![Flashback Machine: Huge praise from a grand anthropologist. [source]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxezjhZtiQ1qzs6yjo1_1280.png)
Flashback Machine: Huge praise from a grand anthropologist. [source]
I think it bears mention that this is less about the actual merits of Austrian economics and more about a complete failure of due diligence on the part of a professed intellectual. Murphy was admittedly responding to an argument that Graeber wasn’t making. The question of whether Murphy’s response is coherent in light of the argument he was responding to is a different question entirely from whether his response to Graeber was misinformed with respect opinions Graeber actually holds.
Well you make a good point, one that I believe Dave addresses in some detail, however his reply to Murphy ends with the following,
At this point, it’s easier to understand why economists feel so defensive about challenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describing is not how we ‘naturally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowadays, is doing most of the actual teaching? Primarily, economists. The question of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an economy is—most economists still insist that an economy is essentially a vast barter system, with money a mere tool (a position all the more peculiar now that the majority of economic transactions in the world have come to consist of playing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very status of economics: is it a science that describes of how humans actually behave, or prescriptive, a way of informing them how they should? (Remember, sciences generate hypothesis about the world that can be tested against the evidence and changed or abandoned if they don’t prove to predict what’s empirically there.)
Or is economics instead a technique of operating within a world that economists themselves have largely created? Or is it, as it appears for so many of the Austrians, a kind of faith, a revealed Truth embodied in the words of great prophets (such as Von Mises) who must, by definition be correct, and whose theories must be defended whatever empirical reality throws at them—even to the extent of generating imaginary unknown periods of history where something like what was originally described ‘must have’ taken place?
The emphasis is mine.
Edit: In my experience, Murphy’s lack of due dilligence is quite common at Mises (with a steady stream of people ready to parrot and discredit an entire person’s work because of slander or imaginary arguments made in one post.)
Dave Graeber, in a recent post over at Naked Capitalism, responds to Robert Murphy and wipes the floor with him,
Last week, Robert F. Murphy published a piece on the webpage of the Von Mises Institute responding to some points I made in a recent interview on Naked Capitalism, where I mentioned that the standard economic accounts of the emergence of money from barter appears to be wildly wrong. Since this contradicted a position taken by one of the gods of the Austrian pantheon, the 19th century economist Carl Menger, Murphy apparently felt honor-bound to respond.
In a way, Murphy’s essay barely merits response. In the interview I’m simply referring to arguments made in my book, ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’. In his response, Murphy didn’t even consult the book; in fact he later admitted he was responding at least in part not even to the interview but to an inaccurate summary of my position someone had made in another blog!
We are not, in other words, dealing with a work of scholarship. However, in the blogsphere, the quality or even intention of an argument often doesn’t matter. I have to assume Murphy was aware that all he had to do was to write something—anything really—and claim it rebutted me, and the piece would be instantly snatched up by a right-wing echo chamber, mirrored on half a dozen websites and that followers of those websites would then dutifully begin appearing across the web declaring to everyone willing to listen that my work had been rebutted. The fact that I instantly appeared on the Von Mises web page to offer a detailed response, and that Murphy has since effectively conceded, writing an elaborate climb-down saying that he had no intention to cast doubt on my argument as a whole at all, only to note that I had not definitively disproved Menger’s, has done nothing to change this. Indeed, on both US and UK Amazon, I have seen fans of Austrian economics appear to inform potential buyers that I am an economic ignoramus whose work has been entirely discredited.
The emphasis are mine and the rest of the post, with reply, can be read at the link. Whether or not you agree with Dave Graeber’s politics, you have to admit that it’s a pretty nice way of slapping around the Austrian economist fan boys at Mises (or on tumblr) who have a habit of mimicking Murphy’s “tactics.”
