Acclaimed "Anarchist Anthropologist" David Graeber passed away in 2020, leaving behind an incredible legacy of scathingly insightful examinations of economics and human culture. In addition to being credited with coining the whole "We are the 99%" idea, Graeber is perhaps best known for his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs. — Read the rest
David Graeber hated being called "The Anarchist Anthropologist." But he was both those things — an anarchist activist, a figurehead of the Occupy movement, and a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. His wife reports that he has passed away at the age of 59. — Read the rest
David Graeber defined a "bullshit job" in his viral 2013 essay as jobs that no one -- not even the people doing them -- valued, and he clearly struck a chord: in the years since, Graeber, an anthropologist, has collected stories from people whose bullshit jobs inspired them to get in touch with him, and now he has synthesized all that data into a beautifully written, outrageous and thought-provoking book called, simply, Bullshit Jobs.
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David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, analyzes the rise of the menial, hapless, unfulfilling jobs and their consequences. — Read the rest
Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber made a landmark contribution to the debate about inequality, money, and wealth with his massive 2012 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (a book that helped inspire my 2017 novel Walkaway).
Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber follows up his magesterial Debt: The First 5000 Years with a slim, sprightly, acerbic attack on capitalism's love affair with bureaucracy, asking why the post-Soviet world has more paperwork, phone-trees and red-tape than ever, and why the Right are the only people who seem to notice or care.
Graeber wrote the magisterial Debt: The First 5,000 Years; Piketty, of course, wrote the essential Capital in the 21st Century — in a must-read dialog, they discuss their differences and similarities and offer views on whether capitalism will collapse.
I am cleaning out my family home in New York. Evicted. (police intelligence seems to have played a role.).
— David Graeber (@davidgraeber) April 2, 2014
There is a pattern here: almost everyone mentioned in press as involved in early days of OWS has been getting administrative harassment
— David Graeber (@davidgraeber) April 2, 2014
There have been evictions, visa problems, tax audits… Endless minor harassment arrests
— David Graeber (@davidgraeber) April 2, 2014
David Graeber, author of Debt: the First 5000 Years, was evicted from the home that his family had lived in for 52 years yesterday. — Read the rest
Neptune's Brood is Charlie Stross's newest, weirdest and most thought-provoking book. It's technically something of a followup to Saturn's Children, a funny, sexy late-Heinlein robosexual pastiche, but as the action takes place millennia after Saturn, and as the mood and substance of this book are totally different from it, they're hardly related, properly speaking. — Read the rest
I've previously written about the Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse, and I'm back for more! This time, it's to share a terrific article published this week in The Nation titled "Apocalypse No! Pseudo-Archaeology, Ancient Tech-Lords, and Ordinary People: Why the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse is worth taking seriously. — Read the rest
Do you know who owns your debt? Do you know who makes money off your hustle to pay off the principal, compounding interest and fees, and that strange moral obligation to repay the debt? Is it an investment firm, a rural bank, a person, a government, a church, or a non-profit? — Read the rest
Earlier this week, a disgruntled journalist began railing on Twitter about the tyrannies of editing. While there were some shades of David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" implied between the lines, that particular criticism took a backseat to other, more general ideas about authoritarianism and power. — Read the rest
Robert Skidelsky is an eccentric British economist: trained at Oxford, author of a definitive three-volume biography of Keynes, a Lord who sat with the Tories as their economics critic during the Blair regime, who now sits as an independent who is aligned with Labour's left wing. — Read the rest
The American right spent generations lauding the "free enterprise" spirit of "cutting red tape," contrasting its private sector ethos with the stodgy, Stalinist ways of the USSR, where bureaucrats weaponize forms and other paperwork to oppress the citizenry.
Two competing (or, possibly, complementary?) proposals for resolving income inequality and the hole that four decades of demand-side Reaganomics has dug us into are Universal Basic Income and a federal jobs guarantee (the former being a kind of "venture capital for everyone" that provides enough money to live without having to work for an employer; and the latter being a guarantee of a good, meaningful job of social value in sectors like infrastructure, education and caring professions).
It's been five years since David Graeber's original, groundbreaking essay on "bullshit jobs" (socially useless busywork that everyone — including the holders of bullshit jobs — knew to be a tremendous waste of time), and now he's got a whole book on the subject (if you're in LA, you can see me interviewing him about it on June 13).
The last 40 years has seen a steady rise of deficit-hawking, in which the world's postwar social safety nets are shredded because the state "can't afford" them — think of all the times you've heard of national debt being money that "the taxpayers" will have to pay back, and misleading comparisons between sovereign governments (who print their own money) to households and businesses (who don't), as though sovereign state finance was just a scaled-up version of balancing the family check-book.
In a paper in the World Review of Political Economy, economists from Sichuan University propose a model for an efficient planned economy that uses a hybrid of managed, two-sided "platform" markets (modeled on Ebay, Alibaba and various app stores) and central planning informed by machine learning and big data to fairly and efficiently regulate production in a system in which all substantial assets are owned by the state.
Of all the press-stops I did on my tour for my novel Walkaway, I was most excited about my discussion with Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, where I knew I would have a challenging and meaty conversation with someone who was fully conversant with the political, technological and social questions the book raised.
Every year, Oxfam publishes a headline number about global wealth inequality that takes this form: "The richest X people own more than the poorest Y billion people on Earth" (some examples: 2014, 2016, 2017, UK edition).
