David Graeber

David Rolfe Graeber (born 12 February 1961) is an American Anthropologist and Anarchist who currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.[1] He was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him,[2] and his term there ended in June 2007. Graeber has a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, and an early role in Occupy Wall Street. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

2006 interview by Charlie Rose contra Globalization

involvement in Occupy Wall Street

• http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/david-graeber-the-antileader-of-occupy-wall-street-10262011.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPeaFKvszKI
• http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/david-graeber-on-playing-by-the-rules-%E2%80%93-the-strange-success-of-occupy-wall-street.html

(2023-06-17) Rao Book Review Slouching Towards Utopia: I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as David Graeber’s Debt

(2024-07-08) Hobart Bullshit Jobs Is A Terrible Curiosity Killing Concept: Since the book was written to expand a previous article, he has room to backtrack on at least one of those, conceding that actuaries may do something useful, something he learned through pushback. Here we have our first anthropological datapoint: he didn't learn this by asking himself "Is there, after all, some kind of social utility in knowing how long someone is likely to live? In an advanced economy where people aren't working from the first moment they're capable of it until they're incapacitated or dead, might we expect such a job to exist, to create value, and to be paid accordingly?" No, what happened according to Graeber, is that people who read his claims responded and set him straight....That drives a lot of the empirical research in the book. He cites some surveys, which show that many workers feel alienated from their jobs, don't believe those jobs are worth doing, don't like their jobs... That doesn't make their jobs fake. It just makes them jobs.