its amount recorded and its profit taxed, pocketed and shared among priests, potentates nd peddlers. That's how money, as the value transferred onto a shekel, as a cuneiform squiggle or a haggled cow, slave or bride, originated.
So begins David McWilliams' breezy narrative. While fire generated calories, boosted energy and eased digestion, only the advent of currency, he proposes, shifted nascent civilization away from slash and burn food production into scales of mercantile exchange, hierarchical order and efficient taxation in turn enabling imperial expansion, regional commerce and efficient law. Thus far, his sketch reveals near zero nuance not already popularized by bestselling professorial predecessors Jared Diamond, David Graeber and Yuval Noah Harari. These voices from the sciences, hard or social, have the chair.
While as much at ease at TED talks, on podcasts or self-promotion as many of his chatty peers in academia and journalism, what McWilliams, who made his mark on his homeland's charts with his {The Pope's Children} (2005), brings into this genre combines his experience at not a think-tank institute or tenure-track institution, but the Central Bank of Ireland. Striding onto media platforms to translate David Brooks' millennial take on the new upper class of {Bohos in Paradise} from op-ed pages of the {New York Times} Hibernian equivalents witty enough for current-affairs programs, his warnings, after fifteen years inside a Celtic Tiger's financial maw, about impending meltdown proved prescient. Meanwhile, he's hosted {Punk Economics} online videos and a Dublin "political cabaret."
This backstory illustrates McWilliams' approach. He's adept at grabbing attention with provocative packaging of phrases. He knows how to win over an audience. He's not bogged down in discourse of a turgid seminar or rhetoric from campaign hustings. Thus, his survey of coins, and how they generate mobility, dowries, fines, debt, art, accounting, credit and capitulation, while their factoid revelations may not prove astonishing, relates five thousand years of exponential growth, adjusting for booms and busts, in shifts from Sumeria and Croesus, past Fuggers and Florence, to blockchains and Brexit.
Trouble is, this quick step skips over details. For instance, early on McWilliams mentions the theory of Robin Dunbar, who posited how brain capacity in our primal ancestors correlated to a circle of those who could be trusted in a community. Yet, without explaining that "Dunbar's Number" (as it's come to be coined) doesn't exceed 150, McWilliams stumbles short of usefully incorporating this embedded mental model for networked management of goods, relationships, mates and work. In similar fashion, his adroit contrast of Renaissance horizontal webs of commerce which challenged vertical powers of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire skims past deep clashes between illicit usury and interest rates; it skimps on any relegation of Europe's Jewish merchants into banking business by the Church.
Still, McWilliams spins a smooth yarn of goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg's sly pre-bible Mainz hustle, printing on his newfangled press for fellow scoundrel Pope Pius II a passel of lucrative indulgences. In mechanization and production, boosts spurred capital. Pamphlets and spreadsheets proliferated. Skills sharpened, sedition spread and globalizing revolution swept away clerics, palaces, forts and frontiers.
With the Dutch, their lauded tolerance didn't transcend borders. Guns, shareholders, piety, currency and collusion ensured their maritime dominance, albeit briefly, grasping their thrift against Iberian, French and British maritime competition. Championing colonialism, London supplants Amsterdam in command. New Amsterdam transforms into New York. Early modern landscapes loom; McWilliams jumps over century spans, glancing at a mad rush of industrial, agricultural and political innovations.
Holland's fevered tulipmania embodies allure of gossip, doubled speculation, mirrors seducing the dreamy gaze, conjuring up visions of intangible, elusive, unattainable or ultimately unsustainable wealth. On the trail of crafty deadbeats, McWilliams follows the twisted tale of John Law, a Scots hit man who took out the discarded lover of a gay ancestor of Princess Diana, and a finagler who wriggled scot-free to become the world's pioneering engineer of fiat funding, issued by central banks without being backed by reserves in gold. The South Sea Bubble burst by 1720; Law's Mississippi Company sank. However, this frenzy to get to rich overseas, from the comfort of a coffeehouse, never has ebbed.
Romps through Talleyrand, Hamilton, Darwin, Malthus may all be expected. Maybe not a connection between Dunlop's bicycle tires, King Leopold's Belgian Congo and the complicated career of doomed rebel Sir Roger Casement, entangled in the struggle for Ireland's independence from the Crown. Here, McWilliams demonstrates his acumen, mining the rich elements of his native island to extract their illuminating exposure of inequality, which sustains and obsesses us, beneficiaries of its exploitation.
{The Wizard of Oz}, fewer fans probably realize thirteen decades on, emerges from an excoriation of reforms involving the gold standard. James Joyce's exile in the entrepot of Trieste, Hemingway's trip to inflation-insane Weimar Germany and Hitler's clever scheme (a brainstorm he and Lenin shared) to bomb Britain into submission by fake banknotes devastating its hard cash pepper the vignettes in recent times. Again, despite the uneven pace, McWilliams refreshingly devotes space to relevant, if digressive, anecdotes to keep his readers engaged. Like a sharp lecturer, he guides his lessons smartly.
His supplemental reading list, casually listing key texts, suggests his eclectic range. Dante, Graeber and {Ulysses}; James Scott, Iris Origo, Niall Ferguson, Deirdre McCloskey; John McCourt, Stephen Greenblatt and Thomas Frank may be names encountered by savvy bookworms. And nearly no Marx.
He wraps up his presentation with his own entrance into the profession as the Nineties began. Fresh out of university, he relates how liquidity traps, property porn, booze arbitrage, Eurodollars, and the rejection of precious metals for Ponzi borrowers led us all into our contemporary morass of failed policies. All dazzle of bitcoin, the hype of crypto and the imposition of qualitative easing fades away.