I read that book and mostly enjoyed it than I got to the last chapter and found it was riddled with errors I could easily spot like the in following sentence:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
Reading around, it seems like the rest of the book is similarly accurate.
I was reading the book and enjoying it until I got to this part. It was so wrong in so many ways that I put the book down, not able to trust anything else in it.
I've been trying to think of a more compact/dense incorrect sentence for a bit now, and I can't really think of an alternative. (Although some of the political screeds from the election of 1800 might have been close, and I have yet to go mine twitter for examples)
> For those who don't know how the Fed works: technically, there are a series of stages. Generally the Treasury puts out bonds to the public, and the Fed buys them back. The Fed then loans the money thus created to other banks at a special low rate of interest ('the prime rate')...
The quote seems to be from Chapter 5, "A brief treatise on the moral grounds of economic relations", page 96. It comes at the end of a paragraph giving examples of how almost everyone follows the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" if they are collaborating on some common project.
Just before the Apple Computers example, Graeber writes "The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become. Inventors have always understood this, start-up capitalists frequently figure it out, and computer engineers have recently rediscovered the principle: not only with things like freeware, which everyone talks about, but even in the organization of their businesses."
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
Reading around, it seems like the rest of the book is similarly accurate.