In the comments attached to my article Have Anthropologists Overturned Menger?, David Graeber offered a lengthy response. Below we’ve compiled his comments into a convenient stand-alone post. I’ll respond in turn with a follow-up post.
I recently wrote a Mises Daily article defending Carl Menger’s theory of the origin of money from the critique set forth by anthropologist David Graeber, in an interview where Graeber was discussing his new book. I wasn’t disputing Graeber’s (obviously) superior command of the historical evidence.
The history of economics is full of tales of forgotten forerunners, men whose work had no effect and was only rediscovered after their main ideas had been made popular by others, of remarkable coincidences of simultaneous discoveries, and of the peculiar fate of individual books.
The best thing about the five-finger Vibram shoe — the craze has certainly reach the tipping point — is that it lets the runner navigate terrain that had previously been inaccessible.
Robert Remini’s Andrew Jackson and the Bank War (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967) has the following excerpt explaining part of Jackson’s opposition to the Second Bank of the United States:
I recently debated Karl Smith, a New Keynesian professor at UNC, on the possible merits of government spending (video here).
