Thread by @delong

I see the late David Graeber is in the news today.

I do not trust anything he ever wrote. Let me tell you why.

Let me pick a chapter at random from Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years… I land on chapter 12… I start reading… I come to the third... 1/

...page <archive.org/details/DebtTh…> and find:

"I would hear occasional rumors of secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers in Manhattan.... After the Towers were destroyed… one of the first questions many New Yorkers asked was: What happened to the money?... Some... 2/

[Graeber cont.]: "...spoke of legions of emergency workers secretly summoned… desperately carting off tons of bullion…. One particularly colorful conspiracy theory suggested that the entire attack was really staged by speculators…. The truly remarkable thing… is... 3/

[Graeber cont.] "... that.. I did a little research and discovered that, no, actually, it’s true...

A reader reading this thinks that the “it” of “actually, it's true” is: (1) There were “secret gold vaults underneath the Twin Towers”, (2) “Legions of... emergency workers... 4/

...[were] secretly summoned to make their way through miles of overheated tunnels”, and (3) They worked “desperately carting off tons of bullion”,

And perhaps also: (4) “The entire attack was really staged by speculators.”

Actually, what is actually true is that the... 5/

...Federal Reserve Bank of New York does keep the gold in its custodial accounts in the vaults of 33 Liberty Street. 33 Liberty Street is not “underneath” the World Trade Center. 33 Liberty Street is not even, as Graeber later corrects himself, “two blocks”... 6/

... Trade Center. It is six blocks from the World Trade Center—half a mile away.

And do note that when David Graeber claims he “did a little research”, what he means is that he read the pamphlet the FRBNY hands out to visiting junior high school students... 7/

...And do not forget the most famous paragraph of Graeber’s Debt, of which barely a word was ever true: "Apple Computers… was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty... 8/

[Graeber, cont.:] ... to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages..."

Afterwards, Graeber could not give a consistent account of how he had come to write this.

(1) Sometimes he claimed that it was 100% true, but not of Apple Computer, and that it was just... 9/

... minor mind-o error.

(2) Sometimes he claimed he had been led astray by Richard Wolff (and perhaps one of his graduate students?) who had misinformed him.

(3) Sometimes he claimed it was his editor’s fault in the copyediting, and he had missed the error when he... 10/

...reviewed the ms.

Not everything Graeber writes is wrong—some of it is right, and some of it is quite good.

But nothing David Graeber writes is trustable.

Today we have Daniel Immerwahr <thenation.com/article/societ…> writing that David Graeber and David Wengrow’s claim... 11/

.. that British-colonist settlers in America captured by Amerindians “almost invariably” chose to stay with them is “ballistically false”. Immerwahr writes:

"Graeber and Wengrow twice assert that settlers in the colonial Americas who’d been 'captured or adopted' by... 12/

[Immerwahr, cont.:] ...Indigenous societies 'almost invariably' chose to stay with them. By contrast, Indigenous people taken into European societies “almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or—having tried their best to... 13/

[Immerwahr, cont.:] ...adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.'… The sole scholarly authority that Graeber and Wengrow cite… argues the opposite. 'Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity... 14/

[Heard, cont.:] ...in much the same way” is its thesis; generally, young children assimilated into their new culture and older captives didn’t…"

New York Times reporter Jennifer Scheussler does the “he said, he said” dance <nytimes.com/2021/10/31/art…> by reporting... 15/

...that David Wengrow says that it is “Immerwahr who was reading the source wrong”.

Scheussler could have—and would have, if competent, resolved this. What the source Graeber and Wengrow draw on, Joseph Norman Heard’s 1977 dissertation, actually argues is exactly what... 16/

...Daniel Immerwahr says it argues. This:

"Boys and girls captured below the age of puberty almost always became assimilated, while persons taken prisoner above that age usually retained the desire to return to white civili­ zation…. An Indian child reared and cherished... 17/

[Heard, cont.:] ...in a white family became assimilated in much the same manner as a white child adopted by an Indian family. The deter­mining factor was age at the time of removal from natural parents for Indian children as well as for whites..." <digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewconten…> 18/

...No. David Immerwahr has not misread it.

Graeber and Wengrow’s “almost invariably” is false.

Wengrow is lying. 19/END