I've read "Debt" and responded more fully here [1].
But I'm curious: given your reading of "Debt", what ordering would you change in my post besides the myth of barter? My sense is that people are reacting to the first couple sentences and missing the entire rest of the post. I don't really see how Graeber is related to the Fed funds rate or currency pegs, e.g. Of course money is political, and I could have framed everything in terms of state violence and control, but that's essentially a different blog post. I don't think that adds a lot of clarity for what mechanically happens at Jackson Hole. Happy to hear how I'm wrong.
100%, that's why I led with the post being useful as-is -- you don't have to shift your view to Graeber's because we can always link to it as a supplement :).
IMO part of why myth-of-barter has persisted is because it has worked for helping folks understand our modern finance system (among other reasons, b/c many folks building that system grew up on it as well). So it makes sense to use in an explainer.
With that said, it doesn't feel to me like it detracts from anything to start with obligation before currency. Markers of past favors seems like as easy a place to start as trading stones.
This is a fair point, and rhymes with other commentators’ feedback. I could have started with `Obligation -> Debt -> Money`, for example, and that strikes me as a better beginning. People need money to pay their debts, and this theme would re-appear at various levels of the hierarchy: the villager needs stones to pay taxes, the village needs black money to pay tribute, and so forth. I think this would add meaningful nuance to the "just so" motivations; money isn't solely motivated by trade but also by social obligations and political power.
That said, I would not find a full Graeber-ization helpful. It wouldn't change the structure of the post, and I don't think Graeber's framework is useful for understanding much of the content, such as the Fed funds rate, the intra-bank clearinghouse, or correspondent banking.
I’m happy to hear criticism and to learn from that, but I wrote this myself. Took quite a while.
Re: why, I don’t think most people understand the very basics of the global economy in mechanical terms, and this was my attempt to explain those mechanics. I wanted the various pieces of the system to be motivated by understandable problems, hence the fable-like story.
I now see some folks were triggered by this stylized approach. Which is a pity. I think the simple setup is worth the payoff. My explanation of money creation, for example, matches the Bank of England’s whitepaper, and I am especially pleased with how the idea of a reserve currency both develops naturally and rhymes with earlier ideas lower in the hierarchy.
Your article was well worth the read. Thank you for that. It's merely a HN trend where lazy people who can't read an article bad-mouth it as AI. You'll find the lazy AI comment in every article's top first or second comment now. Don't bother justifying yourself, keep it up and keep writing.
I wouldn't say that it's the stylized approach tbh, but rather the lack of it?
Not to attack you, but it reads like a sudden unexpected glossary section. For which there is a place in the world, but only if it is expected (hence the opener).
If the goal was to have an explainer for people about stuff that most get wrong, then I think an opener alone would not be enough, though. For that, it's probably far too densely written. It could also use some illustrations for that (albeit that's optional. Engaging textbooks also do well without).
Truth be told, it does to me read more like an intellectual achievement you're proud of and not like a piece to in any way serve an audience.
Then again, if that was to be the goal, I agree that the fundamentals would be there; just waiting to be shuffled around a bit and be embedded into a context that pulls the reader's brain along the path you want them to follow.
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!
I have a theory that whatever popularity my blog has comes from writing to the level of the reader. My favorite example of the opposite behavior is how every blog post on a topic involving Bayesian inference seemingly must start with Bayes’ formula.
I really like Katex. I used to use MathJax for my blog, but the page reflow was annoying. Now I use Katex with server-side rendering, and even pages with a lot of math load quickly and without reflow.
The other obvious reason to avoid inverses is that they're only defined for square matrices, whereas LU decomposition works on general rectangular matrices (or rather PLU decomposition,same basic idea).
Invert can also destroy structure you might want to keep around, for example the LU factorization of a banded matrix will still be banded (lapack will do partial pivoting which will increase the bandwidth, but with it'll only double the number of super-diagonals in L), while the inverse is a full matrix.
But I'm curious: given your reading of "Debt", what ordering would you change in my post besides the myth of barter? My sense is that people are reacting to the first couple sentences and missing the entire rest of the post. I don't really see how Graeber is related to the Fed funds rate or currency pegs, e.g. Of course money is political, and I could have framed everything in terms of state violence and control, but that's essentially a different blog post. I don't think that adds a lot of clarity for what mechanically happens at Jackson Hole. Happy to hear how I'm wrong.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49785213
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