Fat cat (checks notes) math professors have had it far too good for far too long. If they think they’re so smart, why didn’t they get a real job and raise venture funding for a scammy startup?
Right? Like, God forbid someone work gruelingly hard at a stable job quietly and slowly advancing the state of human knowledge without seeking fame and fortune!
I'm sure Graeber is right about the ahistoricity of the orthodox just-so story of money, but I've always wondered if perhaps he misread the kind of claim that story is actually making.
What if economists don't really intend to make a factual historical claim? What if it's more like the principle of virtual work, if you take the analogy? What if it's saying, look, here are two possible configurations of the world: one with barter and one with monetary exchange. One of these configurations is "more stable" than the other. That's a reasonable explanation for "why" we use money, if you read "why" in a non-causal way.
Or maybe economists are straightforwardly careless historians. I don't know!
The essential elements were to succeed without having been given any direction or opinions as to how.
The detail was to get money. Yeah ok, so what? The experiment was to be a company not a person, and there is no other definition of success for a company.
Earn, steal, gamble, beg, whore, all on the table. The same is true for a person.
I’m no proponent of capital punishment, but to take the question seriously: as an extreme measure to disincentivize extreme externalities that would otherwise never be priced in. In the status quo, captains of industry have something close to a call option on the social utility of their products. They capture much of the upside (they get paid when people enjoy their goretex jackets), but are pretty free to socialize tail risks (relative to the harm, they have little to lose from poisoning thousands. Maybe a lawsuit. Maybe they have to sell the third house.) A society could decide that this is not a desirable incentive structure.
There’s a pirates-and-emperors aspect to this: such measures are taken in some societies to disincentivize O(1) violent crimes. Why (really, why? It’s worth thinking about!) are they rarely taken for O(n) crimes?
I don’t really understand this. Sometimes I see even stronger versions of this sentiment, that amount to saying, hey, it’s inevitable, so you might as well be e/acc. But you can just not do things. Societies can just not do things. They used to know this. We don’t have to admit the neoliberal Nuremberg defense of “I was just following incentives.”
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