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Title: Reply to Brad DeLong Author: David Graeber Date: 2011 Language: en Topics: a response Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/brad-delong-reply/
In late 2011, around the time of Occupy Wall Street, he for some reason
known only to himself, decided to go gunning for me despite my never
having met him or interacted with him in my life. He started with
outright personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or
anything else I could figure out) until my publishers encouraged me to
point out that false personal aspersions were actionable
Since a number of otherwise sensible people seem to have been taken in
by Brad DeLong’s claims to have exposed serious flaws in my work,
particularly my book Debt: The First 5000 Years, it often being added
that I have not even attempted to reply, I thought it might be helpful
to provide some brief background for anyone curious about the matter.
Brad DeLong is a self-proclaimed troll and a proven serial liar. In late
2011, around the time of Occupy Wall Street, he for some reason known
only to himself, decided to go gunning for me despite my never having
met him or interacted with him in my life. He started with outright
personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I
could figure out) until my publishers encouraged me to point out that
false personal aspersions were actionable; the initial attack was taken
down and from then on he seems to have decided to go after my book.
At first, I did try to reply, but I quickly realized he was operating in
bad faith: for instance, one time when I tried to correct a statement
he’d made that I was misrepresenting the works of Giovanni Arrighi, I
tried to post a comment containing a quote from Arrighi stating exactly
the position I’d attributed to him; DeLong simply cut the part with the
evidence out of my response so it seemed like I couldn’t defend myself
(he carefully edits the comment section of his blog).
After that, I blocked him on Twitter and stopped even looking at his
blog. I figured if I stopped responding, eventually, he’d get bored and
go away. Bizarrely, though, this did not work, and he kept it up for
literally years, devoting post after post to attacking me. He also
stalked me online, he would show up to attack me whenever my name was
mentioned prominently in a public debate, or discussed on other blogs,
always to repeat the same accusations again and again; on Twitter, he
would made up dummy eggshell accounts to try to trick me into engaging
with him; he’d respond to my tweets and pretend I was arguing with him,
knowing I couldn’t see his tweets (people showed them to me later); he’d
take tweets I’d made in arguments with others and put them on his blog
pretending they were addressed to him, and otherwise behaved in a
totally monomaniacal and frankly rather unhinged fashion. Finally,
again, knowing I’d blocked him and had refused to interact with him for
years at that point, he created a Twitter bot to attack me every day for
a month, each tweet ending with “stay away!” – i.e., pretending he
wasn’t the one stalking me but that it was somehow the other way around.
So the man is irrefutably a liar. You can believe his other claims about
my scholarly work if you like.
His greatest triumph was to find one sentence about Apple obviously
garbled in the copyediting process and instantly removed from all but
the very earliest edition of the book, which DeLong has since contrived
to reproduce perhaps a thousand times in an attempt to defame me.
Otherwise, most of the “factual errors” he claims to have found are
either differences of interpretation, based on obvious
misrepresentations of my position, or points so trivial it’s somewhat
flattering that’s they were the best he managed to find.
Example: he once posted an entire blog post just to say my
interpretation of the Sumerian principles called “the mes” was
incorrect. When I showed this to one of my best friends, who is a
Mesopotamianist, the friend started laughing out loud. Nobody, he said,
really knows what the mes are. There are a half dozen interpretations.
The one I adopted was the most widely accepted one but sure, he said,
lots of people would disagree. I think the biggest actual mistake DeLong
managed to detect in the 544 pages of Debt, despite years of flailing
away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the
Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I wrote that it was one,
actually it’s three. Yup. Guilty as charged. I got the number wrong. The
difference between one and three had absolutely no bearing on the point
I was making in the sentence in question, which was just that the Fed is
a public/private hybrid. But DeLong has triumphantly trumpeted this
again and again as proof of my “ignorance.” In other words, he’s still
not managed to find anything really substantial wrong with the book. And
not one of the “mistakes’ he’s even claimed to identify bear on any of
the book’s substantial arguments.
Frankly, what DeLong is playing is a transparent and rather pathetic
game. Anyone who goes through a long book on diverse topics will be able
to find some things they can hold out and say are “errors.” To show how
easy a game it is to play, just in the course of his trolling me, DeLong
himself made more glaring errors than he managed to locate in 544 pages
of Debt. Some were truly embarrassing. Let me recall a few offhand:
School of Economics. (Anyone who knows anything about Bentham knows his
body is in University College London. LSE didn’t even exist when he
died. Note DeLong’s specialty is, he claims, economic history.)
struck Europe more than once (in fact, London alone was hit by plague
over 35 times between 1347 and 1665) – which, again, for a professional
economic historian, is just incredibly embarrassing. I mean this is very
very basic Medieval History 101 stuff. And DeLong proved himself totally
clueless on the subject, declaring I was displaying my “ignorance” by
referring to outbreaks after 1347
Normally, if a crazy person is out there using dishonest methods to try
to destroy one’s intellectual reputation, the best thing is just to
ignore him. But it’s a bit trickier if the crazy person is someone who
is seen as a legitimate figure in many quarters. (It’s quite possible
DeLong is the only person out there who is both a professor at a major
university and a self-proclaimed internet troll). Honest people have
been fooled. To defend oneself however can easily make one seem arrogant
and self-important. Still, let me just offer this: the safest measure of
the accuracy and relevance of scholar’s work is the assessment of other
scholars in the same or related fields. The closest one can come to an
objective measure of my standing as a scholar in anthropology, for
instance, are the reviews my books have received, the disciplinary
prizes Debt has received, or for that matter the fact that the most
eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, decided to collaborate
on a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might
also consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly
conferences (one in TĂĽbingen, one in Birmingham) specifically dedicated
to discussing arguments made in the book, attended by Classicists,
Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists,
Numismatists and others. (One might ask just as a point of comparison,
has it ever even occurred to anyone to hold an academic conference to
discuss the implications of any of DeLong’s writings or ideas?) Finally,
if the argument is that I’m simply out of my depth in economics,
specifically, one might ask then why it is that I am the only
anthropologist ever to have been asked to present a macroeconomic
seminar at the Bank of England.
Brad DeLong is a liar and a con man. I’ve done my best to just ignore
him, hoping he’ll eventually find something else to do, but he won’t,
and since so many honest people appear to have been snookered, I felt it
would be helpful to set the record straight.
— David