Spotted this posted by Dan Clore in alt.fan.noam-chomsky.
David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst*
[The footnote referenced by the '*' reads,
I'm well aware that Graeber has resisted these sorts of labels in
the past (for example, in an interview with Stir Magazine). However,
it's our blog, and I get to write my own headlines.
]
http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2011/10/15/david-graeber-anthropologist-anarchist-financial-analyst/
>From the article (a quotation within the article from _On the
invention of money_):
Economists always ask us to "imagine" how things must have worked
before the advent of money. What such examples bring home more
than anything else is just how limited their imaginations really
are. When one is dealing with a world unfamiliar with money and
markets, even on those rare occasions when strangers did meet
explicitly in order to exchange goods, they are rarely thinking
exclusively about the value of the goods. This not only
demonstrates that the Homo Oeconomicus which lies at the basis of
all the theorems and equations that purports to render economics a
science, is not only an almost impossibly boring person --
basically, a monomaniacal sociopath who can wander through an orgy
thinking only about marginal rates of return -- but that what
economists are basically doing in telling the myth of barter, is
taking a kind of behavior that is only really possible after the
invention of money and markets and then projecting it backwards as
the purported reason for the invention of money and markets
themselves. Logically, this makes about as much sense as saying
that the game of chess was invented to allow people to fulfill a
pre-existing desire to checkmate their opponent's king.
I recall that this characterization of Homo Oeconomicus was
occasionally admitted to discourse in the era of Red Scare rants,
where it referred, of course, to the terrible godless *communist*
notion of Homo Oeconomicus. Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the
USSR, I've occasionally remarked that the Cold War is over and the Bad
Guys won, meaning that the victors were the Guys with this notion of
Homo Oeconomicus embraced by both Soviet communism and today's
capitalist economics. I supposed it to be a humorous remark but nobody
thought it was funny. I guess they assumed I was taking a poke at the
USA per se. Ho hum.
Ah, well, but Graeber's been tagged with the dread label "Anarchist"
so can't we just sweep him up with the other cranks, rabid radicals
and marginal crazies? OTOH, Yale gave its imprimatur to the Georges
Bush and shitcanned Graeber without explanation. What does that tell
us?
Numerous links at the above URL as well as on his Wikipedia page.
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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