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.
Secondly, the Soviet Union already proved that planned economies work. That’s like THE thing they did the best. The McCarthyist conditioning runs so deep that even leftists can`t point at the most obvious example of what we want to accomplish.
The book had a chapter shitting on the Soviet Union, so that’s part of the reason why the book was written in the first place. I didn’t get past the first chapter because it kept on trashing the Soviet Union. Kinda weird how the text would keep on inserting opinions on a Euroasian polity that hasn’t existed in decades about a US company.
