David Graeber

 David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, died today. I first heard of him as the guy who had come up with the siren slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement "We are the 99%". Shortly after, I came across his magnum opus "Debt: The First 5,000 Years", which is as the title suggests, a history of debt and a reflection on the nature of money. While some sections of the book went into more technical detail than I cared  for, it opened a new world to me. I read it at a time when I was bored of my job in Mumbai and was trying my best to move overseas. One option was to go abroad to do a Master's, possibly in Economics. It would be an exaggeration to say that the book inspired me to take the plunge, but inspired me it definitely did. It sparked an interest in economic anthropology in me because anthropology seemed to have a broader and more interesting scope of vision than economics. I even considered doing a degree in economic anthropology before discovering heterodox economics.

But coming back to Graeber, I then came across an article by him on "Bull-shit jobs" which got me thinking about my own previous job as a financial journalist. While I tell people, somewhat pretentiously, that doing the job taught me a lot about how capitalism actually works, that, in itsel, didn't make the job socially valuable. That article inspired me tow write a post for the ISS blog. I was rpetty happy with the post, but when I went back to it today, I found it underwhelming. Hopefully, I have higher standards, now that I am a PhD student. 

David Graeber was one of the greatest intellectuals of our time, and had an influence on fields far beyond his mother discipline of anthropology.  And, debt was the only book I lugged all the way over from India to the UK when I moved here.