Skip to main content

Home/ economic crisis/ Group items tagged graeber

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Arabica Robusta

Debt: The First 500 Pages | Jacobin - 0 views

jacobinmag.com/...debt-the-first-500-pages

adjustment economic structural crisis theory neoclassical social neoliberalism debt graeber

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The style is welcome, 
akin to that of the best interdisciplinary scholarly blogs (like Crooked Timber, where Debt has been the subject of a symposium): clear, intelligent, and free of unexplained specialist jargon.
  • Partly, his maverick status rests on his politics – he is the anarchist saying things about debt, money, markets, and the state that the powers-that-be would rather not look squarely in the face. But largely his argument is a move in an interdisciplinary struggle: anthropology against economics.
  • “Can we really use the methods of modern economics, which were designed to understand how contemporary economic institutions operate, to describe the political battles that led to the creation of those very institutions?” Graeber’s answer is negative: not only would economics mislead us, but there are “moral dangers.”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Graeber’s alternative is to recognize the diversity of motives that guide people’s economic interactions. He proposes that there are three “main moral principles” at work in economic life: communism, exchange, and hierarchy.
  • but principles of interaction present in all societies in different proportions: for example, capitalist firms are islands of communism and hierarchy within a sea of exchange.
  • The most simplistic renditions of neoclassical economics may reduce all human interactions to self-interested exchange. But the idea that society is made up of different but interdependent levels is hardly new in social theory. Neither is Graeber’s view that to talk of a society as a unit may be misleading, since people are involved in social interactions across multiple horizons that may not fit together into a coherent whole.
  • The greed of the Europeans is contrasted with the inscrutable warrior honor of Moctezuma, who would not object when he saw Cortés cheat at gambling. Also, Cortés and his fellows were drowning in debt, and so was Emperor Charles v, who sponsored his expeditions.
  • English villagers were quite happy with market transactions in their place, as part of a moral economy of mutual aid.
  • It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal – and often vindictive – power of the state.
  • For Braudel, capitalism is the domain of the big merchants, bankers, and joint stock companies that feed off the market and reorganize it. For Graeber, the easiest way to make money with money is to establish a monopoly, so “capitalists invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market.”
  • In place of a materialist economic history, Graeber’s 5,000 years are organized according to a purported cycle of history in which humanity is perpetually oscillating between periods of “virtual money” – paper and credit-money – and periods of metal money. The emergence and rise of capitalism up to 1971 has to be shoehorned into this quasi-mystical framework as a turn of the wheel back toward metallism.
  • What do these units of measurement measure? Graeber’s answer is: debt. Any piece of money, whether made of metal, paper, or electronic bits, is an iou, and so “the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.”
  • et it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to monetary theory. Texts have no problem acknowledging that money is not a commodity, and then going on to claim that money exists because barter is inefficient.
  • The reason, to be blunt, is that unlike Graeber’s critique, not much of monetary theory itself rests on the historical origins of money. Economics deals with the operation of a system.
  • As for arguments that money is essentially about debt, or essentially a creature of the state: this is to make the mistake of reducing something involved in a complicated set of relationships to one or two of its moments. Economics has generally met the challenges of credit and state theories of money not with fear or incomprehension, but with indifference: if credit or the state is the answer to the riddle of money, the wrong question may have been posed.
  • But to call its value a social convention seems to misrepresent the processes by which this value is established in an economy like ours – not by general agreement or political will, but as the outcome of countless interlocking strategies in a vast, decentralized, competitive system.
  • But however far credit may stretch money, it still depends on a monetary base: people ultimately expect to get paid in some form or other.
  • Graeber’s general reading of Smith’s worldview is quite tendentious: Smith was blind to the flourishing credit economy of mutual aid all around him, had hang-ups about debt, and “created the vision of an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore, free of guilt and sin.” The gold standard was a strategy by the powerful to undermine the informal rustic credit economy.
  • The value of gold acted as an anchor for the value of any currency convertible into it. This was not due to any inherent goldness to money, and people didn’t have to believe in any such thing to support the gold standard. There was a big difference, as Schumpeter put it, between theoretical and practical metallism, a difference which does not register in Graeber’s picture.
  • In the modern period, state after state committed to metallic anchors as strategic decisions to enhance trust in their national currencies.
  • The ultimate killer of the gold standard in the twentieth century was not changing minds about the nature of money, but the rise of the labor movement and collective bargaining: deflations became more painful and politically unacceptable.
  • Pierre Berger, a French economist responding to a previous incursion by the anthropologists, wrote in 1966: “With no disrespect to history, one is obliged to believe that an excessive concentration on research into the past can be a source of confusion in analyzing the present, at least as far as money and credit are concerned.” He meant that economics studies a system, and the origins of its parts might mislead about their present functions and dynamics.
Arabica Robusta

There's no need for all this economic sadomasochism | David Graeber | Comment is free |... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...eed-for-economic-sadomasochism

adjustment economic structural neoclassical theory crisis social neoliberalism debt graeber rogoff reinhart

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Will we, then, see a reversal of policy? A sea of mea culpas from politicians who have spent the last few years telling disabled pensioners to give up their bus passes and poor students to forgo college, all on the basis of a mistake? It seems unlikely. After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality.
  • We are talking about a politics of crime and punishment, sin and atonement.
  • But in a larger sense, the message was that we were guilty of having dreamed of social security, humane working conditions, pensions, social and economic democracy.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • If ever proof was required that the theory is selected to suit the politics, one need only consider the reaction politicians have to economists who dare suggest this moralistic framework is unnecessary; or that there might be solutions that don't involve widespread human suffering.
  • the vicious cycle of austerity. As a larger percentage of government spending has to be redirected to paying rising interest rates, budgets are slashed, workers fired, the economy shrinks, and so does the tax base, further reducing government revenues and further increasing the danger of default.
Arabica Robusta

What is Modern Monetary Theory, or "MMT"? « naked capitalism - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...rn-monetary-theory-or-mmt.html

adjustment economic structural neoclassical theory crisis social neoliberalism debt graeber

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Under the gold standard, and largely because of the gold standard, the capitalist world endured eight different deflationary slumps severe enough to be called “depressions.” Since the gold standard was abolished, there have been none – and, as we shall see, this is anything but coincidental.
  • The essential insight of Modern Monetary Theory (or “MMT”) is that sovereign, currency-issuing countries are only constrained by real limits. They are not constrained, and cannot be constrained, by purely financial limits because, as issuers of their respective fiat-currencies, they can never “run out of money.” This doesn’t mean that governments can spend without limit, or overspend without causing inflation, or that government should spend any sum unwisely. What it emphatically does mean is that no such sovereign government can be forced to tolerate mass unemployment because of the state of its finances – no matter what that state happens to be.
  • what had really happened was epoch-making and paradigm-shattering. It was also, for the rest of the 1970s, polymorphously destabilizing. Because no one had a plan for, or knew, what all of this was going to mean for the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar. Certainly not Richard Nixon, who was by then embroiled in the early stages of the Watergate scandal. But no one else was in charge of this either. In the moment, other countries and their central banks followed Washington’s line. They wanted to forestall any kind of panic too. But, inevitably, as the real consequences of the new monetary regime kicked in, and as unforeseen and unintended knock-on effects began to be felt, this changed.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Conventional, so-called “neo-classical” economics pays little or no attention to monetary dynamics, treating money as just a “veil” over the activity of utility-maximizing individual “agents”. And, as hard as this is for non-economists to believe, the models which these ‘mainstream’ economists make do not even try to account for money, banking or debt.
  • What needs to be said is this: Keynesian economics worked before, and the improved version – now generally called “post-Keynesian” – will work again, to deliver what the market-fundamentalism of the past three decades has patently and persistently failed to deliver *anywhere in the world*. Namely – a prosperity which is shared by everyone. The principal purpose of Modern Monetary Theory is to explain, in detail, why this this worked in the past and how it can be made to work again.
Arabica Robusta

Debt: The First Five Hundred Pages - Crooked Timber - 0 views

crookedtimber.org/...t-the-first-five-hundred-pages

adjustment economic structural crisis theory neoclassical social neoliberalism debt graeber

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The prospect of a grand social history of debt from a thinker of the radical left is exciting.
Arabica Robusta

With September 17 anniversary on the horizon, debt emerges as connective thre... - 0 views

wagingnonviolence.org/...s-as-connective-thread-for-ows

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Playfully infusing a familiar Occupy Wall Street chant with the mindless noshing of zombies, last month around 100 costumed protestors undertook a small but significant “Night of the Living Debt” march around the New York University campus and Washington Square Park.
  • debt is emerging as a connective thread for OWS organizers and their allies as they begin to build toward the movement’s one year anniversary of September 17, variously known as S17, Black Monday and Occupy Year One.
  • Over two hours, several dozen people from a wide range of backgrounds and generations delivered emotionally-charged, first-person testimonials about the experience of debt-servitude to Wall Street and its intermediary institutions.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent. Almost everyone in the United States is a debtor of some sort. Even those excluded from mainstream credit systems are still preyed upon by lending institutions, exemplified by payday loan sharks and pawn shops that dot poor neighborhoods. Rather than a supplementary facet of the overall economy, the personal debt system is a primary engine of Wall Street profits, and it is prone to crisis.
  • Looming over these discussions of debtors’ movement has been the question of a debt strike, a deliberate withdraw of consent by debtors from the system designed to keep them paying in perpetuity. Millions already do not and cannot pay their debt anyway, and are by default on strike. These de-facto debt-strikers constitute what has been described as an “invisible army of defaulters” with massive political potential. Debt strike — or debt refusal, as OCSDC describe it in an online pledge — is a significant alternative to the notion of debt forgiveness, which has been advocated by some groups rallying around the Student Loan Forgiveness Act. In the words of OSDC member Christopher Casuccio:
  • An intriguing mutual aid pilot project is the idea of a “debt fairy” campaign in which groups of private citizens would pool their resources to purchase defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar from banks — who typically sell to collection agencies — liberating the debtor from their burden. While not a structural solution — and not applicable to student loans — scaled up it could become what David Graeber imagines as a “moving jubilee” capable of both garnering media attention around debtors’ struggles and taking business away from the intermediary companies that profit from hounding and penalizing those unable to pay.
  • If debt is a gateway into a radical conversation about the capitalist system itself, strategic and analytical questions arise about the role of the state — questions that have always haunted OWS as a movement grounded in anarchist principles. What can we learn from the debt cancellation forced upon the Icelandic government by citizens earlier this year? How do we connect the dots between “personal” debt and the public debt of municipalities and governments subjected to corporate bondholders and credit-rating agencies?
  • While it remains to be seen on what terms OWS will collaborate for S17 with its allies in the “99% Opposition” on the institutional left — ranging from the groups gathering for the Student Power Convergence in August to the 99% Spring network, to May Day partners such as SEIU — there are signs of an emerging consensus across the spectrum of the left that debt, and especially student debt, is a key note to hit for a longer-term vision of social and economic renewal. While some will attempt to yoke the energies of S17 to the timeframe of the electoral cycle and ultimately the established mechanisms of the state, OWS will push back with its own sense of time and priorities.
1 - 5 of 5
Showing 20▼ items per page