[A-List] Truth about Gold and Braudel

["ewc" <ewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Henry

First to say I strongly agree with your definition of money, and a
good number of the things you put as facts.  So I will just focus on a
couple of matters where we differ

I would distance myself from 'Greshams law' - Thomas Gresham himself
was concerned with the relationship between pure and debased currency
in Elizabethan England.  To pull his comments out of that context and
make them a law seem to me to be a mistake.  If you seek definitions
rich enough to make the 'law' work in diverse historical situations
you end up with either a vacuous statement (people prefer the money
they prefer) or a false one (eg 'silver is better than gold' etc etc).
Paper, copper, silver and gold etc all can and have been dominant.  In
my judgement talk of 'Greshams law' is usually at base a ruse to
pre-empt and side-track discussion about how one form of media becomes
dominant, rather than offer a genuine insight.  It blocks
understanding rather than assists it.  I guess I would generalise this
point further, to say that historically the monetary media is an
important aspect of the political and social structure of a society,
and that much of modern economic dogma exist to deflect our attention
into a desert of superficialities and unanswerable questions, away
from the richer realities of past situations.  (Am not decrying all
economic theory here - just bad economic theory)

And I am fascinated to find you apparently quoting Braudel as a kind
of bible of economic historical fact.   Braudel's theories of economic
history are almost all fictions.  He constructed a fake version of the
past - very much like the fake past that Orwell postulated in '1984'.
Braudel himself was Febvre's creature.  Febvre started negotiations
with the Rockerfeller Foundation as far back as 1927, but the real
push to produce a de-politicised (dumbed down) version of the economic
past began in earnest in 1946, and was funded primarily by the Ford
Foundation.  (As Febrve was manoeuvring himself into a plum job at
UNESCO)  About 10 years back I wrote out a couple of pages of
criticism of Braudel's account of 17th cent India (Braudel's
speculation on monetary media are all bunk, but those on India are
especially shoddily constructed).  I sent them off to Wallerstein at
the Braudel centre.  His comment came back that Braudel did not know
anything about 17th century India.  Does not it strike anyone on
a-list as odd that a man becomes the world's greatest 20th century
historian by writing standard reference books on things he knows
nothing about?

Of course Wallerstein is a Ford Foundation creature too - writing his
'core-periphery' thesis at Ford Foundation's Palo Alto retreat, and
getting Ford Funding to 'perpetuate' (actually further mangle)
Braudel's heritage at Binghamton.

Andre Gunder Frank's continued silence on these matters is surely a
matter of note

I am out of station for the next couple of weeks - so if anyone wants
to comment on these issues, please ensure to put 'Braudel' on the
subject line

Robert