Please, we are trying to speculate on what people who just recently discovered farming did in a serious manner, because this is what gets people tenure.
Man... you would LOVE this paper, in the sense that you would be tearing out your hair and sharpening your spear. 100+ pages of "Let's just take whatever numbers we can find for anything and pretend they apply to the neolithic. Smear enough vaseline over those graphs and no one will tell the difference."
We're honestly a little afraid/ashamed to admit how little we actually know- and will probably ever know- about human history, often not even very very ancient human history.
This is something I really see whenever I'm going down a rabbit hole about, like Norse theology or linguistics or even stuff like blacksmithing or clothing. No written history for the most part, and the culture was mostly obliterated by Christianity, so there's a lot of like "we literally have no idea what this is/what this word means/how they did X" and this is SO much more recent, and a so much more successful culture, than a random crowd of Neandertals from 250K ago. (What's an "atgeir?" Some kinda polearm. That's literally all we know. And maybe not even that.)
When you get into ANCIENT ANCIENT human history, we're stuck- like we are with most social sciences but also medicine- with pretending that the foundations of the art were ALWAYS rooted in the scientific method and not simply "just so" stories becoming foundational and everything else being academics massaging extremely limited data to explain something (but I repeat myself).
We barely know shit about the Neolithic and it's ridiculous how much we pretend we do, about it and so many other things.
I'm still convinced an antediluvian industrial society predated this one by up to 100K years and vanished without a trace, because that's absolutely possible.
And, /rant, but I'm more annoyed that this stupid paper is attempting to use these postulates to say anything meaningful about MODERN state power, even if their vaseline-smeared theory WAS accurate.
Modern 'states' don't "produce" anything. They loot, through regulation and law enforcement.
That's part of what bugged me too... why would you say something so obviously misleading as "the elites create the surplus that sustains them" type nonsense if you weren't trying to justify the existence of extractive governments? One generally shouldn't extrapolate intention behind such word choices but... one hardly has to extrapolate at all, but just notice what the word choice achieves. Which makes it odd to me that the meme has become fairly well lodged in the realms of the blogosphere I read. I would have expected many more people to have recoiled instinctually from that sort of claim. What the hell good is confirmation bias if it doesn't even make you question claims that are antithetical to your views? :D
Yea. Howard's version of the world where civilizations waxed and waned and were buried beneath the waves over and over might well be true save for the lack of finding e.g. swords in sedimentary rock deposits.
But hell, we have very little idea of how things worked not too long ago at all, and frankly I wouldn't trust most of these sorts of "historians" to make a spear themselves using modern tools, so why expect they know "how things were done" or worked? I have a lot more sympathy for folks like Mancur Olsen who point out what we don't know or what is observationally equivalent (Stationary Bandit model of government) when they theorize about history than folks who speculatively narrow down what "must have happened". I suppose a lot of it is just the pressure to publish something, anything, to justify your job and get tenure, but it is embarrassing that no one has corrected that problem yet, and worse that people don't just shoot this crap down immediately. It was all I could do to not make this essay a litany of all the things I disliked about this paper.
Huh, that's a new one to me. I am struggling to imagine what his argument could have been, other than defining "money" in a way that economists usually do not. Do you happen to have a link handy?
It appears in ‚Debt: the first 5000 Years‘. From Wikipedia (don’t hit me): „ Graeber argues that debt and credit historically appeared before money, which itself appeared before barter.“
If memory serves right, primitive societies were communistic and thus had no need for any exchange system at all. Money came about as an accounting tool once debt and credit had been invented by the exploiters and only then was barter (trade) invented.
Wow... yea as an economist I never would have come up with that theory, not without a great deal of mind altering substances. Reading the wiki summary, it is hard to imagine the book is worth reading, if the summary of the points is that foolish. I wonder if there are some good reviews of it... maybe I can have Amazon drop ship a copy to the Psmiths.
I love this line from the summary "He also claims that the standard economics texts cite no evidence for suggesting that barter came before money, credit and debt, and he has seen no credible reports suggesting such." One wonders what sort of evidence he expects... stone tablets functioning as receipts for barter? One might as well claim that humans never kissed before modern times because there is no evidence of it. What the hell form does "debt" take before the creation of money if not barter? Trading grain now for grain later is barter! My god... if I were speaking there would be flecks of foam collecting at the corners of my mouth now :D
Wow, thanks for the link. Talk about an example of just letting a guy talk knowing that he is going to destroy all his credibility. I am not sure what is my favorite like, but this one is close " pricing systems in fact emerged as a side-effect of non-state bureaucracies. Again, non-state bureaucracies are a phenomenon that no economic model would even have anticipated existing."
... what the hell economists are you reading, Graeber?
In general, however, it seems to me that Graeber is mistaking the definitions of market, barter and money pretty badly, applying market to things like family exchange for instance, along with assuming that the modern uses of money such as unit of account would be the explicit goals of inventors of money. You know, instead of just like "hey, everyone is willing to trade for this stuff, so it is handy to keep around just in case."
All in all, it doesn't make one marvel at the perceptive wisdom of anthropologists :D Academics complain about economic imperialism (in the sense of economists writing in other fields) but man, you can see why. The standard for reasoning and rigor for other fields in pretty lame if DG here is anything to go by.
Well, he was an anarchist who was big into Occupy and central planning. Confusion doesn’t really describe it.
The comments section at mises.org was recently removed unfortunately, because he did continue the good fight there. Did you now that before the invention of barter if you needed a cow you could just go to another farmer and take one of his?
I am not making this up, it’s the reason I remember the guy at all.
If you _had_ a functional elite, and it wasn't in the protection business, you might predict it did things such as discover crop rotation, invent the horse collar, and the plough, experiment with novel crops imported from some place far away, build aqueducts and irrigation systems, and invent sanitation. You get more prosperity by making the labour more productive. I take it nothing like this was mentioned?
No, that's what really bugged me, too. The entire focus was that the surplus was "created" via starving the marginal farmers. Nothing on any sort of actual value creation via loss prevention, capital improvements, coordination, dispute resolution, anything. I tried to bring up a little bit of that when steel manning it, but all the authors give is that the elites are distant, and they take stuff and keep the population down.
Unless, of course, it is buried somewhere in the excessively long paper and I just missed it, but I am pretty sure it isn't there. They bring up the argument then bam, off they go away from it as quickly as possible. Which makes me wonder a bit if that was part of the review, where someone complained about their terrible reasoning, and instead of removing the entire argument they just removed the reasoning and no one noticed. Who knows. It is possible that somewhere in the 100+ page slog my eyes just glazed over and missed some more detail, I will admit.
Yea, Malthus is one of those thinkers whose popularity only makes sense if you figure people like his conclusions, not his methods or track record. He isn't wrong in the sense that sure, at some vastly higher level of population the carrying capacity or Earth is a relevant concern, but what that capacity is is a very difficult question because humans are hyper adaptable. That's enough for a "Huh, that's kind of an interesting point" and maybe a footnote in history along with the point "We have over and over again demonstrated that we severely under estimate that carrying capacity." People seem to really like the idea that there are too many other people, along with apocalyptic visions of the future, and so, like Marx, Malthus is perennially popular.
Probably due to the nature of academics, who are typically gammas (losers) in the socio sexual hierarchy. Losers don't believe they can ever be winners, so they try and destroy winners.
We've allowed Revenge of the Nerds for real, which is a big mistake. I expect it to be rectified over the next couple decades....
I could buy that in the case of academics, but Malthus enjoys a lot of perennial popularity well outside that world, on almost all sides of the ideological spectrum. It seems to be a much deeper generalized human trait to assume zero sum is the state of the world, and therefore to see all out group humans as necessarily a cost to us, whether in the short or long term.
When I can take time off from dying, I'll first have to add more lies to my resume. Can anybody prove I'm not the rightful King of Lithuania, or that I did not receive three Nobel Peace Prizes during the 15th Century when Alfred's hick ancestor, Cowbell Nobel, was running the program?
Remember over 100 years ago when we invented refrigeration and cheap energy? That was cool. :)
Please, we are trying to speculate on what people who just recently discovered farming did in a serious manner, because this is what gets people tenure.
Man... you would LOVE this paper, in the sense that you would be tearing out your hair and sharpening your spear. 100+ pages of "Let's just take whatever numbers we can find for anything and pretend they apply to the neolithic. Smear enough vaseline over those graphs and no one will tell the difference."
We're honestly a little afraid/ashamed to admit how little we actually know- and will probably ever know- about human history, often not even very very ancient human history.
This is something I really see whenever I'm going down a rabbit hole about, like Norse theology or linguistics or even stuff like blacksmithing or clothing. No written history for the most part, and the culture was mostly obliterated by Christianity, so there's a lot of like "we literally have no idea what this is/what this word means/how they did X" and this is SO much more recent, and a so much more successful culture, than a random crowd of Neandertals from 250K ago. (What's an "atgeir?" Some kinda polearm. That's literally all we know. And maybe not even that.)
When you get into ANCIENT ANCIENT human history, we're stuck- like we are with most social sciences but also medicine- with pretending that the foundations of the art were ALWAYS rooted in the scientific method and not simply "just so" stories becoming foundational and everything else being academics massaging extremely limited data to explain something (but I repeat myself).
We barely know shit about the Neolithic and it's ridiculous how much we pretend we do, about it and so many other things.
I'm still convinced an antediluvian industrial society predated this one by up to 100K years and vanished without a trace, because that's absolutely possible.
And, /rant, but I'm more annoyed that this stupid paper is attempting to use these postulates to say anything meaningful about MODERN state power, even if their vaseline-smeared theory WAS accurate.
Modern 'states' don't "produce" anything. They loot, through regulation and law enforcement.
That's part of what bugged me too... why would you say something so obviously misleading as "the elites create the surplus that sustains them" type nonsense if you weren't trying to justify the existence of extractive governments? One generally shouldn't extrapolate intention behind such word choices but... one hardly has to extrapolate at all, but just notice what the word choice achieves. Which makes it odd to me that the meme has become fairly well lodged in the realms of the blogosphere I read. I would have expected many more people to have recoiled instinctually from that sort of claim. What the hell good is confirmation bias if it doesn't even make you question claims that are antithetical to your views? :D
Yea. Howard's version of the world where civilizations waxed and waned and were buried beneath the waves over and over might well be true save for the lack of finding e.g. swords in sedimentary rock deposits.
But hell, we have very little idea of how things worked not too long ago at all, and frankly I wouldn't trust most of these sorts of "historians" to make a spear themselves using modern tools, so why expect they know "how things were done" or worked? I have a lot more sympathy for folks like Mancur Olsen who point out what we don't know or what is observationally equivalent (Stationary Bandit model of government) when they theorize about history than folks who speculatively narrow down what "must have happened". I suppose a lot of it is just the pressure to publish something, anything, to justify your job and get tenure, but it is embarrassing that no one has corrected that problem yet, and worse that people don't just shoot this crap down immediately. It was all I could do to not make this essay a litany of all the things I disliked about this paper.
This sounds a bit similar to David Graeber‘s contention that money precedes barter.
Huh, that's a new one to me. I am struggling to imagine what his argument could have been, other than defining "money" in a way that economists usually do not. Do you happen to have a link handy?
It appears in ‚Debt: the first 5000 Years‘. From Wikipedia (don’t hit me): „ Graeber argues that debt and credit historically appeared before money, which itself appeared before barter.“
If memory serves right, primitive societies were communistic and thus had no need for any exchange system at all. Money came about as an accounting tool once debt and credit had been invented by the exploiters and only then was barter (trade) invented.
Wow... yea as an economist I never would have come up with that theory, not without a great deal of mind altering substances. Reading the wiki summary, it is hard to imagine the book is worth reading, if the summary of the points is that foolish. I wonder if there are some good reviews of it... maybe I can have Amazon drop ship a copy to the Psmiths.
I love this line from the summary "He also claims that the standard economics texts cite no evidence for suggesting that barter came before money, credit and debt, and he has seen no credible reports suggesting such." One wonders what sort of evidence he expects... stone tablets functioning as receipts for barter? One might as well claim that humans never kissed before modern times because there is no evidence of it. What the hell form does "debt" take before the creation of money if not barter? Trading grain now for grain later is barter! My god... if I were speaking there would be flecks of foam collecting at the corners of my mouth now :D
Robert Murphy did review the book and then graciously (?) compiled Graeber‘s replies here:
https://mises.org/wire/david-graebers-response-my-article
Wow, thanks for the link. Talk about an example of just letting a guy talk knowing that he is going to destroy all his credibility. I am not sure what is my favorite like, but this one is close " pricing systems in fact emerged as a side-effect of non-state bureaucracies. Again, non-state bureaucracies are a phenomenon that no economic model would even have anticipated existing."
... what the hell economists are you reading, Graeber?
In general, however, it seems to me that Graeber is mistaking the definitions of market, barter and money pretty badly, applying market to things like family exchange for instance, along with assuming that the modern uses of money such as unit of account would be the explicit goals of inventors of money. You know, instead of just like "hey, everyone is willing to trade for this stuff, so it is handy to keep around just in case."
All in all, it doesn't make one marvel at the perceptive wisdom of anthropologists :D Academics complain about economic imperialism (in the sense of economists writing in other fields) but man, you can see why. The standard for reasoning and rigor for other fields in pretty lame if DG here is anything to go by.
Well, he was an anarchist who was big into Occupy and central planning. Confusion doesn’t really describe it.
The comments section at mises.org was recently removed unfortunately, because he did continue the good fight there. Did you now that before the invention of barter if you needed a cow you could just go to another farmer and take one of his?
I am not making this up, it’s the reason I remember the guy at all.
If you _had_ a functional elite, and it wasn't in the protection business, you might predict it did things such as discover crop rotation, invent the horse collar, and the plough, experiment with novel crops imported from some place far away, build aqueducts and irrigation systems, and invent sanitation. You get more prosperity by making the labour more productive. I take it nothing like this was mentioned?
No, that's what really bugged me, too. The entire focus was that the surplus was "created" via starving the marginal farmers. Nothing on any sort of actual value creation via loss prevention, capital improvements, coordination, dispute resolution, anything. I tried to bring up a little bit of that when steel manning it, but all the authors give is that the elites are distant, and they take stuff and keep the population down.
Unless, of course, it is buried somewhere in the excessively long paper and I just missed it, but I am pretty sure it isn't there. They bring up the argument then bam, off they go away from it as quickly as possible. Which makes me wonder a bit if that was part of the review, where someone complained about their terrible reasoning, and instead of removing the entire argument they just removed the reasoning and no one noticed. Who knows. It is possible that somewhere in the 100+ page slog my eyes just glazed over and missed some more detail, I will admit.
Malthus used insect populations to come to his conclusions about overpopulation and resource consumption.
Because y'know, humans are just like insects in the way the relate to their environment... : P
Yea, Malthus is one of those thinkers whose popularity only makes sense if you figure people like his conclusions, not his methods or track record. He isn't wrong in the sense that sure, at some vastly higher level of population the carrying capacity or Earth is a relevant concern, but what that capacity is is a very difficult question because humans are hyper adaptable. That's enough for a "Huh, that's kind of an interesting point" and maybe a footnote in history along with the point "We have over and over again demonstrated that we severely under estimate that carrying capacity." People seem to really like the idea that there are too many other people, along with apocalyptic visions of the future, and so, like Marx, Malthus is perennially popular.
Probably due to the nature of academics, who are typically gammas (losers) in the socio sexual hierarchy. Losers don't believe they can ever be winners, so they try and destroy winners.
We've allowed Revenge of the Nerds for real, which is a big mistake. I expect it to be rectified over the next couple decades....
I could buy that in the case of academics, but Malthus enjoys a lot of perennial popularity well outside that world, on almost all sides of the ideological spectrum. It seems to be a much deeper generalized human trait to assume zero sum is the state of the world, and therefore to see all out group humans as necessarily a cost to us, whether in the short or long term.
IMO it's both. Academics tend toward it, and it's being pushed from outside.
You have a marvelous knack for explaining economics in easy-to-understand terms. I plan to plagiarize you shamelessly.
Thank you sir! Keep that up and you might become president of Harvard some day! :D
When I can take time off from dying, I'll first have to add more lies to my resume. Can anybody prove I'm not the rightful King of Lithuania, or that I did not receive three Nobel Peace Prizes during the 15th Century when Alfred's hick ancestor, Cowbell Nobel, was running the program?