I have 2. The People’s Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I’m a little familiar with central planning techniques… but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just “Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it’s possible” without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning… I just didn’t get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn’t even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn’t a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
Counter Revolution of 1776.
Incredibly poor scholarship. Author obviously stretches really thin evidence to fit an idea he had before actually researching. Dude really dug through piles of letters from people you never heard of to justify the thesis.
Frames the British empire as radical abolitionists. Gimme a break.
It absolutely did not. His entire point was that Black and Indigenous peoples know where their bread is buttered, so they would side with the Spanish when the Spanish was at war with the British and side with the British when the British was at war with the Americans. He very much framed the British as a lesser evil compared to the Americans and the Spanish as a lesser evil compared to the British. Hardly a case of framing them as “radical abolitionists.”