These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• David Grae­ber: On the Inven­tion of Money – Notes on Sex, Adven­ture, Mono­ma­ni­a­cal Sociopa­thy and the True Func­tion of Eco­nom­ics « naked capitalism

  “At this point, it’s eas­ier to under­stand why econ­o­mists feel so defen­sive about chal­lenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describ­ing is not how we ‘nat­u­rally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowa­days, is doing most of the actual teach­ing? Pri­mar­ily, econ­o­mists. The ques­tion of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an econ­omy is—most econ­o­mists still insist that an econ­omy is essen­tially a vast barter sys­tem, with money a mere tool (a posi­tion all the more pecu­liar now that the major­ity of eco­nomic trans­ac­tions in the world have come to con­sist of play­ing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very sta­tus of eco­nom­ics: is it a sci­ence that describes of how humans actu­ally behave, or pre­scrip­tive, a way of inform­ing them how they should? (Remem­ber, sci­ences gen­er­ate hypoth­e­sis about the world that can be tested against the evi­dence and changed or aban­doned if they don’t prove to pre­dict what’s empir­i­cally there.) Or is eco­nom­ics instead a tech­nique of oper­at­ing within a world that econ­o­mists them­selves have largely cre­ated? Or is it, as it appears for so many of the Aus­tri­ans, a kind of faith, a revealed Truth embod­ied in the words of great prophets (such as Von Mises) who must, by def­i­n­i­tion be cor­rect, and whose the­o­ries must be defended what­ever empir­i­cal real­ity throws at them—even to the extent of gen­er­at­ing imag­i­nary unknown peri­ods of his­tory where some­thing like what was orig­i­nally described ‘must have’ taken place?”
  
  eco­nom­ics ratio­nal­ity con­ser­vatism David-​​Graeber anthro­pol­ogy debt Austrian-​​school take­down pragmatism-it-ain’t

• Wel­come to The Bessen­berg Bindery NEW web­site | The Bessen­berg Bindery — Cus­tom Case Bound Books from Thomson-​​Shore

  “The Bessen­berg Bindery has served the uni­ver­sity, med­ical, legal, pub­lish­ing, adver­tis­ing and book col­lect­ing com­mu­ni­ties in south­ern Michi­gan since 1978. We are a hand book bindery that offers a full range of sewn, hard­cover book bind­ing, cus­tom boxes, book repair, pro­to­type objects, cus­tom photo album and scrap books, port­fo­lios, and desk acces­sories. We quote on jobs as small as one book, or as large as 500. We are a craft shop and all our work is cus­tomized to meet our clients’ var­ied require­ments. In both orig­i­nal bind­ing and book repairs we stress attrac­tive­ness, proper fit and durability.”
  
  local book­bind­ing mak­ing project ven­dor