David Graeber

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pages: 199 words: 61,648

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Landlord’s Game, means of production, moral hazard, new economy, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, precariat, Robert Shiller, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, wages for housework

Spy Apocalypse Now Great America Capitalism Titanic Repeat Art One’s Own Guggenheim Capitalism Accounting Art Eat a Peach Accounting Capitalism White Russians Spies Citizens Water Art Blood Bicycle Manifesto The Hug Resignation Work All I Wanted Care Ancient Mew The Gift Consumption The Hole Notes Works People About the Author I am afraid to own a Body – I am afraid to own a Soul – Profound – precarious Property – Possession, not optional – —EMILY DICKINSON If we really want to understand the moral grounds of economic life and, by extension, human life, it seems to me that we must start instead with the very small things. —DAVID GRAEBER CONSUMPTION ISN’T IT GOOD? We’re on our way home from a furniture store, again. What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying? We almost bought something called a credenza, but then John opened the drawers and discovered that it wasn’t made to last.

It costs $200, twice as much as my wedding ring. But I go ahead and buy it. This gives me a strange sense of accomplishment that persists through dinner. On the train home I’m still too tired to read, but I feel like I’ve done something today. Or the necklace has done it for me. CONSUMERS “A metaphor is all this really is,” David Graeber writes. He means consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work—eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.”

“Willing bondage” is how Lewis Hyde describes the service of the artist who is working to master an art, but art doesn’t appear in these definitions. Service is the act of paying interest on a debt, labor that doesn’t produce a commodity, and a ceremony of religious worship. That’s something close to what I had in mind. Service was a way of life in Northern Europe in the Middle Ages, David Graeber writes. Almost everyone was expected to spend some part of their early lives, seven to fifteen years, as a servant. Older children and teenagers, boys and girls both, were sent by their parents to work as servants in other households. This was true even for the elite, who would serve as pages or ladies-in-waiting before becoming knights and noblewomen.


pages: 284 words: 92,387

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

Still, even if you eliminate the contestable categories the numbers are striking, and even more, the fact that the numbers vary dramatically between countries: with Greece, the United States, United Kingdom, and Spain having roughly 20–24 percent of workers doing some sort of guard labor, and Scandinavian countries a mere 1 in 10. The key factor seems to be social inequality: the more wealth is in the hands of the 1 percent, the larger a percentage of the 99 percent they will employ in one way or another to protect it. ALSO BY DAVID GRAEBER Debt: The First 5,000 Years ABOUT THE AUTHOR DAVID GRAEBER teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of several books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years. He has written for Harper’s, The Nation, and other magazines and journals.

The Democracy Project is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed. Copyright © 2013 by David Graeber All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Weekly Standard for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Anarchy in the U.S.A.: The Roots of American Disorder” by Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard, November 28, 2011. Reprinted by permission.

Reprinted by permission. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Graeber, David. The Democracy Project : a history, a crisis, a movement / David Graeber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-0-679-64600-6 1. Democracy—History. I. Title JC421.G677 2013 321.8—dc23 2012031998 www.spiegelandgrau.com Jacket design: Jamie Keenan v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Introduction 1. The Beginning Is Near 2. Why Did It Work? 3. “The Mob Begin to Think and to Reason”: The Covert History of Democracy 4. How Change Happens 5. Breaking the Spell Dedication Acknowledgments Notes Other Books by This Author About the Author INTRODUCTION On April 26, 2012, about thirty activists from Occupy Wall Street gathered on the steps of New York’s Federal Hall, across the street from the Stock Exchange.


pages: 142 words: 45,733

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

—Karl Marx, afterword to the second German edition of Capital What ever happened to Political Economy, leaving me here? —John Berryman, “Dream Song 84” Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction 1. David Harvey: Crisis Theory 2. Fredric Jameson: The Cultural Logic of Neoliberalism 3. Robert Brenner: Full Employment and the Long Downturn 4. David Graeber: In the Midst of Life We Are in Debt 5. Slavoj Žižek: The Unbearable Lightness of “Communism” 6. Boris Groys: Aesthetics of Utopia Guide to Further Reading Introduction To the disappointment of friends who would prefer to read my fiction—as well as of my literary agent, who would prefer to sell it—I seem to have become a Marxist public intellectual.

One of us has just referred to the financial district around us, including the twin towers of the World Trade Center, as the belly of the beast, and it seems to us that from our position in the belly there isn’t anything we can do to provoke the least indigestion in the beast. At the same conference, I’d met the anarchist and scholar David Graeber (whose book Debt: The First 5,000 Years furnishes the subject of another essay here). Graeber struck me then, and on the half-dozen later occasions when we hung out, as a brilliant mind and fascinating talker, but by no means as the sort of person ever likely to be profiled by a major business magazine—as he was in 2011, when Bloomberg Business Week described his connection to a meteoric social movement called Occupy Wall Street.

” * The terror inspired by the notion of a “public option” attached to health care reform always indicated the bad faith behind familiar eulogies to the marvelous competitiveness of capital by comparison with the lumbering state. If the self-description of business were accurate, it would have nothing to fear from public competition. 4 David Graeber: In the Midst of Life We Are in Debt Most analysts divide postwar capitalism into two periods. The first extends from the late 1940s into the 1970s. The end of the second appears to have been announced by the crisis—at first a “financial” crisis, now often a “debt” crisis—that broke out in 2008.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Finally, what measures might be useful in alleviating problems caused by automation? Of course, the way we react to change depends not only on the problem but also on the assumptions we hold about what would constitute a good outcome. Both David Graeber and Rachel Kay favour reducing human work, while Irmgard Nübler focuses on how technological unemployment can be mitigated and job growth maintained. David Graeber argues that the future of technological unemployment predicted by J.M. Keynes has in fact come to pass—but that we have compensated for the lack of work by creating millions of make-work jobs with little purpose.

109 Simon Colton Contents vii Part V Work in the Digital Economy 123 13 Work in the Digital Economy125 Daniel Susskind 14 Two Myths About the Future of the Economy133 Nick Srnicek Part VI AI, Work and Ethics 143 15 AI, Ethics, and the Law145 Cathy O’Neil Part VII Policy 155 16 Policy for the Future of Work157 David Graeber 17 Automation and Working Time in the UK175 Rachel Kay 18 Shaping the Work of the Future: Policy Implications189 Irmgard Nübler Index203 Notes on Contributors James Bessen is an economist who studies technology and innovation policy. He has also been a successful innovator and CEO of a software company.

Frey has served as an advisor and consultant to international organisations, think tanks, government and business, including the G20, the OECD, the European Commission, the United Nations and several Fortune 500 companies. He is also an op-ed contributor to the Financial Times, Scientific American and the Wall Street Journal. In 2016, he was named the second most influential young opinion leader by the Swedish business magazine Veckans Affärer. David Graeber is an American anthropologist, activist and author of Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Rachel Kay is a researcher at the Centre for Global Studies. Before joining the Centre, she completed an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge.


pages: 179 words: 42,081

DeFi and the Future of Finance by Campbell R. Harvey, Ashwin Ramachandran, Joey Santoro, Vitalik Buterin, Fred Ehrsam

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, collateralized debt obligation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, initial coin offering, Jane Street, margin call, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, rent-seeking, RFID, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, smart contracts, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Our goal in this book is to give an overview of the problems that DeFi solves, describe the current and rapidly growing DeFi landscape, and present a vision of the future opportunities that DeFi unlocks. NOTES 1. Alan White, “David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years,” Credit Slips: A Discussion on Credit, Finance, and Bankruptcy, June 18, 2020, https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2020/06/david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years.html. 2. Ibid. See also Euromoney. 2001. “Forex Goes into Future Shock.” (October), https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Media/2001/EuromoneyOct01.pdf. 3. PayPal, founded as Confinity in 1998, did not begin offering a payments function until it merged with X.com in 2000. 4.

Next, we detail the solutions DeFi offers and couple this with a deep dive on some leading ideas in this emerging space. We then analyze the major risk factors and conclude by looking to the future and attempt to identify the winners and losers. NOTES 1. See Alan White, “David Graber's Debt: The First 5000 Years,” Credit Slips, June 24, 2020, https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2020/06/david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years.html. 2. Dean Corbae and Pablo D'Erasmo, “Rising Bank Concentration,” Staff Paper #594, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, March 2020, https://doi.org/10.21034/sr.594 . 3. Plaid, http://plaid.com. 4. R. Chetty, N. Hendren, P. Kline, and E. Saez, “Where Is the Land of Opportunity?

Based on executed purchases and sales, the contract updates the asset size behind both the bid and the ask and uses this ratio to define a pricing function. Barter. A peer-to-peer exchange mechanism in which two parties are exactly matched. For example, A has two pigs and needs a cow. B has a cow and needs two pigs. There is some debate as to whether barter was the first method of exchange. For example, David Graeber argues that the earliest form of trade was in the form of debit–credit. People living in the same village gave each other “gifts,” which by social consensus had to be returned in future by another gift that is usually a little more valuable (interest). People kept track of exchanges in their minds as it was only natural and convenient to do so since there is only a handful sharing the same village.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

“the power of organizing without organization”: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). one of the most radical forms of direct democracy conceivable: For the instituting of participatory democracy within OWS, see David Graeber, “Enacting the Impossible: On Consensus Decision Making,” The Occupied Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2011; Drake Bennett, “David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 26, 2011; and Jeff Sharlet, “Inside Occupy Wall Street,” Rolling Stone, November 10, 2011. For an invaluable survey of some of the movement’s participants (based, unfortunately, on a survey conducted on May 1, 2012, months after the movement’s glory days in the fall of 2011), see Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City (New York: Murphy Institute, 2013).

“There is an energy and an amazing consensus”: DG, “Some Impressions from Saturday and Monday,” 16beaver website, www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms09.23.11.htm. “Consensus only works if working groups”: David Graeber, “Some Remarks on Consensus,” February 26, 2013, http://occupywallst.org, and http://occupywallstreet.net/story/some-remarks-consensus. the militancy of Occupy Oakland: The infatuation with Oakland’s Black Bloc anarchists and their tactics provoked a heated debate. See Chris Hedges, “The Cancer in Occupy,” February 6, 2012, www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206. David Graeber—the most prominent of those infatuated—responded to Hedges with an “open letter,” “Concerning the Violent Peace Police,” February 9, 2012, http://nplusonemag.com/concerning-the-violent-peace-police.

Expecting an open assembly, the radical democrats and anarchists had found instead a few people with megaphones and prefab placards, trying to rally participants for a conventional march that would make conventional demands. In response, the radical democrats, led by an anthropology professor and avowed anarchist named David Graeber, retreated to a corner of the park to discuss alternative steps. Sitting in a circle, they debated how they might better organize a Wall Street occupation. They agreed that they would take seriously the online call to create a general assembly—and proposed implementing one of the most radical forms of direct democracy conceivable: a daily meeting, open to all, where virtually all decisions would be made without voting, by consensus, and formally subject to veto by a single “block,” if anyone felt a proposed decision violated an ethical principle.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

Practised with ‘skill sharing, resource sharing, horizontal organizing without leaders, mutual emotional caretaking, no official membership lists or fees, joining by doing’, consensus contributes to the construction of the non-hegemonic social relationships that enable self-government.88 These ideas also infused the politics of the Occupy movement of 2011, where consensus decision-making was practised by large numbers of people. For David Graeber, one of the leading lights in Occupy, consensus not only described a participatory decision-making practice but an alternative system of self-government. As it was enacted in Occupy camps, consensus emerged as a political practice that enabled participants to take decisions at General Assemblies transparently and directly.

Splitting with the anti-art, Dada-inspired Letterist Isidore Isou, Debord set up the Letterist International (LI) in the early 1950s before founding the Situationist International (SI) in 1957. The SI was dissolved in 1972. In 1989 Debord published Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. He committed suicide five years later.5 DAVID GRAEBER (b. 1961) The anthropologist and activist Graeber was born on the West Side of Manhattan, studied at the State University of New York (Purchase College) and the University of Chicago. He is professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. In the early 2000s he participated in actions in Quebec City and Genoa, at the Republican National Conventions in Philadelphia and New York and the New York meeting of the World Economic Forum.

, in Social Ecology and Communalism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2007), p. 45 [19–52]. 75 Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (London: Verso, 2015), p. 71. 76 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 70. 77 Murray Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose, 1992), p. x. 78 Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, ch. 7: ‘The Organization of Territory’, para. 174, online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/24 [last access 4 June 2018]. 79 Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities, p. 3. 80 Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities, p. x. 81 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 66. 82 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, in Social Ecology and Communalism, p. 66. 83 Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), p. 137. 84 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, p. 61. 85 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 87. 86 David Graeber, ‘Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making)’, Occupy Wall Street, 29 October 2011, online at http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/ [last access 2 December 2017]. 87 Murray Bookchin, ‘What is Communalism? The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism’, Democracy & Nature: The International Journal of Politics and Ecology, 3 (2) (1995), pp. 1–17, online at https://www.democracynature.org/vol3/bookchin_communalism.htm [last access 5 May 2017]. 88 Émilie Breton, Sandra Jeppesen, Anna Kruzynski and Rachel Sarrasin (Research Group on Collective Autonomy), ‘Prefigurative Self-Governance and Self-Organization: The Influence of Antiauthoritarian (Pro)Feminist, Radical Queer, and Antiracist Networks in Quebec’, in Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley and Eric Shragge (eds), Organize!


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

I think I should also thank Megan Laws, the indefatigable LSE anthropology graduate student whose entire job is to monitor my “impact.” I can only hope this book will facilitate her efforts. About the Author © MARI JAN MURAT David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of DEBT: The First 5,000 Years, and a contributor to Harper’s, The Guardian, and The Baffler. He lives in London. MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/David-Graeber @simonbooks We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. * * * Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster.

Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. ALSO BY DAVID GRAEBER Debt: The First 5,000 Years The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Notes Preface: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs 1. I’ve got a lot of push-back about the actuaries, and now think I was being unfair to them. Some actuarial work does make a difference. I’m still convinced the rest could disappear with no negative consequences. 2. David Graeber, “The Modern Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Canberra (Australia) Times online, last modified September 3, 2013, www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/the-modern-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-20130831-2sy3j.html. 3.

The jailers had evidently read the classics. 24. The three-part list is not meant to be comprehensive. For instance, it leaves out the category of what’s often referred to as “guard labor,” much of which (unnecessary supervisors) is bullshit, but much of which is simply obnoxious or bad. 25. In David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 9, I refer to this as “the Iron Law of Liberalism”: that “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.” 26.


Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres by Jamie Woodcock

always be closing, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, David Graeber, emotional labour, gamification, invention of the telephone, job satisfaction, late capitalism, means of production, millennium bug, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, profit motive, scientific management, social intelligence, stakhanovite, technological determinism, women in the workforce

The development of capitalism and the application of technology to the productive process led many to identify the potential to drastically reduce the amount of time that people had to work. David Graeber notes that Keynes predicted in 1930 that by the end of the century the working week would be reduced to 15 hours.48 Not only did this fail to materialise, but the opposite now seems to be true. The potential of technology has instead been exploited to make people work even more. In the place of declining manufacturing jobs there has been an increase in what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’. These jobs are far removed from any fulfilling activity, so much so that many people find it difficult to explain what they are actually employed to do.

No longer faced with the same physical demands of the assembly line, the new demand is for a repetition of the same performance trying to convince people to part with their money for insurance over the phone. The reaction to this is not the loss or alienation of some part of the self; rather it is a ‘condition of estrangement from the mode of production and its rules, as refusal of work’.18 In the call centre, like many of the ‘bullshit jobs’ David Graeber describes,19 it is not a question of seizing back the means of production in order to fulfil the workers’ potential, but resistance is more likely to take the form of refusal. management The role of management in the call centre has been detailed in this book. We began with the figure of Nev, declaring that ‘Napoleon . . . a dictator’ was his inspiration.20 However, this ridiculous statement was not just a performance for the TV programme; it also indicates how much power managers and supervisors have on the call-centre floor.

Gigi Roggero, The Production of Living Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), p. 23. van der Linden, Workers of the World (2008), p. 179. Mario Tronti, ‘The Strategy of Refusal’, Operai e capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), available at: http://libcom.org/library/strategyrefusal-mario-tronti Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 204. David Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, Strike Magazine, 17 August 2013, http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs Ibid. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1999). Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’ (2013). 177 Working the Phones chapter 5 1. Robert Blackburn, Union Character and Social Class (London: Batsford, 1967), p. 18. 2.


pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

Also by David Graeber Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value The False Coin of Our Own Dreams Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Lost People Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar Possibilities Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire Direct Action An Ethnography Debt The First 5,000 Years Revolutions in Reverse Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination The Democracy Project A History, A Crisis, A Movement THE UTOPIA OF RULES Copyright © 2015 by David Graeber First Melville House printing: February 2015 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint a panel from Kultur Dokuments, which originally appeared in Anarchy Comics #2 and was collected in Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection, edited by Jay Kinney and published by PM Press in 2012.

I pointed out that no one had mentioned any such letter previously. “What?” the manager suddenly interjected. “Who gave you those forms and didn’t tell you about the letter?” Since the culprit was one of the more sympathetic bank employees, I dodged the question,40 noting instead that in the bankbook it was printed, quite clearly, “in trust for David Graeber.” He of course replied that would only matter if she was dead. As it happened, the whole problem soon became academic: my mother did indeed die a few weeks later. At the time, I found this experience extremely disconcerting. Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian student existence comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking my friends: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?

Obviously, “fantasy” can refer to a very wide range of literature, from Alice in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to The Call of Cthulhu, and many critics include science fiction as a subgenre of fantasy as well. Still, Middle Earth style heroic fantasy remains the “unmarked term.” 151. Elsewhere, I’ve referred to this as “the ugly mirror phenomenon.” See David Graeber, “There Never Was a West: Democracy Emerges from the Spaces in Between,” in Possibilities: Notes on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), p. 343. 152. The key difference here is no doubt that Medieval carnivals were, in fact, organized largely bottom-up, much unlike Roman circuses. 153.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Countries loaded with old debts are under heavy pressure to deregulate logging and mining and other extractive industries, plundering ecosystems in order to meet their debt obligations. The same is true of households. Researchers have found that households with high-interest mortgages work longer hours than they would otherwise need to simply in order to stay afloat.44 As the anthropologist David Graeber has observed, the financial imperatives of debt ‘reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money’.45 Fortunately, there’s a way to relieve this pressure. We can just cancel some of the debt. In an era of ecological breakdown, debt cancellation becomes a vital step towards a more sustainable economy.

Big creditors would lose out, of course, but we might decide that this is OK – a loss we’re willing to have them bear in order for us to build a fairer and more ecological society. We can cancel debts in such a way that nobody gets hurt.49 Nobody dies. Compound interest is just a fiction, after all. And the nice thing about fictions is that we can change them. Perhaps no one has put this more eloquently than David Graeber: [Debt cancellation] would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is going to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.50 New money for a new economy But debt cancellation is just a one-off fix; it doesn’t really get to the root of the problem.

At every step along the way I have relied on the grace of fellow travelers who have pulled me out of ruts and opened me to new ways of seeing the world. I’ve benefitted immensely from personal conversations – and in some cases collaborations – with Giorgos Kallis, Kate Raworth, Daniel O’Neill, Julia Steinberger, John Bellamy Foster, Ian Gough, Ajay Chaudhary, Glen Peters, Ewan McGaughey, Asad Rehman, Bev Skeggs, David Graeber, Sam Bliss, Riccardo Mastini, Jason Hirsch, Federico de Maria, Peter Victor, Ann Pettifor, Lorenzo Fioramonti, Peter Lipman, Joan Martinez-Alier, Martin Kirk, Alnoor Ladha, Huzaifa Zoomkawala, Patrick Bond, Rupert Read, Fred Damon, Wende Marshall, The Rules team, my editors at the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera and other outlets, where I first worked out many of the ideas that appear in this book, and of course my agent Zoe Ross, and Tom Avery, my editor at Penguin, who were willing to give this idea a platform.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

the United States of America: Morgan Keith, “Over the Last Four Decades, HIV/AIDS Has Killed at Least 700,000 Americans: COVID-19 Has Killed More in Two Years,” Business Insider, October 30, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-19-deaths-americans-hiv-aids-united-states-2021–10. “the ninety-nine percent”: Sam Roberts, “David Graeber, Caustic Critic of Inequality, Is Dead at 59,” New York Times, September 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html. “long-term psychological impoverishment”: The School of Life, “SARTRE ON: Bad Faith,” YouTube video, 3:37, October 30, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxrmOHJQRSs&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=TheSchoolofLife.

This book is also a story of the guides I’ve learned from as I’ve traveled through the viral underclass on five continents: of the doctors, condom-mongers, syringe-exchange volunteers, lovers, librarians, colleagues, boyfriends, sex workers, journalists, bathhouse attendants, friends, activists, bartenders, maps, movies, dogs, doulas, and drag queens who have pointed me in the right direction. By hearing a few of their stories, we will learn together about the structures that ensnare most of us who live in what the late anthropologist David Graeber first called “the ninety-nine percent.” And while these stories will be narrated by me, an American trying to make sense of the particular cruelties of the American empire, the viral underclass is a global phenomenon. This is not a book about or for only the United States of America. While we will follow, on our journey, people in the viral underclass encountering or negotiating life around a number of pathogens, such as hepatitis B (HBV), hepatitis C (HCV), West Nile virus (WNV), influenza, and smallpox, we will see them dealing mostly with two viruses: HIV and SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus.

As with the lynching postcards documenting the public execution of Black Americans that were available at the turn of the twentieth century, videos of police killing people like Oscar Grant in 2009, Eric Garner in 2014, Zak Kostopoulos in 2018, and George Floyd in 2020 serve both as proof of murder and, as they circulate online, a warning to marginalized folks of what could happen to them if they ever step out of line. Before I arrived in Greece, I understood how governmental debt can lead to austerity, ruthless policing, and disease. Anthropologist David Graeber, in writing about the uprisings in St. Louis County, gave a simple, definitive example of austerity in 2015: “Increasingly, cities find themselves in the business of arresting citizens in order to pay creditors,” fining arrestees because “local governments have become deeply indebted to large, private financial institutions—many of the same ones that brought us the crash of 2008.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Moreover, participative democracy might well be constructed without them, particularly using the communications technologies available today. Another folk-political constraint emerged with the emphasis on consensus as a basic goal of the process. The aim of consensus is to reach a decision that is acceptable to everyone, again reliant upon spatial immediacy. As anarchist David Graeber notes, ‘It is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to convince those who do not to go along with it.’41 Yet what works well on one scale (the face-to-face community) is much more difficult to make work on larger ones.

., Communism in the 21st Century, Volume 3: The Future of Communism (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013). 34.Isabel Ortiz, Sara Burke, Mohamed Berrada and Hernán Cortés, World Protests 2006–2013 (New York: Initiative for Policy Dialogue and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2013), pdf available at fes-globalization.org. 35.Michael Albert, Parecon: Life After Capitalism (London: Verso, 2004). 36.Samuel Farber, ‘Reflections on “Prefigurative Politics”’, International Socialist Review 92 (March 2011), at isreview.org. 37.Jane McAlevey, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (London: Verso, 2014), p. 11. 38.Not An Alternative, ‘Counter Power as Common Power’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 9 (2014), at joaap.org. 39.Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics 12: 3 (2014). 40.Rodrigo Nunes, Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks (London: Mute, 2014), p. 36. 41.David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm, 2004), p. 89. 42.Helen Hester, ‘Synthetic Genders and the Limits of Micropolitics’, … ment 6 (2015). 43.Marco Desiriis and Jodi Dean, ‘A Movement Without Demands?’ Possible Futures, 3 January 2012, at possible-futures.org. 44.Noam Chomsky, Occupy (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 58. 45.Not An Alternative, ‘Counter Power as Common Power’. 46.Ibid. 47.Jeroen Gunning and Ilan Zvi Baron, Why Occupy a Square?

., p. 6. 56.The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 12; John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2010); Nathan Brown, ‘Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Badiou and Theorie Communiste in the Age of Riots’, Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 5 (2012); David Graeber, ‘Afterword’, in Khatib et al., We Are Many, p. 425. 57.Spence and McGuire, ‘Occupy and the 99%’, p. 61. 58.Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London: Verso, 2012), p. 63. 59.In light of the emergence of Occupy, McKenzie Wark memorably asked: How do you occupy an abstraction?


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How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

Keith Roberts, The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 126; “Temple archives demonstrate that the temple held deposits by individuals but did not allow others to access them or in any other way use the negotiable instruments that complete the definition of ‘banking.’ … So temples were not ‘banks’ in antiquity. Rather, the more precise designation for the role of the temple in antiquity would be ‘financial intermediary.’ ” David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 13. 2. Earlier Italian banks formed during the fifteenth century. The Medici Bank and those in the Venetian Republic were family-run institutions that lent to the crown but were not as integrally tied to the state and did not issue government bonds.

Peter Rose, The Interstate Banking Revolution (New York: Quorum Books, 1989), 4–5. 64. “Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held in Chicago, Illinois, July 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1896,” in The Annals of America, vol. 12, 1895–1904: Populism, Imperialism, and Reform (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968), 100–105. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012), 52–53. 69. In fact, Grossman and Calomiris and Haber all remark on just how uniquely unstable this period was. Calomiris and Haber, Fragile by Design, 183; Grossman, Unsettled Accounts, 68. 70. Political debates during this era, and especially the presidential election of 1908, were focused on banking reform.

Courts will not enforce contracts that run counter to public policy or are not allowed by law, such as selling babies, organs, cocaine, or human slaves. 2. This is not to say that human civilization was ever free of usury. In fact, predatory lending has been present ever since human societies have existed but has generally operated on the fringe of society within a sphere of corruption, violence, and stigma. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House 2011), 10–11. 3. Ronald W. Del Sesto, “Should Usury Statutes Be Used to Solve the Installment Sales ‘Problem?,’ ” Boston College Law Review 5, no. 7 (1964): 389, 390. 4. L. C. Jain, Indigenous Banking in India (London: Macmillan, 1929).


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Our addiction to consumption is enabled mostly by robots and Third World wage slaves. And although agricultural and manufacturing production capacity have grown exponentially over the past decades, employment in these industries has dropped. So is it really true that our overworked lifestyle all comes down to out-of-control consumerism? David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, believes there’s something else going on. A few years ago he wrote a fascinating piece that pinned the blame not on the stuff we buy but on the work we do. It is titled, aptly, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” In Graeber’s analysis, innumerable people spend their entire working lives doing jobs they consider to be pointless, jobs like telemarketer, HR manager, social media strategist, PR advisor, and a whole host of administrative positions at hospitals, universities, and government offices.

After all, for the moment our clothes aren’t being produced by steel robotic arms or intelligent cyborgs but by fragile children’s fingers in Vietnam and China. For many companies, outsourcing work to Asians still beats using robots. This could also be why we’re still waiting for so many of the big technological dreams of the twentieth century to materialize. See: David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler (2012). 30. Andrew McAfee, “Even Sweatshops are Getting Automated. So What’s Left?” (May 22, 2014). http://andrewmcafee.org/2014/05/mcafee-nike-automation-labor-technology-globalization/ 31. Steven E. Jones, Against Technology. From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (2006), Chapter 2. 32.

The cynical thing is that claimants often aren’t even allowed to do purposeful work in exchange for their benefits because that would lead to fewer paid jobs. 37. Deborah Padfield, “Through the eyes of a benefits adviser: a plea for a basic income,” Open Democracy (October 5, 2011). http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/deborah-padfield/through-eyes-of-benefits-adviser-plea-for-basic-income 38. David Graeber, “On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Strike! Magazine (August 17, 2013). http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-job 7 Why It Doesn’t Pay to Be a Banker 1. This reconstruction of the strike is based on contemporary coverage in The New York Times. 2. Though officially there were only 12,281 lobbyists registered in Washington in 2014, this misrepresents the situation since an increasing share of lobbyists operates underground.


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The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

It is not just an economic claim, it is a highly moral one. It’s about giving people what they are due. It’s about accepting one’s responsibilities. It’s about fulfilling one’s obligations. Refusing to pay a debt seems like reneging on a promise – it’s just wrong. And this is why debt is so powerful. The anthropologist David Graeber puts it nicely when he says, ‘There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt – above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.’54 There have been some efforts to challenge the framing around debt, and to call it what it is.

Five: Debt and the Economics of Planned Misery 1  ‘It drove right to the …’ For more on this movement, see Vijay Prashad’s excellent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007). 2  ‘The idea was to create …’ Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London: Verso Books, 2013). 3  ‘Outraged by this incursion …’ This shipment was known as Operation Nickel Grass. 4  ‘In response, the Arab coalition …’ Egypt’s Sadat managed to convince Saudia Arabia’s King Faisal to make this move. 5  ‘Desperate for a quick solution …’ Lizette Alvarez, ‘Britain says US Planned to seize oil in ’73 crisis’, New York Times, 2 January 2004. 6  ‘As a result of the oil …’ The $450 billion figure reflects petrodollar influx into OPEC as of 1981. 7  ‘Loan pushers were trained …’ John Perkins offers a troubling account of his time as a loan pusher during those years, in his bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. 8  ‘These “juicers” created a strong …’ Perkins, Economic Hit Man. 9  ‘By 1982, total debt stocks …’ In 2013 dollars, according to World Development Indicators (DataBank). 10 ‘Through the miracle of compound …’ In 2013 dollars, according to World Development Indicators (DataBank). 11 ‘And that’s exactly what happened …’ Average interest rates on new loans to global South countries shot up from 5 per cent in 1970 to more than 10 per cent in 1981. 12 ‘In 1982, Mexico took …’ In current dollars. 13 ‘In other words, the IMF …’ I am indebted to my colleague David Graeber for this comparison. 14 ‘This is how the plan …’ The IMF had been using conditional lending since 1952, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that this power was leveraged to impose a specific economic ideology around the world. This idea was first hatched by World Bank president Robert McNamara (formerly president of Ford Motor Company, and then Secretary of Defense) in 1979.

See note in Chapter 1 for more on Köhler’s methods and the meaning of unequal exchange. 50 ‘Altogether, during the whole period …’ All of these figures come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, accessed through DataBank, and are reported in 2013 dollars. 51 ‘Lebanon, for instance, spends 52 …’ New Economics Foundation, ‘Debt Relief as if Justice Mattered’, 2008. 52 ‘The rest was piled up …’ J. W. Smith, The World’s Wasted Wealth (Sun City, AZ: Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 1994), p. 143. 53 ‘External debt as a percentage …’ External debt stocks (percentage of GNI), World Bank, International Debt Statistics. 54 ‘“There’s no better way …”’ David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), p. 5. 55 ‘In all of these cases …’ In other words, in order win debt relief a country must first agree to submit to IMF structural adjustment. 56 ‘One of the key tenets …’ Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 57 ‘The World Bank itself defines …’ World Bank, ‘What is Development?’


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The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

#OccupyWallStreet, September 17, Bring Tent,” Adbusters, Poster (2011), http//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/57/WallStreet-1.jpg, accessed June 28, 2021; William Yardley, “The Branding of the Occupy Movement,” New York Times, November 27, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/media/the-branding-of-the-occupy-movement.html, accessed June 28, 2021. 55.Schwartz, “Pre-Occupied”; Brian Greene, “How ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Started and Spread,” USNews.com, October 17, 2011, https://www.usnews.com/news/washington-whispers/articles/2011/10/17/how-occupy-wall-street-started-and-spread, accessed April 28, 2021; David Graeber, “Occupy’s Liberation from Liberalism: The Real Meaning of May Day,” The Guardian, May 7, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/07/occupy-liberation-from-liberalism, accessed April 28, 2021. On the student debt crisis, see Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Indentured Students: How Government-Guaranteed Loans Left Generations Drowning in College Debt (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021). 56.David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011); on 1990s protest, see Richard Saich, “Contesting Neoliberalism: Social Movements and Resistance in America, 1982–2000” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2022). 57.Schwartz, “Pre-Occupied”; Mattathias Schwartz, “Map: How Occupy Wall Street Chose Zuccotti Park,” New Yorker, November 21, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20140405004551/http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-map.html, accessed April 28, 2021; Brian Greene, “How ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Started and Spread,” USNews.com, October 17, 2011, https://www.usnews.com/news/washington-whispers/articles/2011/10/17/how-occupy-wall-street-started-and-spread, accessed September 9, 2021. 58.On the demographics of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, see Laura Norén, “Occupy Wall Street Demographics,” Thesocietypages.org, November 17, 2011, https://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/2011/11/17/occupy-wall-street-demographics/, accessed June 28, 2021; Jillian Berman, “Occupy Wall Street Actually Not at All Representative of the 99 Percent, Report Finds,” Huffington Post, January 29, 2021, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/occupy-wall-street-report_n_2574788?

The widening economic inequality of American life, the architects of this slogan charged, had reached grotesque proportions. It had to be stopped, and then reversed.55 Many rallying to the “99 percent” slogan were new to politics. However, their ranks were leavened by anarchists and other veterans of the protests against the WTO that had flared briefly but fiercely in the 1990s. One of the latter was David Graeber, a University of Chicago–trained anthropologist and anarchist thinker then teaching at Goldsmiths, part of the University of London. Graeber had written sweepingly about how debt across the ages had been a key instrument used by elites to ensnare ordinary people in poverty and dependency. He wanted all debt forgiven immediately, the surest way, he argued, to free people from oppression and bring the world’s powerful financial institutions to heel.

Across the next five years, left-leaning intellectuals and politicians acquired an influence on American politics that they had not enjoyed since the heyday of the New Deal order in the 1930s and 1940s.59 The leftist moment that Occupy inaugurated was marked by the flourishing of the so-called little magazines of the left, old (Dissent) and new (n + 1 and Jacobin), full of ideas about how to build radically different futures; by dramatic growth in the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America; by the popularity of books like Capital to the Twenty-First Century, an 800-page tome on inequality published by French economist Thomas Piketty in 2013 that sold approximately 3 million hardcover copies in the United States and beyond; by the soaring reputations of left-leaning writer-activists (and anti-neoliberal crusaders) Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and David Graeber; and by the sudden appearance in electoral politics of individuals who made a critique of free market capitalism—and the concentration of wealth and power that went with it—their signature message. Elizabeth Warren won election as a US senator from Massachusetts in 2012 by making attacks on the dominance and irresponsibility of America’s mega-banks the centerpiece of her campaign.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

This feels wrong because our social psychology and our economic debate is often characterized by a picture-book nostalgia. It seems that we have lost ‘real jobs’ where ‘real men’ produced things you could drop on your foot – the kind of jobs that are in children’s picture books. In exchange we get a lot of unsatisfactory bullshit jobs (as David Graeber called them in a popular book of the same name) with temporary contracts where it’s unclear what is actually produced. Which children’s books are really about art directors, personal trainers, PR consultants, content managers, food couriers or biotechnological analysts? The picture books should be supplemented with the views of people who have actually worked in those fabled factories.

During this quarter of a century, when tougher competition and globalization are said to have undermined all good jobs, the proportion who are completely satisfied with their work increased from 35 to 56 per cent. (Together with those who are reasonably satisfied, it is now almost nine out of ten workers.) The proportion who are satisfied with the amount of work required of them has increased by a third and the proportion dissatisfied has halved.25 Some critics of modern working life, such as David Graeber and Roland Paulsen, say that all the time we spend talking on the phone, emailing, playing and wasting time at work shows that we may not have very important and meaningful jobs.26 Of course, this can be the case, although it may be more about our need for micro-breaks and distractions even when doing something urgent.

Annual geographic mobility rates, by type of movement: 1948–2020’, www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/geographic-mobility/historic.html. 23. Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina & Max Roser, ‘Working hours’, Our World in Data, December 2020. 24. Ibid. 25. Gallup, ‘Work and Workplace’, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1720/work-work-place.aspx. 26. David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Simon & Schuster, 2018. Roland Paulsen, The Working Society: How Work Survived Technology, Gleerups, 2010. See also Andreas Bergh, ‘Tre böcker av Roland Paulsen – en kritisk läsning’, Ekonomisk Debatt, no.3, 2017. 27. Graeber 2018, pp.xix, xxiv. 28. Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood, Brendan Burchell, ‘Alienation is not “bullshit”: An empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS jobs’, Work, Employment and Society, June 2021. 29.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

community-minded version of Darwin: Of course, we mustn’t forget that critics find evidence of “scientific racism” in his work, citing examples like this sentence from The Descent of Man: that at “some time the civilized races of man will exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” the late scholar and activist David Graeber wondered: David Graeber, “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?,” The Baffler 24 (January 2014), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun. “A Symbiotic View of Life”: In an essay by Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber from 2012 titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” the authors write that while “the notion of the ‘biological individual’ is crucial to studies of genetics, immunology, evolution . . .” in the twenty-first century, the level at which animals and plants are interconnected with “symbiotic microorganisms” has come to disrupt the boundaries of the individual, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/668166.

It is also a gentler, snuggly-er “dependence of one being on another and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual. . . .” For Johnson and other researchers, this more community-minded version of Darwin guided not only their intellectual works but their belief systems. This included humanities folks who have joined their virtual institute, among them the late scholar and activist David Graeber, who wondered, “Why should worker bees kill themselves to protect their hive?” To protect their community over themselves was Graeber’s answer, in his essay that also presented a Mutual Aid Darwin. It’s also a position refracted in harder sciences as well. A recent essay along these lines stridently titled “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.”


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

He was an activist and public intellectual of international repute who tried to live his ideas about social justice and liberation, giving hope to the oppressed and inspiring countless others to follow suit. The book is dedicated to the fond memory of David Graeber (1961–2020) and, as he wished, to the memory of his parents, Ruth Rubinstein Graeber (1917–2006) and Kenneth Graeber (1914–1996). May they rest together in peace. Acknowledgements Sad circumstances oblige me (David Wengrow) to write these acknowledgements in David Graeber’s absence. He is survived by his wife Nika. David’s passing was marked by an extraordinary outpouring of grief, which united people across continents, social classes and ideological boundaries.

BY THE SAME AUTHORS David Graeber: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar Direct Action: An Ethnography Debt: The First 5,000 Years The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Bullshit Jobs: A Theory David Wengrow: The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 bc What Makes Civilization?

BY THE SAME AUTHORS David Graeber: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar Direct Action: An Ethnography Debt: The First 5,000 Years The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy Bullshit Jobs: A Theory David Wengrow: The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 bc What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction Copyright © 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow Signal and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

J. Gordon, “Aristotle, Schumpeter, and the Metallist Tradition,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 75 (4) (1961): 608–14. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: Martin, Money, 8–10. The anthropologist David Graeber hypothesizes: David Graeber, “On the Invention of Money—Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics,” http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money-%E2%80%93-notes-on-sex-adventure-monomaniacal-sociopathy-and-the-true-function-of-economics.html. Money, then, made human settlements less vulnerable: See Martin, Money, 50–64.

You draw on the writings of dozens of twentieth-century anthropologists who have visited places where currencies weren’t used; anthropologists who claim to have found no evidence that these peoples ever engaged in barter, at least not as the primary system of exchange. Instead, these societies came up with elaborate codes of behavior for sorting out their various debts and obligations. Debt, in other words, came first. The anthropologist David Graeber hypothesizes that specific debt agreements likely evolved out of gift exchanges, which generated the sense of owing a favor. After that, codified value systems may have emerged from the penalties that tribes meted out for various wrongdoings: twenty goats, say, for killing someone’s brother. From there human beings started to think about money as a system for resolving, offsetting, and clearing those debts across society.


pages: 909 words: 130,170

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

‘Our laborious manner of life . . . they esteem slavish and base,’ Franklin observed of his Indian neighbours, and noted that while he and his fellow colonists were hostage to ‘infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature’ that were often ‘difficult to satisfy’, the Indians had only ‘few . . . wants’, all of which were easily met by ‘the spontaneous productions of nature with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty’. As a result, compared to the colonists, Franklin noted somewhat enviously, the Indians enjoyed an ‘abundance of leisure’, which, in happy accordance with his views that idleness was a vice, they used for debate, reflection and refining their oratorical skills. As the anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, Adam Smith’s parable of the entrepreneurial savages has become ‘the founding myth of our system of economic relations’ and is retold uncritically in pretty much every introductory academic textbook. The problem is that it has no basis in fact. When Caroline Humphrey, a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, conducted an exhaustive review of the ethnographic and historical literature looking for societies that had barter systems like that described by Smith, she eventually gave up and concluded ‘no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money’, and that ‘all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing’..

And while views on what counts as entertainment vary, few people dispute the fact that entertainers, chefs, musicians, tour guides, hoteliers, masseuses and others whose work involves bringing others happiness or stimulating and inspiring them are important too. One of the most novel approaches to re-categorising roles in the service sector is that proposed by the anthropologist David Graeber. In a brief essay he wrote in 2013, which subsequently went viral and later formed the basis of a book, he differentiated between jobs that were genuinely useful, like teaching, medicine, farming and scientific research, and the apparent efflorescence of other jobs that served no obvious purpose other than giving someone something to do.

Ancient Greek philosophers, for instance, may have been contemptuous of hard manual labour but they still acknowledged its fundamental importance, even if they had slaves to do it for them. The same principle is also discussed in the writings of fourteenth-century scholars like Thomas Aquinas – who insisted that any commodity’s value should ‘increase in relation to the amount of labour which has been expended in the improvement’ of it. As the anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, Adam Smith’s parable of the entrepreneurial savages has become ‘the founding myth of our system of economic relations’ and is retold uncritically in pretty much every introductory academic textbook. The problem is that it has no basis in fact. When Caroline Humphrey, a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, conducted an exhaustive review of the ethnographic and historical literature looking for societies that had barter systems like that described by Smith, she eventually gave up and concluded ‘no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money’, and that ‘all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing’..


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

This view was put forward, for example, in 1864 by Bruno Hildebrand of the German historical school of economics; it happens to be wrong.”17 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, a rare academic consensus had been reached amongst those with an interest in empirical evidence that the conventional idea that money emerged from barter was false. As the anthropologist David Graeber explained bluntly in 2011: “[T]here’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not.”18 The story of Yap does not just present a challenge to the conventional theory’s account of money’s origins, however. It also raises serious doubts about its conception of what money actually is.

., p. 97. 7. Ibid., pp. 97–8. 8. Keynes, 1915a. 9. Aristotle, 1932, I.3.13–14. As we shall see in chapter 8, Aristotle also developed a quite different theory, however. 10. Locke, 2009, pp. 299–301. 11. Smith, A., 1981, pp. 37–8. 12. Ibid., p. 38. 13. Ibid., pp. 38–9. 14. The anthropologist David Graeber exasperates himself presenting a catalogue of examples from recent textbooks in Graeber, 2011, p. 23. 15. Dalton, 1982. 16. Humphrey, 1985, p. 48. 17. Kindleberger, 1993, p. 21. 18. Graeber, 2011, p. 28. 19. Smith, T., 1832, p. 11ff. 20. Mitchell Innes, 1913. Like, I expect, most modern readers, I owe the discovery of both this essay and Mitchell Innes, 1914 to Wray, 2004. 21.

Finally, two significant books on money were published in the U.K. when I was already in the midst of writing, with the unfortunate result that I was not able to absorb and make reference to them as I would in retrospect have liked. These are Philip Coggan’s Paper Promises: Money, Debt, and the New World Order (Coggan, 2011) and David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber, 2011). BOOKS AND ARTICLES Alessandri, P., and Haldane, A. (2009), Banking on the State. London: Bank of England. Amis, M. (1984), Money: A Suicide Note. London: Vintage. Andreau, J. (1999), Banking and Business in the Roman World (tr. Lloyd, J.).


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now , Pinker credits the European Enlightenment (the same one that brought us John Locke and the justification of slavery) with an aggregate decline in violence and increase in health, longevity, education level, and universal human rights. It’s a highly problematic account. First off, as David Graeber and David Wendgrow demonstrated in their myth-smashing book, The Dawn of Everything , the oversimplified unidirectional narrative of civilizational progress from agriculture to cities and through technology and the Enlightenment to modern society is just wrong. There have been all sorts of different city-states throughout history, with and without what we think of as technology.

How Growing Rent-Seeking Is at the Heart of America’s Economic Troubles,” Journal of Public and International Affairs , https:// jpia .princeton .edu /news /something -nothing -how -growing -rent -seeking -heart -americas -economic -troubles.   74   “some kinds of social change” : Jennifer Szalai, “Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity Is Doing Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans,” New York Times , February 28, 2018, https:// www .nytimes .com /2018 /02 /28 /books /review -enlightenment -now -steven -pinker .html.   74   The Dawn of Everything : David Graeber and David Wendgrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).   74   problem with Pinker’s oft-quoted statistics : Jeremy Lent, “Steven Pinker’s Ideas Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why,” openDemocracy , May 21, 2018, https:// www .opendemocracy .net /en /transformation /steven -pinker -s -ideas -are -fatally -flawed -these -eight -graphs -show -why /.   75   “As we have seen” : Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin, 2018), 109.   75   “What we want … fast as you can” : “Dr.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

But in the face of perhaps the biggest challenge for seventy-five years, government, corporate and even personal thinking was often trapped by the models of the past, incapable of building those of the future on the fly. Despite all our technologies, businesses and knowledge, we are vulnerable. Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel famously encapsulated the argument as ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ But there is more to it than that – in the words of David Graeber, it encompasses ‘a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise – of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what the adult world was supposed to be like’.5 This isn't just about flying cars and colonies on Mars, the tug of war between techno optimism and pessimism.

The shape of academia is more settled as a result: in the twentieth century we gained such major new disciplines as anthropology and psychology, computer science and biochemistry, management studies and media studies. In the twenty-first century came a proliferation of niche masters’ degrees, but few major new branches of knowledge. Few would call this a golden age for original thought. Bemoaning the state of the humanities and social sciences, the anthropologist David Graeber saw an attenuation of ambitious thinking. Everyone still endlessly discusses the thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s without producing comparable work: ‘No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years.’ 15 The philosopher Agnes Callard agrees, writing, ‘When I am asked for sources of “big ideas” in philosophy – the kind that would get the extra-philosophical world to stand up and take notice – I struggle to list anyone born after 1950.’ 16 Similarly a study of 500 Western polymathic intellectuals finds plenty born in the 1940s, from Julia Kristeva to Vaclav Smil, Jacqueline Rose to Bruno Latour, but encounters a precipitous fall from the 1950s on: ‘The drop around 1950 may be an alarm signal’, the author writes.17 In a core area of big ideas – political thinking – intellectuals are in full-scale retreat.

My thanks to: Euan Adie, Azeem Azhar, Courtney Biles, Francis Casson, Krishan Chadha, Sen Chai, Ben Chamberlain, Tom Chatfield, Harry Cliff, Matt Clifford, Daniel Crewe, Lee Cronin, Payel Das, Danny Dorling, Eric Drexler, Fredrik Erixon, Jeremy Farrar, Iason Gabriel, Ian Goldin, Robert J. Gordon, the late and much missed David Graeber, Alexey Guzey, Anton Howes, William Isaac, Matthew Jockers, Benjamin F. Jones, Richard A.L. Jones, Victoria Krakovna, Roman Krznaric, François Lafond, James Le Fanu, Joel Mokyr, Geoff Mulgan, Mikko Packalen, Carlota Perez, Mark Piesing, Benjamin Reinhardt, Matt Ridley, Jack Scannell, Vera Schäfer, Ben Southwood, Peter Watson and Michael Webb.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

If Frey and Osborne are right, and 47 percent of jobs may be automated in the next two decades, then we face one of two possible futures. The dystopian future of mass unemployment and psychological alienation leading to deep social unrest is one we have already seen in Blade Runner. The only present remedy is to create millions of low-wage “bullshit jobs”—the writer David Graeber’s term. Graeber notes, “Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

Andrew Gumbel, “San Francisco’s Guerrilla Protest and Google Buses Swells into Revolt,” Guardian, January 25, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/25/google-bus-protest-swells-to-revolt-san-francisco. Tom Perkins, “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?” Letter to the Editor, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014, www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (London: Melville House, 2015). This is a funny, biting chronicle of the world of “bullshit jobs.” Chapter Eleven: What It Means to Be Human Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (New York: Portfolio, 2014).


pages: 317 words: 71,776

Inequality and the 1% by Danny Dorling

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, David Attenborough, David Graeber, delayed gratification, Dominic Cummings, double helix, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, family office, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, land value tax, Leo Hollis, Londongrad, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, mega-rich, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor

It may even be one of the best measures of inequality to consider in terms of how simple a target it may be for effective social policy.12 Economists have measured the fortunes of the best-off 1 per cent for decades. Only recently have political activists, campaigners, and even those anarchists who most distrust economists become as interested in these statistics. In 2011 David Graeber was credited with coining the phrase ‘We are the 99 per cent’, and so made the best-off 1 per cent the object of opposition. And with that phrase came what appeared to be new home truths. For example, for the 99 per cent, as Graeber explains, for most people ‘the fear of losing your job is far greater than the hope of finding a truly fulfilling one’.13 However, not all of the 99 per cent are unfulfilled, and many of the 1 per cent undertake work they find dull just to remain in that income bracket – though their income often means that in the rest of life they have choices that others can only dream of, other than the choice to be normal.

While better than the Gini measure, it is still not as simple as the 1 per cent measure, and may well not correlate as well with social problems. On the Palma ratio, see A. Cobham, ‘Palma vs Gini: Measuring Post-2015 Inequality’, Centre for Global Development Blog, 5 March 2014, at cgdev.org. 13. D. Runciman, ‘The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber – review’, Guardian, 31 March 2013. 14. When the very well-paid, now publicly owned, financial institutions such as Royal Bank of Scotland are excluded. See ONS, ‘Labour Market Statistics’, 16 October 2013, at ons.gov.uk. 15. We know it is roughly fifteen times as much, because that figure is given by the World Top Incomes Database – the most respected source in the world.


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Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

In subscribing to this notion, the left unconsciously accepts the key notion of the populist right and the neoclassical orthodoxy, that “nothing is substantially different between then and now.” Markets are timeless entities with timeless laws, they insist. Indeed, this is the identical premise of some of the most popular crisis books of the last few years, from Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s This Time Is Different to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.24 Yet that is precisely where the polemical divergence should originate on the left. Things are profoundly different about the economy, the society, and in the global political arena than they were during the Cold War: some recent neoliberal innovations have lent the current crisis its special bitter tang; understanding precisely how and where they are different is a necessary first step in developing a blueprint for a better world.

Kalle Lasn Associates has also published an anti-textbook entitled Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics which contains contributions by George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz. At least the graphics were radical. Similar ideas were promoted in the curiously titled Occupy Handbook, which included chapters by Raghuram Rajan, Tyler Cowen, Martin Wolf, David Graeber, Jeffrey Sachs, and Robert Shiller.6 Besotted by the millenarian idea of starting anew, and lacking any sense of the history of protest and political organization, both neoliberals and neoclassical economists rapidly addled whatever political curiosity and radical inclinations that the well-intentioned protestors might have had.

Johnson, Simon, and James Kwak. 13 Bankers (New York: Pantheon, 2010). Jones, Daniel Stedman. Masters of the Universe: Friedman, Hayek and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Jones, Owen. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso, 2011). Jones, Rachel. “Bookforum Talks with David Graeber” (2012), at www.bookforum.com/interview/9154. Jovanovic, Franck. “Finance in Modern Economic Thought,” in Alex Preda and Karin Knorr-Cetina, eds., Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Judt, Tony. Ill Fares the Land (London: Penguin, 2010). Jung, Alexander. “The EU’s Emissions Trading System Isn’t Working,” Der Spiegel, February 15, 2012.


pages: 206 words: 9,776

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, David Graeber, deindustrialization, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Murray Bookchin, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, precariat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, special economic zone, the built environment, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, urban planning, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche, Works Progress Administration

To top it all, there is a conspicuous absence of broadly agreed concrete proposals as to how to reorganize divisions of labor and (monetized?) economic transactions throughout the world to sustain a reasonable standard of living for all. Indeed, this problem is all too often cavalierly evaded. As a leading anarchist thinker, David Graeber, puts it, echoing the reservations of Murray Bookchin set out above: Temporary bubbles of autonomy must gradually turn into permanent, free com munities. However, in order to do so, those communities cannot exist in total isolation; neither can they have a purely confrontational rela­ tion with everyone around them.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, London: Pengui n, 1 978; David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volu me 2, London: Verso, forthcoming. 9. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: OUP, 2005. 1 0. Murray Bookchin, Urban iza tion Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1 992. 1 1 . David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009: 239. See also Ana Dinerstein, Andre Spicer, and Steffen Bohm, "The (lm)possibilities of Autonomy, Social Movement in and Beyond Capi tal, the State and Development;' Non- Governmental Public Action Program, Working Papers, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009. 1 2.


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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

There’s no need to be afraid of the technology – it’s how we use it that matters. The invention of the power loom didn’t have to create a hateful factory system and slum cities – it could have freed men and women from long hours of work. Instead, working hours increased. Getting rid of what the great economist and anthropologist David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’ is not anything to mourn. What we need is economic fairness. What we need is to get away from the false binary of sustainability or growth. What we need in the Information Age really is information; not propaganda, fake news, outright lies. Our problem is that governments do not know how to legislate Big Tech.

Haraway The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil, 2005 The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels, 1845 The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848 The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill, 1869 The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson, 1963 Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, Eric Hobsbawm, 1968 Why the West Rules – For Now, Ian Morris, 2010 Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber, 2011 ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (poem), Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1832: ‘Ye are many—they are few’ ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’ (essay), Simon Fairlie, 2009 PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason, 2015 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, 2013 Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon have cornered culture and undermined democracy, Jonathan Taplin, 2017 The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot, 1860 From Sci-fi to Wi-fi to My-Wi Rocannon’s World, Ursula K.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

That might work in theory, but when those insiders’ priorities are not aligned with what’s good for the general public, then we have a problem. Indeed, the careful cultivation and protection of that group of technocrats by both Wall Street and Washington is one reason the discussion around financialization and its perverse effects on our economy has become so muddled. As the anthropologist David Graeber, one of the key participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement, has pointed out, bureaucracy of this kind is the enemy. Incomprehensible rules crafted and controlled by a small cadre of insiders, discussed in a language that only they find comprehensible, is one of the key ways that elites maintain power—in finance and elsewhere.19 Financiers claim that their disproportionate privilege is a reward for the responsibilities they assume for lubricating the economy.

Taylor, Robin Greenwood, David Scharfstein, Raghuram G. Rajan, Carmen Reinhart, Ken Rogoff, Thomas Philippon, Robert Atkinson, J. W. Mason, Luigi Zingales, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Jeff Madrick, George Akerlof, Robert Shiller, John Coates, Karen Ho, Enisse Kharroubi, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, David Graeber, Charles Calomiris, Stephen H. Haber, Allan H. Meltzer, Robert Reich, Alan Blinder, John Asker, Joan Farre-Mensa, Alexander Ljungqvist, Kimberly Krawiec, Thomas Ferguson, Gerald Epstein, Michael Spence, Sarah Edelman, Monique Morrissey, Mariana Mazzucato, Atif Mian, and Amir Sufi. Finally, the biggest thanks of all to my husband, John Sedgwick, the author of thirteen books himself, who talked me down from the ledge numerous times during the three years it took to complete this project.

For example, Princeton economist and former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder has estimated, in a study he coauthored with Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, that without the bailouts, American GDP would have plunged 12 percent rather than 4 percent. See Alan S. Blinder and Mark Zandi, “Stimulus Worked,” Finance & Development 47, no. 4 (December 2010). 19. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015). 20. Mason, “Disgorge the Cash,” 32. 21. William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review, September 2014; Drew Desilver, Pew Research Center, “For Most Workers, Real Wages Have Barely Budged for Decades,” October 9, 2014. 22.


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Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

The large cities in the pre-Christian ancient world, particularly in the Levant and Asia Minor, were full of fraternities and clubs, open and (often) secret societies—there was even such a thing as funeral clubs, where members shared the costs, and participated in the ceremonials, of funerals. Today’s Roma people (aka Gypsies) have tons of strict rules of behavior toward Gypsies, and others toward the unclean non-Gypsies called payos. And, as the anthropologist David Graeber has observed, even the investment bank Goldman Sachs, known for its aggressive cupidity, acts like a communist community from within, thanks to the partnership system of governance. So we exercise our ethical rules, but there is a limit—from scaling—beyond which the rules cease to apply. It is unfortunate, but the general kills the particular.

Acknowledgments Ralph Nader; Ron Paul; Will Murphy (editor, advisor, proofreader, syntax expert and specialist); Ben Greenberg (editor); Casiana Ionita (editor); Molly Turpin; Mika Kasuga; Evan Camfield; Barbara Fillon; Will Goodlad; Peter Tanous; Xamer ‘Bou Assaleh; Mark Baker (aka Guru Anaerobic); Armand d’Angour; Alexis Kirschbaum; Max Brockman; Russell Weinberger; Theodosius Mohsen Abdallah; David Boxenhorn; Marc Milanini; ETH participants in Zurich; Kevin Horgan; Paul Wehage; Baruch Gottesman, Gil Friend, Mark Champlain, Aaron Elliott, Rod Ripamonti, and Zlatan Hadzic (all on religion and sacrifice); David Graeber (Goldman Sachs); Neil Chriss; Amir-Reza Amini (automatic cars); Ektrit Kris Manushi (religion); Jazi Zilber (particularly Rav Safra); Farid Anvari (U.K. scandal); Robert Shaw (shipping and risk sharing); Daniel Hogendoorn (Cambyses); Eugene Callahan; Jon Elster, David Chambliss Johnson, Gur Huberman, Raphael Douady, Robert Shaw, Barkley Rosser, James Franklin, Marc Abrahams, Andreas Lind, and Elias Korosis (all on paper); John Durant; Zvika Afik; Robert Frey; Rami Zreik; Joe Audi; Guy Riviere; Matt Dubuque; Cesáreo González; Mark Spitznagel; Brandon Yarkin; Eric Briys; Joe Norman; Pascal Venier; Yaneer Bar-Yam; Thibault Lécuyer; Pierre Zalloua; Maximilian Hirner; Aaron Eliott; Jaffer Ali; Thomas Messina; Alexandru Panicci; Dan Coman; Nicholas Teague; Magued Iskander; Thibault Lécuyer; James Marsh; Arnie Schwarzvogel; Hayden Rei; John Mast-Finn; Rupert Read; Russell Roberts; Viktoria Martin; Ban Kanj Elsabeh; Vince Pomal; Graeme Michael Price; Karen Brennan; Jack Tohme; Marie-Christine Riachi; Jordan Thibodeau; Pietro Bonavita.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Cyberspace today offers an expansive opportunity, much as the vast physical expanse of North America did for previous generations; the promise of a land stake was the great difference between America and other societies in prior centuries.81 Is ever greater technological consolidation inevitable? It is possible that as these firms move further from their entrepreneurial roots, many take on what anthropologist David Graeber describes as “a timid, bureaucratic spirit” that responds to the needs of investors and focuses on preserving already established business lines. Many observers, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Joseph Schumpeter, agree that monopoly creation, rent seeking, and price fixing are the natural instincts of the monied classes rather than risk taking, hard work, and free enterprise.82 Over time, this yearning for oligarchy could also threaten a host of other large firms, in media and finance in particular, which have been subject to what one analyst calls the “super-sizing” of big business.

Jigar Shah, “Social Media Won’t Drive a New Economy,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (blog), August 30, 2012, http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/social_media_wont_drive_a_new_economy. 80. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 8-13. 81. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 249. 82. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, pp. 8–13; David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” Baffler, no. 19 (March 2012): 66–84; Nick Wingfield, “Worries That Microsoft Is Growing Too Tricky to Manage,” New York Times, September 9, 2013. 83. Murray, Coming Apart, p. 48. 84. “Has the Ideas Machine Broken Down?” Economist, January 12, 2013; Alexandra Petri, “Dear Google, about These Recent Changes to Gmail,” ComPost (blog), Washington Post, July 18, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/07/18/dear-google-about-these-recent-changes-to-gmail; Nick Mokey, “What Happened to You, Google?”


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

Morgan’s financial concerns were so all-encompassing that when his bank was broken up by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, it turned into three different institutions, all of them very big: the bank J. P. Morgan and Co., the investment house Morgan Stanley, and the overseas investment bank Morgan Grenfell in London. jubilee A word with a number of meanings, but in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the anthropologist David Graeber advocates a global jubilee in the specific sense of a cancellation of all outstanding debt in the developing world. Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) One of the greatest minds ever to dedicate himself to the study of money—I put it like that because although many very clever people have spent most of their lives thinking about money, it’s noticeable that there haven’t been many geniuses attracted to the field, minds of the order of Mozart or Einstein or Shakespeare.

Notes 1Grayson Perry and Brian Eno, “How the Internet Has Taught Us We Are All Perverts,” New Statesman, 7 November 2013. 2Daniel, quoted in Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 206. 3You can read the original Fortune article at www.awjones.com/images/Fortune_-_The_Jones_Nobody_Keeps_Up_With.pdf. 4See http://www.awjones.com/historyofthefirm.html. 5Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, trans. Patrick James Stirling (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1873) , p. 83. 6See David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Felix Martin’s Money: The Unauthorised Biography for more on this. 7John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 5. 8John Maynard Keynes, ”Alfred Marshall, 1842–1924,” Economic Journal 34, no. 135 (1924): 333. 9Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 13. 10Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1890), p. 32. 11Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 231–33. 12Ibid., pp. 231–32.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession exposed almost a decade’s worth of Western growth as an illusion, a diverse cast of economists and political scientists and other figures on both the left and the right have begun to talk about stagnation and repetition and complacency and sclerosis as defining features of this Western age: Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, Thomas Piketty and Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber and Peter Thiel, and many others. This book is, in part, an attempt to synthesize their various perspectives into a compelling account of our situation. But it also weaves the social sciences together with observations on our intellectual climate, our popular culture, our religious moment, our technological pastimes, in the hopes of painting a fuller portrait of our decadence than you can get just looking at political science papers on institutional decay or an economic analysis of the declining rate of growth.

That image—a sci-fi writer using the small marvel of a flat-screen TV to watch a larger marvel recede into the past—is a compelling one for our era, which for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted. The technological sublime, unlike the natural or religious sort, does not renew itself in every generation. And though we are habituated to that reality, as Stephenson’s lament suggests, it is not at all what was expected fifty years ago. Here is David Graeber, writing in the very left-wing Baffler several years ago, making a version of this point: As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like.… It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

You see it in the flexible jobs that characterize the gig economy, such as driving for Uber or DoorDash, where workers can choose their own hours. You see it in the ever-greater number of hours people spend in the office futzing around on social media. And you see it in the rise of what the anthropologist David Graeber colorfully calls “bullshit jobs.” He describes several types, including “box tickers,” who generate lots of paperwork to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t, and “taskmasters,” who manage people who don’t need management. A big problem with technological revolutions, Keynes said, was that with so much of the work increasingly being done by technology, humans would have to find a sense of purpose.

Norton, 1963), 358–73. 113 Jetson of the 1960s cartoon: “works three hours a day, three days a week,” per Sarah Ellison, “Reckitt Turns to Jetsons to Launch Detergent Gels,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2003; pushing a button, per Hanna-Barbera Wiki, “The Jetsons,” https://hanna-barbera.fandom.com/wiki/The_Jetsons. 113 four-day workweek: Zoe Didali, “As PM Finland’s Marin Could Renew Call for Shorter Work Week,” New Europe, January 2, 2020, https://www.neweurope.eu/article/finnish-pm-marin-calls-for-4-day-week-and-6-hours-working-day-in-the-country/. 114 “bullshit jobs”: David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). 115 “slaves of time without purpose”: McEwan, Machines Like Me. 116 atoms in the observable universe: David Silver and Demis Hassabis, “AlphaGo: Mastering the Ancient Game of Go with Machine Learning,” Google DeepMind, January 27, 2016, https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering-ancient-game-of-go.html. 116 all fifty-seven games: Kyle Wiggers, “DeepMind’s Agent57 Beats Humans at 57 Classic Atari Games,” Venture Beat, March 31, 2020; Rebecca Jacobson, “Artificial Intelligence Program Teaches Itself to Play Atari Games—And It Can Beat Your High Score,” PBS NewsHour, February 20, 2015. 117 Stuart Russell: Stuart Russell, “3 Principles for Creating Safer AI,” TED2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_3_principles_for_creating_safer_ai/transcript?


pages: 290 words: 82,220

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

Though most prefer to provide counterevidence as a corrective, others have gotten fed up. American studies scholar David Correia published an essay about Diamond’s work called simply “F**k Jared Diamond.”3 Correia calls out Diamond’s “environmental determinism,” which leaves out the crucial political aspects of urban transformation. Meanwhile, anthropologists David Graeber and David Wingrow take issue with the way Diamond suggests that civilizations at their peak are always hierarchical, and that those hierarchies can only be dislodged by environmental catastrophe followed by a collapse. They write: Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization … it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe.

Lizzie Wade, “It Wasn’t Just Greece—Archaeologists and Early Democracy in the Americas,” Science (March 15, 2017), https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas. 3. David Correia, “F**k Jared Diamond,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24, no. 4 (2013): 1–6. 4. David Graeber and David Wingrow, “How to Change the Course of Human History,” Eurozine (March 2, 2018), https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/. Chapter 12: Deliberate Abandonment 1. Samuel E. Munoz et al., “Cahokia’s Emergence and Decline Coincided with Shifts of Flood Frequency on the Mississippi River,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 20 (May 2015): 6319–24. 2.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Thiel explained that too many companies are “too drawn to incremental point solutions and very scared of complex operational problems,” and that only those with “a fairly inspiring long-term vision at their core” can overcome this problem —a state that he did not think defined many Silicon Valley start-ups.15 Thiel’s argument is ultimately riddled with contradictions, but there have been more logical explanations for what is considered technological deceleration. The late anthropologist David Graeber argued that the perception that innovation has slowed down is the product of a shift in how research funding was allocated and what kinds of research it is targeted toward. Even though research funding has generally increased over time, especially in the private sector, less of that money has gone to the basic research that often produces the transformative innovations that we associate with the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century or the ambitious moonshot projects that tended to generate unintended technological advancements.

., p. 14. 10 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6:1, 1996, imaginaryfutures.net. 11 Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 90. 12 O’Mara, The Code, p. 214. 13 Ibid., p. 226. 14 Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, Nationalreview.com. 15 Tom Simonite, “Technology Stalled in 1970,” MIT Technology Review, September 18, 2014, Technologyreview.com. 16 David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler 19, March 2012, Thebaffler.com. 17 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 90–1. 18 Tim Maughan, “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand,” OneZero, November 30, 2020, Onezero.medium.com. 19 Ibid. 20 Senator Gore, speaking on S. 1067, 101st Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 135, May 18, 1989, S 9887. 21 Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, MIT Press, 2011. 22 Madeline Carr, US Power and the Internet in International Relations: The Irony of the Information Age, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 58 (author’s emphasis). 23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 194. 24 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, Eff.org. 25 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 222. 27 Ibid. 28 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

The final disappointing feature of the economy in the twenty-first century is not something that economists talk about, but it looms large in laypeople’s discussions. We call it inauthenticity or fakeness: the idea that workers and businesses lack the grit and authenticity they should have, and that they once had. Consider anthropologist David Graeber’s critique of “bullshit jobs”: “Through some strange alchemy, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand” even while “the lay-offs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing, and maintaining things.”3 Graeber’s critique follows in the footsteps of postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard, who argued that the modern world is dominated by “simulacra”: imitations and symbols that, like Disneyland, take on a new life of their own that is detached from the underlying reality.4 Likewise, the conservative commentator Ross Douthat has argued that one of the characteristics of modern decadence is the prevalence of imitation rather than originality in culture, media, and entertainment.

Inauthenticity The idea that our economy lacks authenticity and that we should be troubled by it has at least three dimensions. The first is Ross Douthat’s observation in The Decadent Society that too much of our output is derivative and self-referential, the product of recombination rather than original effort.14 The second is the concern expressed by David Graeber and a thousand politicians in rich countries that the economy involves too much fakery, too much work that does not produce useful, tangible results. In the public mind, and in political discourse, the most lamented type of lost economic activity is manufacturing. Third, there is the widespread impression that the modern economy is replete with frothy get-rich-quick schemes that lack substance and are at best risible and at worst fraudulent, such as Juicero’s failed plans to make $1 billion from web-enabled juicers, the collapse of Theranos’s fake blood-test empire, and the sudden liquidation of British government outsourcer Carillion.


pages: 255 words: 92,719

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

On 5 January 2015, the first working day after Christmas, adverts appeared on underground trains, where adverts for Match.com normally are. In black type on canary yellow, there was a sentence – ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working’ – which came from an article by David Graeber for Strike! magazine about ‘bullshit jobs’. Productive jobs, he argues, have been automated away and replaced by administrative ones which masquerade as service: HR, PR, financial services, ancillary industries like dog-washing and all-night pizza delivery. These are the bullshit jobs that are, you could add, very like T’s.

Pret’s policy on migrant labour was reported on in the Evening Standard; my colleague Paul Myerscough first wrote about Pret’s use of emotional labour in the LRB of 3 January 2013, which was subsequently picked up by the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and the Independent. The Communication Workers’ Union’s campaign against Payment between Assignment contracts can be seen on their website. David Graeber’s article about ‘bullshit jobs’ is in the 17 August 2013 edition of Strike! Magazine. The FT reported Spad Jo Moore’s comments that 9/11 would be a ‘good day to bury bad news’ and my anthropology of a Spad is drawn from the figures and history in Special Advisers: Who They Are, What They Do and Why They Matter by Ben Yong and Robert Hazell (Hart, 2014) and the Telegraph recorded that Cameron had hung an Emin neon in Number 10 on 20 August 2011.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In particular, I reject the line of reasoning that suggests that since race is a technology and technologies have multiple uses, then perhaps racial categories are not inherently oppressive and can instead be put to subversive and liberatory uses by creative individuals. This sounds to me like the point, identified by David Graeber, where neoliberalism and postmodern critique become mirror images of each other: both see the world as bound by totalizing systems of power, and fixate on action at the individual level. In the case of former, taking action means becoming an entrepreneur, and in the latter it means “fashioning of subversive identities.”

Ironically, in the same piece Boden called for funds to be devoted to “combatting the ignorance and sensationalism that attends AI today” (75). For a discussion of the proliferation, not reduction, of administrative jobs in capitalist societies and the connection to Keynes’s prediction of a diminished work week, see David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” Strike Magazine 3 (August 2013).   35.   Simon won great acclaim in both AI and economics. Within the latter he is often presented as a “heretical” thinker, despite winning the field’s coveted Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economics. See Leonard Silk, “Nobel Winner’s Heretical Views,” New York Times, November 9, 1978.


pages: 124 words: 30,520

Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen's Guide to Reinventing Politics by Manuel Arriaga

banking crisis, behavioural economics, business climate, David Graeber, digital divide, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, Gunnar Myrdal, John Bogle, Occupy movement, principal–agent problem, Slavoj Žižek

In all of these, the focus was strictly on electoral reform, but there is, of course, no reason to restrict the assembly’s mandate in that way. Notes [i] Paul Mason’s Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions offers a glimpse into this other reality. [ii] For the opposite argument, see David Graeber’s The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. [iii] A good illustration of the different facets of this process can be found in George Clooney’s 2011 film The Ides of March. [iv] Admittedly, we all tend to reserve the word “ideology” for those ideas we disagree with. In this section, I will use it to refer to ideas that seem to fly in the face of most available evidence and, yet, are so strong that they seem largely unaffected by it.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

But their reasoning contains a fundamental flaw: they don’t understand what money actually is. In the popular version of economics, money is just a convenient means of exchange, invented because in early societies swapping a handful of potatoes for a raccoon skin was too random. In fact, as the anthropologist David Graeber has shown, there is no evidence that early human societies used barter, or that money emerged from it.26 They used something much more powerful. They used trust. Money is created by states and always has been; it is not something that exists independently of governments. Money is always the ‘promise to pay’ by a government.

The advantages of working remain clear, but there are also advantages to be gained through not working: you can look after your kids, write poetry, go back to college, manage your chronic illness or peer-educate others like you. Under this system, there would be no stigma attached to not working. The labour market would be stacked in favour of the high-paying job and the high-paying employer. The universal basic income, then, is an antidote to what the anthropologist David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’: the low-paid service jobs capitalism has managed to create over the past twenty-five years that pay little, demean the worker and probably don’t need to exist.10 But it’s only a transitional measure for the first stage of the postcapitalist project. The ultimate aim is to reduce to a minimum the hours it takes to produce what humanity needs.


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Through a trade-led process of economic expansion, non-industrial countries with subsistence economies and large indigenous populations must aim to become urbanized, consumer-driven, cosmopolitan manufacturing centers (according to this view): it is their right and destiny to do so. This set of assumptions was always questionable. Indeed, it has been attacked with some vigor by Vandana Shiva, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Martin Kohr, Jerry Mander, Doug Tompkins, Gustavo Esteva, Edward Goldsmith, Ivan Illich, Manfred Max-Neef, David Graeber, and other prominent development critics (sometimes also known as post-development–theorists).38 The critics of development claimed that the project of using loans and aid packages to fund huge infrastructure projects in poor nations, or to build factories there for multinational corporations, was at its core merely a continuation of colonialism by other means.

The Oil Drum, posted January 14, 2011, theoildrum.com/node/7343. Chapter One 1. See Marvin Harris and Orna Johnson, Cultural Anthropology (Boston: –Allyn & Bacon, 2006), pp. 98–107. See also Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, transl. I. Cunnison (New York: Norton, 2000), and David Graeber, Toward an Anthropology of Value (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 2. Elman R. Service, The Hunters (New York: Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 14–21. 3. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 436. 4. This story is told at greater length in, for example, Jack Weatherford, The History of Money (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998). 5.


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Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

I didn’t want my purchases to peg me as a “high spender” so that I would never be offered discounts online. I didn’t want to be suspected of being an anarchist after exploring bitcoins. However, I did not expect or want immunity from criminal transactions. My desire for immunity from the consequences of commerce reminded me of the anthropologist David Graeber’s beautiful meditation on the meaning and moral implications of debt. In his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber describes how there are debts that should never be paid, such as our debt to our parents or a debt for an unsolicited kindness. Only some debts can be settled with money. Those debts have certain characteristics, he says.

search/assasination$20politics$20jim$20bell|sort:date/list.libernet/Mo2RIiViYDE/Pp7BMppVDBYJ. In 1997, IRS agents raided Bell’s home: Associated Press, “Bell Gets 11 Months in Prison, 3 Years Supervised Release, Fine,” December 12, 1997, http://cryptome.org/jdb/jimbell7.htm. They are debts between: David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2010), 120. 10. POCKET LITTER I had just arrived in the city: Julia Angwin, “Secret Orders Target Email,” Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576613284007315072.html. About a year after our meeting: Ira Hunt, “The CIA’s ‘Grand Challenges’ with Big Data,” GigaOM Structure: Data Conference 2013, http://new.livestream.com/accounts/74987/events/1927733/videos/14306067.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

In the United States, almost 70 percent of workers are either “not engaged” in or “actively disengaged” from their work, while only 50 percent say they “get a sense of identity from their job.”32 In the UK, almost 40 percent of people think their work does not make a meaningful contribution to the world.33 In the words of the sociologist David Graeber, many people today find themselves trapped in “bullshit jobs.”34 Finally, even for those who are fortunate and privileged enough to find their jobs meaningful, it does not follow that they would want to work if they did not have to. Take the French. They attach more importance to their work than many other nationalities.

Gallup, “State of the American Workplace” (2017); Pew Research Center, “How Americans View Their Jobs,” 6 October 2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/ (accessed 24 April 2018). 33.  Will Dahlgreen, “37% of British Workers Think Their Jobs Are Meaningless,” YouGov UK, 12 August 2015. 34.  David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” STRIKE! magazine, August 2013. 35.  Pierre-Michel Menger calls this “the French Paradox.” He set it out in a presentation titled “What Is Work Worth (in France)?,” prepared for the “Work in the Future” symposium, 6 February 2018, organized by Robert Skidelsky. 36.  


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Sometimes the textbooks recognize that the government can print money, but this method of financing is quickly dropped from the formal budget model on the grounds that printing money is inflationary, so the student is taught that governments must either finance their expenditures by collecting taxes or borrowing someone’s savings. 10. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011); L. Randall Wray, Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006); and Stephanie A. Bell, John F. Henry, and L. Randall Wray, “A Chartalist Critique of John Locke’s Theory of Property, Accumulation, and Money: Or, Is It Moral to Trade Your Nuts for Gold?

Randall Wray, “A Chartalist Critique of John Locke’s Theory of Property, Accumulation, and Money: Or, Is It Moral to Trade Your Nuts for Gold?,” Review of Social Economy 62, no. 1 (2004): 51–65. 11. There is an enormous literature that traces the history of state-issued currencies. Interested readers should consult works by Christine Desan, Mathew Forstater, David Graeber, John Henry, Michael Hudson, and L. Randall Wray. 12. Buttonwood, “Monopoly Money,” Buttonwood’s notebook, The Economist, October 19, 2009, www.economist.com/buttonwoods-notebook/2009/10/19/monopoly-money. 13. There is also the US Federal Reserve, which is “the issuing authority for all Federal Reserve notes.”


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Rarely is this written down – and even if it was, we would still likely learn this better from experience than by studying. There is a tacit dimension to our lives that is not codified, and perhaps never can be. This is perhaps even truer of supposedly ‘low-skill’ jobs than it is of ‘high-skill’ ones like a Wall Street trader. The anthropologist David Graeber was fond of pointing out that many jobs that we sometimes deem repetitive, task-oriented and perhaps easily automatable are, in fact, more like care work. They’re based less on specific tasks and more on human interaction and emotional labour. Think of a London Underground worker. In practice, this job isn’t so much about watching ticket barriers as it is about helping other humans – guiding confused tourists, ensuring lost children find their parents, explaining to angry commuters why their trains have been delayed.

Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 15. 23 ‘Liquidity, Volatility, Fragility’, Goldman Sachs Global Macro Research, 68, June 2018. 24 John Gittelson, ‘End of Era: Passive Equity Funds Surpass Active in Epic Shift’, Bloomberg, 11 September 2019 <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-11/passive-u-s-equity-funds-eclipse-active-in-epic-industry-shift> [accessed 14 October 2020]. 25 ‘March of the Machines – The Stockmarket Is Now Run by Computers, Algorithms and Passive Managers’, The Economist, 5 October 2019 <https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/10/05/the-stockmarket-is-now-run-by-computers-algorithms-and-passive-managers> [accessed 14 October 2020]. 26 Michael Polanyi and Amartya Sen, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 4. 27 David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), p. 236 28 Carl Benedikt Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 311. 29 Staci D. Kramer, ‘The Biggest Thing Amazon Got Right: The Platform’, Gigaom, 12 October 2011 <https://gigaom.com/2011/10/12/419-the-biggest-thing-amazon-got-right-the-platform/> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 30 The approach has become de rigueur among other digital cognoscenti, but Bezos’s email should surely be considered as one of the single most important internal communications of all time. 31 Chris Johnston, ‘Amazon Opens a Supermarket with No Checkouts’, BBC News, 22 January 2018 <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42769096> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 32 Peter Holley, ‘Amazon’s One-Day Delivery Service Depends on the Work of Thousands of Robots’, Washington Post, 7 June 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/amazons-one-day-delivery-service-depends-work-thousands-robots/> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 33 Harry Dempsey, ‘Amazon to Hire Further 100,000 Workers in US and Canada’, 14 September 2020 <https://www.ft.com/content/9817aae3-1e89-4383-aa34-742447d5794a> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 34 ‘Netflix Continues to Hire Through the Pandemic, Says Co-CEO Reed Hastings’, Bloomberg, 9 September 2020 <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-09-09/netflix-continues-to-hire-through-the-pandemic-video> [accessed 18 September 2020]. 35 ‘Netflix: Number of Employees 2006-2020’, Macro Trends <https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/number-of-employees> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 36 Vishnu Rajamanickm, ‘JD.Com Opens Automated Warehouse That Employs Four People but Fulfills 200,000 Packages Daily’, FreightWaves, 25 June 2018 <https://www.freightwaves.com/news/technology/jdcom-opens-automated-warehouse-that-employs-four-people-but-fulfills-200000-packages-daily> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 37 Reuters Staff, ‘Dish to Close 300 Blockbuster Stores, 3,000 Jobs May Be Lost’, Reuters, 23 January 2013 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockbuster-storeclosings-idUSBRE90M05I20130123> [accessed 7 January 2021]. 38 Daron Acemoglu, Claire LeLarge and Pascual Restrepo, Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France, Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2020) <https://doi.org/10.3386/w26738>. 39 Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets, Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2017) <https://doi.org/10.3386/w23285>. 40 David Klenert, Enrique Fernández-Macías and José-Ignacio Antón, ‘Don’t Blame It on the Machines: Robots and Employment in Europe’, VoxEU, 24 February 2020 <https://voxeu.org/article/dont-blame-it-machines-robots-and-employment-europe> [accessed 10 September 2020]. 41 Till Leopold et al., The Future of Jobs 2018, World Economic Forum <https://wef.ch/2NH6NiV> [accessed 25 September 2020]. 42 Leslie Willcocks, ‘Robo-Apocalypse Cancelled?


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This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Of course, that’s a huge if, especially when – as in the UK – rough sleeping and dependence on food banks have already been rising for years. Yet this is what a surrender looks like: it’s about how much of the organized activity of a society can be decommissioned, not by 2050 or 2030, or even 2025, but as soon as possible. The fact that David Graeber found out when he wrote about ‘bullshit jobs’ – that much of our activity shown up as GDP is widely recognized as pointless, including by those carrying it out – is beneficial. To negotiate a surrender, you need a credible threat – and this is where the movement that began in London in November 2018 might look again at its strange twin across the Channel.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

But the euphoria soon fades, swept away by the swiftly sobering recognition that there is terribly little chance for a soft landing in any of this, for any one of us. Though we may debate the degree to which choice and conscious authorship are involved in it, it seems important to note that automation is a directional process whose initial stages we’ve already entered. In this respect David Graeber’s empty, signifier-shuffling “bullshit jobs” are a signal from the future. They’re not so much a return as an anticipation of the repressed: the surfacing in the present, and pricing into contemporary ways of doing and being, of the recognition that there simply won’t be enough meaningful work for anyone to do following the eclipse of human judgment.

Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume110, Number 2, 2004, pp. 349–99. 43.David Bicknell, “Sloppy Human Error Still Prime Cause of Data Breaches,” Government Computing, June 2, 2016. 44.Mark Blunden, “Enfield Council Uses Robotic ‘Supercomputer’ Instead of Humans to Deliver Frontline Services,” Evening Standard, June 16, 2016. 45.Jun Hongo, “Fully Automated Lettuce Factory to Open in Japan,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2015. 46.Jim Tankersley, “Robots Are Hurting Middle Class Workers, and Education Won’t Solve the Problem, Larry Summers Says,” Washington Post, March 3, 2015. 47.Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-technology Capitalism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; see also Lawrence H. Summers, “The Inequality Puzzle,” Democracy, Summer 2014 No. 33. 48.David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” STRIKE!, August 17, 2013. 49.Walter Van Trier, “Who Framed ‘Social Dividend’?,” USBIG Discussion Paper No. 26, March 2002. basisinkomen.nl/wp-content/uploads/020223-Walter-VanTrier-8.pdf. See also John Danaher, “Libertarianism and the Basic Income (Part One),” Philosophical Disquisitions, December 17, 2013; Noah Gordon, “The Conservative Case for a Guaranteed Basic Income,” Atlantic, August 2014. 50.Mike Alberti and Kevin C.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Anonymous’s Trickster’s Trick: Defying Individual Celebrity through Collective Celebrity Fame-seeking pervades practically every sphere of American life today, from the mass media, which hires Hollywood celebrities as news anchors, to the micro-media platforms that afford endless opportunities for narcissism and self- inflation; from the halls of academia, where superstar professors command high salaries, to sports arenas, where players rake in obscene salaries. Fame-seeking behavior reinforces what anthropologist David Graeber, building on the seminal work of C. B. Macpherson, identifies as “possessive individualism,” defined as “those deeply internalized habits of thinking and feeling” whereby we view “everything around [us] primarily as actual or potential commercial property.”22 How did 4chan—one of the seediest zones of the Internet—hatch one of the most robust instantiations of a collectivist, anti-celebrity ethic, without its members even intending to?

Lee Knuttila, “Users unknown: 4chan, anonymity and contingency,” First Monday, vol. 16, no. 10 (Oct. 2011). 20. “Internet Hate Machine” was a phrase used by a local Fox News program in Los Angeles in 2007 to describe Anonymous. The group promptly turned the phrase into a popular meme. 21. Phillips, “LOLing at tragedy.” 22. David Graeber, “Manners, Deference, and Private Property in Early Modern Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 39 (October 1997): 694–728. 23. Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Chapter 2. Project Chanology—I Came for the Lulz but Stayed for the Outrage 1.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

If one party wanted to trade wheat for nails, and the counterparty wanted wheat but had only rope to trade, the first party might accept the rope and go in search of someone with nails who wanted rope. In this telling, money was an efficient medium of exchange that solved the simultaneity problem because one could sell her wheat for money and then use the money to buy nails without having to barter the rope. But as author David Graeber points out, the history of barter is mostly a myth. Economists since Adam Smith have assumed that barter was the historical predecessor of money, but there is no empirical, archaeological, or other evidence for the existence of a widespread premoney barter economy. In fact, it appears that premoney economies were based largely on credit—the promise to return value in the future in exchange for value delivered today.

.”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1936; reprint New York: New Directions, 2009). The bitcoin phenomenon began in 2008 . . . : Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” November 1, 2008, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. the history of barter is mostly a myth: David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011), pp. 21–41. “Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination . . .”: Thomas L. Friedman, “A Failure to Imagine,” New York Times, May 19, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/opinion/a-failure-to-imagine.html.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

The problem is the combination of concentrated economic power, weakened limits on corporate political spending,72 and an amorphous legal standard, such as the Supreme Court’s “rule of reason” legal standard for most antitrust violations.73 The amorphous legal standard is attractive to economists, lobbyists, and antitrust counsel who “know” and “can work” with the agency to dissuade it from intervening in our three scenarios. Intellectual Capture Closely linked to economic power is the ability to foster intellectual and regulatory capture. As anthropology professor David Graeber observed, “if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.”74 Lobbying, discussed above, provides a central tool to shape opinions of governments and the public—to affect the public debate and our perception of right and wrong.75 Other means to capture the debate include the funding of articles, academic initiatives, and think tanks.76 Here one may harness the credibility of individuals and institutions to propagate certain ideas and create a pool of supportive media and writing that can cross-reference itself.

The rule of reason also “varies in focus and detail depending on the nature of the agreement and market circumstances.” Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations among Competitors (2000) §1.2, at 4, http://www.ftc.gov/os/2000/04 /ftcdojguidelines.pdf. David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Strike! Magazine, August 17, 2013, http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs. See generally, interview with Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow at New America Foundation, “What We Have Is Capture of the Regulators’ Minds, a Much More Sophisticated Form of Capture Than Putting Money in Their Pockets,” published in Pro-Market Blog, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, https://promarket.org/what-we-have-is-capture-of-the -regulators-minds-a-much-more-sophisticated-form-of-capture-than -putting-money-in-their-pockets/.


A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, David Graeber, different worldview, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, illegal immigration, Loma Prieta earthquake, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, San Francisco homelessness, South of Market, San Francisco, Thomas Malthus, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Many fail to notice that it is not the ideals, the ends, but the coercive and authoritarian means that poison paradise. There are utopias whose ideals pointedly include freedom from coercion and dispersal of power to the many. Most utopian visions nowadays include many worlds, many versions, rather than a coercive one true way. The anthropologist David Graeber writes, “Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because they dreamed great dreams—actually, Stalinists were famous for being rather short on imagination—but because they mistook their dreams for scientific certainties. This led them to feel they had a right to impose their visions through a machinery of violence.”

., Three Fearful Days: San Francisco Memoirs of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire (San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 1998), 301. 16 “in cordial appreciation of her prompt”: Argonaut, May 21, 1927. 18 “A map of the world”: Oscar Wilde (quoting from Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”), in Robert V. Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 8. 19 “Stalinists and their ilk”: David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), 11. 21 “The number of weather-related disasters has quadrupled over the past”: “Climate Alarm, 2007”: Oxfam Briefing Paper 108. Pauline Jacobson’s Joy 24 Mary Austen: “The Temblor,” in David Starr Jordan, ed., The California Earthquake of 1906 (San Francisco: A.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

In the profile Thiel seemed a embarrassed about seasteading, his gloriously controversial project to create floating libertarian utopias. Now he spoke of it “almost in the past tense,” as Fortune put it. In September, Thiel showed up at New York’s General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen to debate David Graeber, the left-wing academic who’d helped inspire the Occupy Wall Street movement, and found common ground. When a New York Times reporter asked what Thiel thought of an essay, published by the event’s sponsor, The Baffler, that noted Thiel’s fondness for neo-reactionaries, especially Curtis Yarvin, Thiel laughed this off, calling the article, which ran under the title “Mouth-Breathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich,” “vaguely flattering,” but a “full-on conspiracy theory.”

“America’s leading public intellectual”: Roger Parloff, “Peter Thiel Disagrees with You,” Fortune, September 4, 2014, https://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-contrarian-strategy/. Thiel laughed this off: Jennifer Schuessler, “Still No Flying Cars? Debating Technology’s Future,” The New York Times, September 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/arts/peter-thiel-and-david-graeber-debate-technologys-future.html?searchResultPosition=1. “total insider and a total outsider”: For instance, Lillian Cunningham, “Peter Thiel on What Works at Work,” The Washington Post, October 10, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10/10/peter-thiel-on-what-works-at-work/.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Qualities that should be encouraged in society—like empathy and the willingness to stand up for others—are devalued when ordinary people are told that they literally cannot afford to care. “I think right-wing populists hate the ‘liberal elite’ more than economic elites because they’ve grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn’t just for the money—the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity,” notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. “All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.” Fair and Just On the day the story of the alleged $22,000 UN internship broke, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman assured us that our world is fair and just.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

I’d put Josh Cohen in an emergent purist camp which believes that work represents a failure of society, certainly of capitalism, and that work is essentially not an opportunity but a threat: ‘The reason I didn’t pursue a career in law, accountancy, finance, corporate management, the civil service or any other respectable middle-class profession… was that they all seemed to assume a belief in work as its own justification.’9 This view became more widespread during the Co-Working Years, peaking perhaps as we entered the Nowhere Office in 2020 with anthropologist James Suzman’s book Work in which he speaks of ‘avariciousness amplified’ and argued that the growth mindset of big business was not only disastrous ecologically but morally and emotionally.10 The title of Sarah Jaffe’s 2021 book says it all: Work Won’t Love You Back. Again, as in other areas, Covid-19 was accelerating a pre-existing trend. Take sociologist David Graeber’s highly influential 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, which built on an essay he’d written five years earlier, arguing that it is political control of the workers by the owners of capital/business which ensures that the shorter working shifts, which technology was supposed to usher in, constantly elude most workers, and as a result so too does a life of more meaning.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

In a monetary system, as explained in an earlier chapter, all money is based on a system of claims: assets and liabilities backed up by collateral, and on the exchange of these in social relationships that are vital to the economic sustainability of households and communities. All money is a claim on another – an obligation to be reciprocated – or a debt. And debt, not barter, has been a feature of community life since the dawn of time, as David Graeber explained in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.22 Adam Smith saw ‘the origins of language – hence of human thought – as lying in our propensity to “exchange one thing for another” in which he also saw the origins of the market. The urge to trade, to compare values, is the very thing that makes us intelligent beings, and different from other animals’, writes Graeber.23 The issue, therefore, is not the creation of a debt-free economy, but of one in which economic and other obligations can be freely and easily reciprocated to achieve the common purpose of stability, sustainability, justice and prosperity.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The German economist Helmut Creutz calculated that in his country, 38% of the price of drinking-water is hidden interest, as is 77% of the rent on government-subsidised housing and 40% of the cost of a typical bundle of goods bought by a German household.37 But there’s a different and much older way of talking about interest on debt: as usury. As David Graeber shows in his remarkable book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, usury has been understood and resented for millennia, and is still condemned by some religions, for example Islam.38 The objections are not directed at lending and borrowing as such, but at lending at interest. This pre-modern term may sound anachronistic and negative, with its associations of exploitation and grinding oppression.

Even to offer or accept an interest-free loan might be seen as introducing an unwanted, if temporary, dependence and asymmetry into what would otherwise be seen as properly a relationship of equality and generosity. For this reason, people may prefer to borrow impersonally from a bank and pay interest, rather than borrow from a friend at zero interest. 54 David Graeber’s term for this asymmetry is ‘the logic of hierarchy’ (Graeber, 2011). Gift relationships, where ‘debts’ are not precisely quantified or ever cleared but alternately reciprocated at intervals by each person, thus maintaining the relationship, are the norm in human history. One of the most distinctive, indeed exceptional, features of modern societies is that so many relationships between people are contractual, and hence can be terminated with the meeting of agreed mutual obligations: you did this for me, I paid you the agreed amount, that’s the end of our relationship. 55 This contradiction is a secular version of the Old Testament ‘Deuteronomic ruling’, which caused consternation among theologians and divided Christians for centuries: ‘Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury’, Deuteronomy 23: 20.


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Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

The great transformation of human societies, in the leap from the logic of the sacred to the logic of equivalence, arises as we become more distant from the sacred (Figure 2.1). This process represents the autonomisation of the political and of civil society. Its material basis is the building of cities, from Sumer onwards; it achieves its formal representation through the invention of writing and numbers. According to David Graeber, a movement of concentrated human settlement in Mesopotamia after 2500 BC gave rise to slavery, the foundation of the market.8 Since its origin, the market has oozed violence. Slavery is the ultimate violence. Indeed, slavery strips human relations of all ethics. As Marx shows, wage labour was not so different in this regard, when it lacked the social rights later established in reaction to the violence of the market.

, in L’Homme, no. 162, April–June 2002, pp. 242–54. 3 Marcel Maus, ‘Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, Année sociologique (1923–24), republished in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: PUF, 1973. 4 Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 5 This anthropological controversy is examined by Jean-Pierre Warnier, ‘Alliance, filiation et inaliénabilité: le débat sur le don à la lumière de l’anthropologie de la parenté’, Sociétés politiques comparées, no. 11, January 2009. 6 Thomas R. Trautman, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 7 Stéphane Breton, ‘Monnaie et économies des personnes’, introduction to special issue of L’Homme, no. 162, ‘Question de monnaie’, April–June 2002. 8 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011. 9 On this point, see the contribution by Jean Andreau, ‘Cens, évaluation et monnaie dans l’Antiquité romaine’, in Aglietta and Orléan (eds), La monnaie souveraine, pp. 213–50. Part II: The Historical Trajectories of Money 1 Frank Hahn, Money and Inflation, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. 2 See the introduction to Philippe Beaujard, Laurent Berger and Philippe Norel (eds), Histoire globale, mondialisations et capitalisme, Paris: La Découverte, 2009. 3 Théret (ed.), La monnaie dévoilée par ses crises. 4 Fernand Braudel, La dynamique du capitalisme, Paris: Arthaud, 1985. 3.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Similarly, another worker explained that they ‘wanted to work outside and with a bicycle, because it’s my passion working with a bicycle’. For younger workers, the gig economy offers the potential – and it is important to stress that this is a potential, as we discuss further later in the book – for different ways of working. This is particularly important considering the rise of what David Graeber (2018) has called ‘bullshit jobs’, forms of work that appear to be meaningless busywork. The desire to escape from these kinds of jobs provides a ready supply of labour power to be put to work in new ways. In low- and middle-income countries, even relatively highskilled workers have tended to be quite constrained by the boundaries of their local labour markets.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Although, amusingly, it later dived as investors realized the company itself would not profit that much from the game, given it was developed by Niantic (and draws on data from Google, who also incubated the company). Presumably, investors had not checked this in advance. There is also evidence that the refusal of work in relation to videogames is going beyond work avoidance in the workplace. David Graeber has observed that many people in the Global North are now working what they call “bullshit jobs.”36 As Jane McGonigal has explained: “Games provide a sense of waking in the morning with one goal: I’m trying to improve this skill, teammates are counting on me, and my online community is relying on me.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Bentoism Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality How Ideas Work Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind John Higgs, The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds John Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain Economics Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Updated and Expanded) Annie Lowrey, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages Thomas Picketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century E.


pages: 233 words: 64,702

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

“revolutionized how Chinese people live, learn, work and play”: See Jack Ma, “Jack Ma on Taking Back China’s Blue Skies,” HBR Blog Network, November 11, 2013, available at http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/jack-ma-on-taking-back-chinas-blue-skies/ (accessed September 1, 2014). a centuries-long rejection of free-market economics: For a discussion of this rejection, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), pages 259–260. Chapter 2: Wide Open that target was raised to 60 million: See Josh Horwitz, “Xiaomi Is Well on Track to Sell 60 Million Smartphones in 2014,” TechInAsia.com, October 8, 2014, at https://www.techinasia.com/xiaomi-is-well-on-track-to-sell-60-million-smartphones-in-2014/ (accessed November 5, 2014).


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

L. Woloski. It was translated for me by Benoit Hochedez. The letter was made famous (among money nerds, at least) by Jevons. Details of the potlatch come from Davies. The Caroline Humphrey quote on barter is from her article “Barter and Economic Disintegration,” published in the journal Man. David Graeber made much of the myth of barter in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Norms of gift giving and reciprocity in traditional cultures have been widely discussed, perhaps most famously in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift. The details about different types of proto-money in different cultures come from Paul Einzig’s Primitive Money.


Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy by Philippe van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, open borders, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, price mechanism, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, systematic bias, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor

Suppose the marginal tax rate on this category of workers was 25 Â�percent in 1975. Their marginal net wage was therefore $6. This marginal net wage (and hence, supposedly, the material incentive to work) could be preserved in 2013 while raising the marginal tax rate to 62.5 Â�percent! 49. Cole 1949: 147. 50. Townsend 1968: 108. More provocatively, David Graeber (2014a) makes the same point as follows: “I always talk about prisons, where Â�people are fed, clothed, they’ve Â� got shelter; they could just sit around all day. But actually, they use work as a way of rewarding them. You know, if you Â�don’t behave yourself, we Â�won’t let you work in the prison laundry.

As Andy Stern (2016: 147) puts it: “The Â�people Â�running Â�unions, unfortunately, have not been creative enough, to date, in responding to the challenges of a changing economy, as evidenced in their slow response to Uber, Airbnb, and other disruptive ventures, and in the difficulties unions Â� have faced while trying to orÂ�gaÂ�nize freelancers.” 32. In David Graeber’s (2014b) forceful formulation: “I’m thinking of a Â�labor movement, but one very difÂ�ferÂ�ent than the kind Â�we’ve already seen. A Â�labor movement that manages to fiÂ�nally ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines Â�labor as caring for other Â�people.” 33.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

For more on the history of money, a plug here for Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order (London: Allen Lane, 2011), by my colleague Philip Coggan. 2. Vincent Bignon, “Cigarette Money and Black-Market Prices During the 1948 German Miracle” (EconomiX Working Papers from University of Paris West–Nanterre la Défense, 2009). 3. For a retelling of the history of credit and money, see David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011). 4. K. V. Nagarajan, “The Code of Hammurabi: An Economic Interpretation,” International Journal of Business and Social Science (May 2011). 5. See, for example, Hal Hershfield et al., “Increasing Saving Behaviour Through Age-Progressed Renderings of the Future Self,” Journal of Marketing Research (2011). 6.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Shifting to ‘reproductive’ work such as caring for relatives or work in the community could be expected to have beneficial environmental effects, because it would mean a shift to resource-conserving activities away from resource-depleting ones. Shorter working hours in jobs are correlated with smaller ecological footprints.33 And basic income would allow people to reject or spend less time on what David Graeber calls ‘bullshit’ jobs that they find hateful or meaningless.34 As mentioned in Chapter 2, basic income would also make it easier for governments to impose carbon taxes and other environmental measures designed to curb pollution and mitigate climate change, by compensating people for the extra costs of the goods and services affected or for livelihoods lost or disrupted.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

The driver of the American car used to drive an entire economy, but now the driver will be passive, and what will the culture become? This new orientation would have seemed deeply strange to our ancestors, but we are trying to talk ourselves into seeing this obsession with digitalized information as normal. Anthropologist David Graeber expressed the point nicely when referring to his attempt to watch one of the Star Wars installments: Recalling all those clumsy effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, the tin spaceships being pulled along by almost-invisible strings, I kept thinking about how impressed a 1950s audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to immediately realize, “actually, no.


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

The cacao beans must have worked well as money: they were observed still being used as ‘small-change’ money in Central American markets in the mid 1850s. And, as the final confirmation that they were real money, they were counterfeited: fraudsters would extract the chocolate from inside the beans and replace it with mud of an equivalent weight! Debt What did these currencies, from barley to gold and from cocoa to sterling, measure? David Graeber makes a case for a simple answer: debt (Graeber 2011b). He observes that the difficulty in the ‘chartalist’ position (from the Latin charta, or token) is to establish why people would continue to trust a token, rather than a commodity, as society develops and points out that the chartalist version of currency (see the later discussion about the Irish bank strike) means providing sufficient token claims against different commodities, whether those are cocoa beans, sea shells, copper axes or anything else.


pages: 349 words: 86,224

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

Adams, Michael Dietler, Gordon Hillman, Karl Jacoby, Helen Leach, Peter Perdue, Christopher Beckwith, Cyprian Broodbank, Owen Lattimore, Thomas Barfield, Ian Hodder, Richard Manning, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Edward Friedman, Douglas Storm, James Prosek, Aniket Aga, Sarah Osterhoudt, Padriac Kenney, Gardiner Bovingdon, Timothy Pechora, Stuart Schwartz, Anna Tsing, David Graeber, Magnus Fiskesjo, Victor Lieberman, Wang Haicheng, Helen Siu, Bennet Bronson, Alex Lichtenstein, Cathy Shufro, Jeffrey Isaac, and Adam T. Smith. I am particularly grateful to Joe Manning, who, I found, anticipated a good part of my argument about cereal grains and states and whose intellectual large-spiritedness extended to allowing me to poach his title, Against the Grain, as the first element of my own.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

One of the things that is troubling from Gorz’s perspective is the sheer pointlessness of many modern forms of employment. Huge proportions of the labour market are devoted to the production, marketing and distribution of consumer goods with superficial differences, limited functions, and short life spans. In his polemic against the rise of ‘bullshit jobs’, David Graeber also points to the unprecedented expansion of sectors such as corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. On top of this, we can consider the huge numbers of people whose role is to provide administrative, technical or security support for these industries, as well those thousands of jobs in the service industries – from dog-washers to home cleaners and 24-hour pizza deliverymen – which only exist because the workers who pay for them are so hellishly busy working (Graeber, 2013).


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Yes, running a business is rewarding for the CEO, but what about the workers? Worker exploitation is one of the oldest charges levied at capitalism, and it persists through the current day. For instance, in a recent Times Literary Supplement review of books about work, Joe Moran summed it up bluntly: “These books are about the misery.” David Graeber, in his recent highly popular book, says it all in the title: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Jeffrey Pfeffer, from the Stanford School of Business, calls his latest book Dying for a Paycheck, even though there is established evidence that unemployment is worse for your health than working.1 I’d like to suggest that productive work is one of the most fulfilling sides of our lives.


pages: 320 words: 86,372

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

But when jobs are cast within the bureaucratic and commercialized sphere of hyper-capitalist relations, even brain surgeons sometimes wonder what their worth is, especially when forced to cut costs, meet targets and generate process efficiencies in those public healthcare services that still remain in the West. This is where David Graeber’s (2013) otherwise insightful notion of ‘bullshit jobs’ is problematic. He suggests that there are wide swathes of occupations that are not really necessary since they do not really add anything to the public good (e.g. management consultants, derivative traders, etc.). The problem is, however, that this is the very worldview that informs the neoliberal gaze.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

There were no representatives, no officials, and few of the mechanisms of “organization” that Robert Michels identified as sliding naturally toward the empowerment of the few over the many. The commitment to this process was so total it was done even at the cost of efficiency. Meetings took a very long time; decisions could not be made quickly and efficiently. But that’s the whole idea. “You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature,” David Graeber, a radical anthropologist who’s been active in planning Occupy Wall Street since its inception, told the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. The occupiers, Graeber said, wanted to “create a body that could act as a model of genuine, direct democracy to contrapose to the corrupt charade presented to us as ‘democracy’ by the U.S. government.”


pages: 353 words: 81,436

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, basic income, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency risk, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, profit maximization, risk tolerance, shareholder value, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

The first and most important point to be made by a movement against the annexation of democracy by the finance markets is that legitimacy is not on the side of the money factories: after all, why should the promissory notes they produce be allowed to eat up the lives of ordinary people? Here David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years has done invaluable preliminary work. The idea that it is only right and proper for all debtors to pay off what they owe is a myth that serves to moralize global finance markets under cover of the morality of everyday life – and to make opposition to their demands appear immoral.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Special thanks go to James, Costas Lapavitsas (whose work has inspired so much of my thinking), Michael Jacobs and George Eaton, who read the book in its early form and provided comments. I would also like to thank Leo Panitch, Joe Guinan, Sarah McKinley, Christine Berry, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Ann Pettifor, David Graeber, Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, Adam Tooze, Laurie MacFarlane, David Rowland, Sahil Dutta, Fran Boait, Richard Kozul-Wright, Mark Seddon, Scott Lavery, Jeremy Green, Ewan McGinety, Nicholas Shaxson, John Christensen, Michal Rozworski, Leigh Phillips, Miriam Brett, Zack Exley, Waleed Shahid, David Adler, Sarah Jaffe, Hilary Wainwright, Will Stronge, Cat Hobbes, Ronan Burtenshaw, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Laura Pidcock, Richard Burgeon, Jon Trickett, and Dan Carden — all of whom have offered me help and advice, or influenced my thinking.


Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2007). 14.  Shankar Vedantam et al., “Emotional Currency: How Money Shapes Human Relationships,” NPR, January 13, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795246685/emotional-currency-how-money-shapes-human-relationships. 15.  David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, updated and expanded ed. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2014); L. Randall Wray, “Introduction to an Alternative History of Money,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2050427; Bill Maurer, “How Would You Like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money,” October 14, 2015, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375173. 16.  


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

You need to be clear with yourself about what you are afraid of, why you are afraid, and whether you care enough to dance with that fear because it will never go away.” Just Kids by Patti Smith: “This is the single best audiobook ever recorded by Patti Smith. It is not going to change the way you do business, but it might change the way you live. It’s about love and loss and art.” Debt by David Graeber: “I recommend it in audio because David is sometimes repetitive and a little elliptical but in audio it’s all okay because you can just listen to it again.” TIM: “Which of these, going from Zig to Pema and onward down to debt with David, which of these do you think I should start with, or which one would you suggest I start with?”

Harris), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Little Drummer’s Girl; The Russia House; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande), all of Lee Child’s books Godin, Seth: Makers; Little Brother (Cory Doctorow), Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud), Snow Crash; The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson), Dune (Frank Herbert), Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) AUDIOBOOKS: The Recorded Works (Pema Chödrön), Debt (David Graeber), Just Kids (Patti Smith), The Art of Possibility (Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander), Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale (Zig Ziglar), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) Goldberg, Evan: Love You Forever (Robert Munsch), Watchmen; V for Vendetta (Alan Moore), Preacher (Garth Ennis), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams), The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) Goodman, Marc: One Police Plaza (William Caunitz), The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom) Hamilton, Laird: The Bible, Natural Born Heroes (Christopher McDougall), Lord of the Rings (J.R.R.


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

© 2011 David Graeber First Melville House Printing: May 2011 Melville House Publishing 145 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, New York 11201 mhpbooks.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Graeber, David. Debt : the first 5,000 years / David Graeber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. eISBN: 978-1-61219-098-3 1. Debt–History. 2. Money–History. 3. Financial crises–History. I. Title. HG3701.G73 2010 332–dc22 2010044508 v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright 1 On The Experience of Moral Confusion 2 The Myth of Barter 3 Primordial Debts 4 Cruelty and Redemption 5 A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations 6 Games with Sex and Death 7 Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundations of Contemporary Civilization 8 Credit Versus Bullion, And the Cycles of History 9 The Axial Age (800 BC-600 AD) 10 The Middle Ages (600 AD-1450 AD) 11 Age of the Great Capitalist Empires (1450–1971) 12 (1971-The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined) Notes Bibliography Chapter One ON THE EXPERIENCE OF MORAL CONFUSION debt • noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the state of owing money. 3 a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In “Stone Age Economics,” Marshall Sahlins provides an interesting and insightful description of economic exchange as a cultural phenomenon, characterizing different forms of economic exchange during the Stone Age, and making the somewhat counterintuitive claim that these were the original affluent societies. Although some of his claims have been disputed by subsequent research, that claim itself is less important and interesting than the descriptions of models of exchange. Readers interested in a deeper history of exchange (and money) should also read David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011). 9. I discuss a small fraction of the history of trust in economic exchange in greater detail in chapter 6. 10. I focus on the United States because, to my knowledge, its historical economic data on employment is most extensive. In Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), see his table A-4.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. Sadly, Keynes’s predictions did not come true. Although productivity did indeed increase, the system—possibly inherent in a market economy—did not result in humans working much shorter hours. Rather, what happened is what the anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber describes as the growth of “bullshit jobs.”* While jobs that produce essentials like food, shelter, and goods have been largely automated away, we have seen an enormous expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration (as opposed to actual teaching, research, and the practice of medicine), “human resources,” and public relations, not to mention new industries like financial services and telemarketing and ancillary industries in the so-called gig economy that serve those who are too busy doing all that additional work.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Tribal societies simplified barter by selecting one rare and valuable commodity to trade all others against. Such commodity-based money, like seashells or gold, is nobody’s debt, a feature that has special appeal to people who see debt as the root of all evil, or at least the financial kind. The countervailing theory, espoused by anthropologists like David Graeber, argues that debt preceded money, and that from the start most money was tradable debt.6 The economists’ theory sounds plausible, but the anthropologists appear to have the facts on their side in the form of tribal societies’ behaviour, past and present. Man did not live in a garden of Eden trading seashells; life was indebted, as well as nasty, brutish and short.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

Occupy Wall Street wasn’t the best tactic available to reach a political goal. The Occupy movement succeeded because several thousand people decided, for their own personal emotional reasons, that they really wanted to be one of those guys. I’m not alone in this analysis. Two fairly important thinkers, anthropologist David Graeber and author Daniel Quinn, came to this conclusion independently and wrote about it online. Occupy Wall Street wasn’t a political formation, it was an affiliation narrative, a metastory that structured the world so that people who associated themselves with it – identified with its protagonists, to be literary about things – were part of a great and just collective, with noble aims and brave methods.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

” [64] Herb Keinon, “Trajtenberg Oversees First Meeting of ‘Rothschild Team,’” Jerusalem Post, August 9, 2011, http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Trajtenberg-oversees-first-meeting-of-Rothschild-Team. [65] Image by Rafimich,Wikipedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Daphne_Leef_ %D7%93%D7%A4%D7%A0%D7%99_%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%A3.jpg. [66] David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s Anarchist Roots,” Al Jazeera in English, November 30, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html; Nathan Schneider, “Thank You, Anarchists,” The Nation, December 19, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/article/165240/ thank-you-anarchists# ; “Translating Anarchy: Interview with Mark Bray, OWS Organizer and Author of the New Book Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” OccupyWallStreet, September 12, 2013, http://occupywallst.org/article/translating-anarchy-occupy-wall-street/


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Obligations and account balances, perhaps measured in customary units such as bushels of grain, could be agreed upon and then tracked within communities. And indeed, financial ledgers of this sort are known to have existed throughout antiquity, at least as far back as Mesopotamia around 3,000 BCE—and quite possibly appearing far earlier than that.4 In a popular book titled Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2011), author David Graeber puts forward a thesis that ledger-based debt obligations were the natural foundation of early systems of trade, and that coin emerged much later and to serve a narrower need. Graeber’s theory is backed up by far stronger evidence than the barter parable—and its implications for our present-day understanding of money are significant too.


pages: 456 words: 101,959

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

Undiagnosed Autistics are not able to apply for disability, and recipients must have their eligibility reevaluated on a regular basis (between every six to eighteen months).[28] Processing and investigating disability benefit cases is incredibly costly. It is for this reason that writer and anthropologist David Graeber suggested in the book Bullshit Jobs that it would be far less expensive and far more socially just to simply provide a baseline, universal basic income to all people, with no strings attached. While replacing all social welfare programs with universal basic income is probably not a wise move, based on the available data,[29] a less restrictive, more generous approach to providing disability benefits would clearly improve disabled people’s quality of life.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

I particularly like the premise considered in Charles Stross's novel Rule 34 (New York: Ace Books, 2011), that “the singularity” is born from the accumulation of global e-mail spam becoming sentient. 54.  See Cory Doctorow's novelization of gold farmers’ plight and struggle in For the Win (New York: Tor, 2010). 55.  David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville Publishing, 2011) revived popular interest in debt as primary in the social ontology of money. See also Marcel Mauss's The Gift (originally published in 1925), which remains a reference for the anthropology of finance, Marcel Mauss and E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

For example, Ian Berry, “Monsanto to Buy Planting Technology Company,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304707604577422162132896528. 21.  Sleep Dealer, directed by Alex Rivera (Vaya Entertainment, 2008). 22.  From a private Facebook post by Christopher Head. 23.  For example, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, David Graeber writes: “Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Khinchin, “Teoria prosteishego potoka” (Mathematical Methods of the Theory of Mass Service; more literally, Simple Stream Theory), Trudy Matematicheskogo Instituta Steklov. 49 (1955): 3–122. 26. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); David Graeber, Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 94. 27. The field of institutional economics offers pragmatic approaches to observed irrationalities in individual and group actions. A few standard references in the literature include Thorsten Veblen’s heterodox position in “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?


pages: 363 words: 107,817

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

As a result, even after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Nobel Prize1 winning economists have been known to make statements such as “I’m all for including the banking sector in stories where it’s relevant; but why is it so crucial to a story about debt and leverage?” (Krugman, 2012). The historical reality The problem with the idea that money emerged ‘spontaneously’ from barter is that, in the words of anthropologist David Graeber, “there’s no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not”. (2011, p. 29)2 As Graeber explains, the historical and anthropological evidence indicates that before the existence of money people did not engage in barter trades with each other. Rather, goods were freely given with the caveat that the person receiving them would have to return the favour at some point.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

People do all sorts of hard and frustrating and even unpaid and unpleasant things that aren’t fun, like tending to the dying or managing a classroom of unruly children or writing a book about gamification. They do these things for lots of reasons. Because it’s satisfying. Because it’s their calling. Because it lets them express themselves. Not because it’s fun. As David Graeber wrote in Bullshit Jobs, “The need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing.” It is cruel to coerce workers into a funhouse distortion of play. Fairly paid, meaningful work can be its own reward.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

That modern capitalist economies increasingly gravitate towards monotonic, value-less jobs goes a long way towards understanding why affluence (as measured by the metrics that the New Optimists prefer) is not offsetting the dissatisfaction and alienation seen in societies that equate work with self-worth. Anthropologist David Graeber describes the glut of these occupations in the aptly named Bullshit Jobs: A Theory: Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they’re doing something useful. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers — as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do.


pages: 424 words: 115,035

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open borders, pension reform, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, post-industrial society, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck

Capitalists can be taught that interest, but whether they will condescend to learn the lesson is up to them.31 Power, after all, is the ability to refuse to learn.32 As we have seen in the current crisis, such ability may require no more than being big enough for one’s demise to be a threat to the community at large. Coming to the end of my comment, I would also like to put in a word for not entirely abandoning concepts like socialism or even communism.33 As to the latter, David Graeber in his book on the anthropology of debt (Debt: The First 5,000 Years) has succinctly pointed out the generically communist foundations of economic life, even in advanced capitalism. Concerning socialism, to me the concept is indispensable for connoting the counterpart of – posses sive-consumerist – individualism, reminding us against the grain of today’s ‘cult of the individual’ that, once again citing Marx, man is the only animal that can individualize only in a society.34 What other concept is there in any case for the more communal, more other-regarding and more collectively responsible way of life that we today seem to need more urgently than ever, a life with much less licence to externalize the costs of private pleasure-seeking to the rest of the world?


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Although it would be impossible to thank them all, I would like to thank the most influential authors to whom I owe a great intellectual debt. These include Lord Adair Turner, W. Brain Arthur, Doyne Farmer, Andreas Antonopoulos, Satyajit Das, Joyce Appleby, Yanis Varoufakis, Patrick O’Sullivan, Nigel Allington, Mark Esposito, Sitabhra Sinha, Thomas Sowell, Niall Ferguson, Andy Stern, Alan Kirman, Neel Kashkari, Danny Dorling, David Graeber, Amir Sufi, Atif Mian, Vitalik Buterin, Andy Haldane, Gillian Tett, Martin Sandbu, Robert Reich, Kenneth Rogoff, Paul Beaudry, Michael Kumhof, Diane Coyle, Ben Dyson, Dirk Helbing, Guy Michaels, David Autor, Richard Gendal Brown, Tim Swanson, David Andolfatto, Paul Pfleiderer, Zoltan Pozsar, Frank Levy, Richard Murnane, César Hidalgo, and Robin Hanson, among others.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Gox in early 2012 and joined in the conversation on the forums and chat channels. When he wasn’t playing with Bitcoin, he devoured several books on the history of money, most significantly Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a cult favorite in the Occupy Wall Street movement and in certain transgressive corners of Wall Street. The book, by anthropologist David Graeber, argued that historians and economists have wrongly assumed that money grew out of barter. In fact, Graeber argued, and Wences came to believe, barter was never common and money was actually an evolution of credit—a way of tracking what people owed to each other. People used to just keep a mental tally of what they owed each other, but money provided a way to expand the system more broadly among people who didn’t know each other.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Debt is not always unsavoury. There is clearly some logic to the claim that the rich economies in particular are (even now) living in a ‘debt-fuelled’ consumerism and we’ll explore that logic later in this book (Chapter 6). But debt is a social institution with a very long pedigree, as anthropologist David Graeber demonstrates unequivocally in Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Debt provided the most primitive means of exchange. Money itself evolved from debt-based exchange.13 Lending and borrowing money is certainly an intrinsic feature of the modern economy. A properly functioning financial system plays a vital role in ‘smoothing’ both our income and our spending patterns over time.


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Way more than the vagaries of communal living and making is just the devastating segregation of the way a group like this forms: stratifying and further isolating ourselves especially along the lines of class and education level—and not because anyone is barred entry, but because even these ideas and desires are classed, are modified by our own backgrounds, feelings, or experiences of power and access. At some point that season, we got really into anarchism again, for the first time since we were teenagers. Somewhere in the hang of returning to Against Me!’s discography and other early-aughts music that came out of the Battle of Seattle, and stumbling into David Graeber’s work, and beginning to reflect on the communities that had always meant the most to us, a different understanding of anarchism formed than the one marked by the crust punks of our younger days. It wasn’t so much like swearing allegiance to an ideology or dropping out of participation in electoral politics—it’s just that I remembered or discovered for the first time (I’m not sure which) that anarchism or anarchist thinkers possessed the most compelling vision of the future for me, whether or not it was actionable or the makings of sound policy.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

There are several thinkers today that can be put in the same category. If you get bored by all those who just repeat the conventional wisdom about the economy and how it evolves, pick any work from these economic thinkers and you will immediately be reinvigorated: David Autor, Tyler Cowen, Deirdre McCloskey, Malcolm Gladwell, David Graeber, Deepak Lal, Joel Mokyr, Matt Ridley, Richard Sennett, Robert Solow, Lawrence Summers, Peter Thiel, and Martin Wolf. Their works have contributed to our thinking for this book. Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

That kind of money can be called “past-oriented money.” The accounting, past-oriented, concept of money is concrete, which makes it cognitively natural. It is easier to think about a concrete number of sheep than about something abstract like statistics predicting the prospects of bundled derivatives.* *Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Chelsea House, 2010), proposes that debt is as old as civilization. However, simple debts are still representations of past events, rather than anticipations of future growth in value; the latter is what we call “finance.” Modern future-oriented concepts of money only make sense in a universe that is pregnant with possibility.


pages: 578 words: 131,346

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

., pp. 90–93. 37Quoted in Lizzie Wade, ‘Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital’, Science (21 June 2018). 38Quoted in Richard Lee, ‘What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources’, Man the Hunter (Chicago, 1968), p. 33. 39James C. Scott, Against the Grain, pp. 66–7. 40Turchin, Ultrasociety, pp. 174–5. 41Scott, Against the Grain, pp. 27–9. 42For an extensive historical overview, see David Graeber, Debt. The First 5,000 Years (London, 2011). 43Scott, Against the Grain, pp. 139–49. 44Ibid., p. 162. 45Owen Lattimore, ‘The Frontier in History’, in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London, 1962), pp. 469–91. 46Quoted in Bruce E. Johansen, Forgotten Founders (Ipswich, 1982), Chapter 5. 47James W.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Each of the hundred-odd quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the noun and the verb date from after 1541, but during the sixteenth century most of the commercial uses of the word show hostility toward it. An act of 34–35 Henry VIII (that is, 1542) noted that “sundry persons consume the substance obtained by credit of other men.” Shame on them (the scolding has lasted down to populist assaults on credit, such as the anthropologist David Graeber’s book in 2011, and the Syriza Party in Greece in 2015). But by 1691 Locke is using neutral, businesslike language: credit is merely “the expectation of money within some limited time.” Roger Holmes has pointed me to Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (1994).12 He well summarizes their evidence: They point to the change in funerary monuments (“marmorialized gentlemen”) from those of the sixteenth to those of the later seventeenth century.

(One can reflect that cheating can characterize nontrading life with people, too, even if wholly “integrative”—family life and tribal life, for example, of which the Hebrew Bible also gives many nasty examples—but the subject here is indignation about the trading life.) The prophet Amos (fl. 750 BCE), for example: Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, . . . skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales.13 So always. The anticapitalist anarchistic anthropologist David Graeber, an Occupy maven, spends 534 pages in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) grumbling that “arguments about who really owes what to whom have played a central role in shaping our basic vocabulary of right and wrong.”14 His sole intellectual tool is Amos-like indignation against sellers and bosses and owners and creditors.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Wilson (1978), On Human Nature, Harvard University Press. genetic science is flawed Anne Innis Dagg (2004), “Love of Shopping” Is Not a Gene: Problems with Darwinian Psychology, Black Rose Books. Douglass North Douglass C. North (1990), Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, 54. no money would David Graeber (2011), Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House. Terrence Deacon Terrence W. Deacon (1997), The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain, W.W. Norton & Co., 384–401. far more philandering Simon C. Griffith, Ian P. Owens, and Katherine A. Thuman (2002), “Extra Pair Paternity in Birds: A Review of Interspecific Variation and Adaptive Function,” Molecular Ecology, 11:2195–212.


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

Joaquin Ramirez Cabanes (Mexico City: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1943), 106. 2 Andrew M. Watson, ‘Back to Gold – and Silver’, Economic History Review 20:1 (1967), 11–12; Jasim Alubudi, Repertorio Bibliográfico del Islam (Madrid: Vision Libros, 2003), 194. 3 Watson, ‘Back to Gold – and Silver’, 17–18. 4 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011). 5 Glyn Davies, A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994), 15. 6 Szymon Laks, Music of Another World, trans. Chester A. Kisiel (Evanston, Ill.: North-western University Press, 1989), 88–9.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT said in a statement: Claire Cain Miller, “Google Appoints Its Most Senior Woman to Run YouTube,” The New York Times, February 5, 2014, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/05/google-appoints-its-most-senior-woman-to-run-youtube/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Slide five showed: Doerr, Measure What Matters, 166. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 18: Down the Tubes an anthropologist: David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Atlas of Places, 2013, https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT her co-worker said: Alex Morris, “When Google Walked,” New York, February 5, 2019, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/can-the-google-walkout-bring-about-change-at-tech-companies.html.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Arthur, for whom Hegel-type dialectics entirely replace monetary theory and economics (‘Money and Exchange’, Capital and Class 30:3, 2006); for a telling response see Thomas Sekine, ‘Arthur on Money and Exchange’, Capital and Class 33:3, 2009. 15 Discussion in this section draws heavily on Costas Lapavitsas, Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit, London: Routledge, 2003, ch. 3. 16 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan E, London: Methuen, 1904, vol. 1, ch. 5. 17 This point is often missed by anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists who discuss the origin of money and criticize ‘economic theory’ for relating money to direct exchange. Thus, David Graeber makes a typically withering attack on Smith for assuming a ‘primitive’ society and an imaginary state of barter out of which money presumably emerges (Debt: The First 5000 Years, New York: Melville House, 2011, ch. 2). There is, of course, little doubt that Smith’s image of barter among ‘primitives’ is fallacious and a product of its time.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

See Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon (New York: Seven Stories, 2001). 106 See John Halloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (London: Pluto, 2002). 107 On identity politics, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), especially 156-91. 108 On the resurgence of anarchist groups, see David Graeber, “For a New Anarchism,” New Left Review, 2nd ser., no. 13 (January-February 2002): 61-73. 109 Here we should also add the various forms of electronic resistance and hacker movements that strive to make common the enormous resources controlled in electronic networks and thwart the new, sophisticated forms of control that use cybernetic technologies.


pages: 1,327 words: 360,897

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

., Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Thought of Elisée Reclus (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004) 61 Clark, ‘Municipal Dreams: A Social Ecological Critique of Bookchin’s Politics’, Social Ecology after Bookchin, ed. Andrew Light (New York: Guilford Press, 1998) 62 See Clark, ‘Bridging the Unbridgeable Chasm: On Bookchin’s Critique of the Anarchist Tradition’, forthcoming in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 63 See David Graeber, ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review, 13 (January-February, 2002). See also his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004) 64 See Benjamin Franks, Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary British Anarchisms (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006); Zerzan, Running on Emptiness, op. cit., p. 162 65 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

It demonstrates not only that another world is possible, but that it already exists, has existed, and shows an endless potential to burst through the artificial walls and divisions that currently imprison us. An exquisite contribution to the literature of human freedom, and coming not a moment too soon.” —DAVID GRAEBER, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Direct Action: An Ethnography Wobblies and Zapatistas offers the reader an encounter between two generations and two traditions. Andrej Grubacic is an anarchist from the Balkans. Staughton Lynd is a lifelong pacifist, influenced by Marxism.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Yet most people find fulfillment and meaning in their work, whereas time-use studies show that the unskilled, who have seen their prospects in the labor market deteriorate, spend much of their time in front of the television, despite many studies showing that there is a negative correlation between television consumption and individual well-being.35 Contrary to the anthropologist David Graeber’s witty essay on “bullshit jobs,” in which he claims that most people spend their working lives doing work they perceive to be meaningless, large-scale survey evidence shows the exact opposite.36 And a wide range of studies across many countries and periods of time has consistently shown that people who work are happier than those who do not.37 As Ian Goldin puts it, “Individuals gain not only income, but meaning, status, skills, networks and friendships through work.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Within any rentier institution, the gains flow disproportionately to the small handful of individuals who create, capture or protect from competition or impairment the all-important rent-generating assets: for instance, the ‘quants’ who design exotic new financial instruments; the oil industry executives who sign the licensing deals with the politicians of resource-rich states; the lawyers who secure patent approval for a blockbuster new drug; the ‘rain-makers’ who win ten-year outsourcing contracts. Indeed, the rise of rentier capitalism is the only credible explanation that we have for the fact that, as David Graeber has recently observed, lawyers and accountants account for ‘an extraordinarily high percentage of the working population’ in the UK, numbering some 150,000 and 312,000, respectively.63 For lawyers and accountants are quintessential, indispensable purveyors of balance-sheet capitalism. The former serve to secure the value of rentiers’ assets, litigating against any perceived or actual threat of devaluation.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

They have also created more demands for enterprises to provide essential information to the government and to the citizens on the products and the services that they sell. These requirements inevitably lead the enterprises and some individuals to object that they are being overregulated, and that these demands are unreasonable and costly. However, as the anthropologist David Graeber put it in a recent book, perhaps with some exaggeration, public and private bureaucracies have become largely indistinguishable, and it is an illusion to believe that the rules that are created apply, or apply equally, to everyone (see Graeber, 2015). The rules often end up benefiting some (often those with more money) over others.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

C r e di tor s a n d De btor s There has always been a tension between the convenience of having a fixed, unchangeable yardstick of value and the desire of creditors and debtors to have a money which suits their own interests. This is the 27 H i s t ory of E c onom ic T houg h t class-struggle theory of money. In the industrial age, the conflict between capitalists and workers overlapped the older conflict between creditors and debtors without ever replacing it. To historical sociologists like David Graeber, much of the history of the world can be interpreted in terms of the struggle between creditors and debtors. Whatever the loan or wage contract says, there is always a risk in an uncertain world that promises will be devalued or revalued; hence the intensity of the conflict to control the value of the promises.10 The state has only a limited incentive to guarantee the value of money.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Hume maintains the effect was only temporary and that by the reign of Tiberius interest had returned to 6 per cent. 55. Hume, Selected Essays, p. 48. 56. Silver, ‘Modern Ancients’. 57. Homer and Sylla, History of Interest Rates, p. 2. 58. Csabai, ‘Chronologische Aspekte’. 59. On the myth of barter see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York, 2011), pp. 33–62. 60. William Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton, 2016), p. 41. 61. Mieroop, Ancient Mesopotamian City, p. 187. 62. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), p. 31. 63.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 12 1 Louis Uchitelle, “Fed Fears Wage Spiral That Is Little in Evidence,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 2008. 2 David Frum, “The Vanishing Republican Voters,” New York Times, Aug. 5, 2008. 3 Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 296–97. 4 See Timothy H. Parsons, The Rule of Empires, 36. 5 Peter G. Peterson, “The Morning After.” 6 George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (1981; out of print), and David Graeber, Debt (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 377–78. 7 Albert Hunt, “Reagan Offers Lesson for Obama on Tax,” Sydney Morning Herald, Jan. 10, 2011. 8 Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang, “Tax Policy Feeds Gap Between Rich, Poor,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2011. 9 Bruce Bartlett, “The Fiscal Legacy of George W.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

So if money is a form of debt—a claim upon society, perhaps—to whom and by whom is this debt payable? Is debt-free money, and even a debt-free monetary system, a worthwhile goal or simply a theoretical error? DEBT’S UNTOLD STORY In his magisterial history of the subject, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), David Graeber begins by positing a fundamental distinction between old-style credit and interest-bearing credit. Debt is a fundamental feature of all human relations; it is foundational to most of the obligations that social life ordinarily involves. This is old-style credit: in English, for example, “thank you” derives from a phrasal verb meaning “I will remember what you did for me.”


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

Then there are the worst-case scenarios: that they will organize and rebel. They are, obviously, a bother: Dead weight. (The disposable ones also have their own “soft” version: the millions and millions who do perfectly useless jobs, defined as those jobs whose disappearance would only affect the same structure where that work is carried out. David Graeber, professor at the London School of Economics, says, “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”14 Employees—an infinite number of employees—in all kinds of service companies, employees of state bureaucracies, all kind of managers, lawyers, public relations people, salesmen, receptionists, secretaries, journalists, and so many others of us who are there so that nobody realizes that we don’t have any real place in the chain of production, that if we all occupied a real place we could all work just ten or fifteen hours a day, that we are really as disposable as the peasants in Bihar—except in some countries where things are a little more complicated.