His excuse is about as plausible as, "My dog ate my homework." Yes dogs do sometimes eat homework, but most of the time that claim is a lie.

First, it's odd how such a garbled sentence managed to be perfectly understandable English. If it was garbled, what was the original intention? I don't know of any major tech company founded in SV in the 1980s by ex-IBM engineers who were mostly Republican. I can't recall any famous company or organization that was known for forming democratic circles of 20-40 people with laptops in garages (regardless of the decade). Any sort of elaboration or clarification on the intended meaning would have gone a long way toward convincing me. The original sentence is simply too coherent to be "garbled" without further elaboration.

Second, book drafts are read and reread by teams of professional editors. Excerpts are circulated among colleagues and domain experts. It is practically impossible that such a "garbled" sentence could sneak by all of them.

I agree that DeLong behaved despicably, but Graeber can't be trusted.

Edit: I've tracked down previous excuses by Graeber. Initially, he blamed incorrect information from an unpublished study by a student of the Marxist economist Richard Wolff. Annoyingly the Twitter thread is totally broken, but individual tweets are still there:

https://twitter.com/chumpchanger/status/141218501024157696 "David Graeber,Debt,p96: Apple was founded by engineers from IBM who formed little democratic circles of 20-40 with laptops in garages.-HUH?!"

https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/141581278880346112 "yeah I know I think Wolff was just kind of wrong about a lot of this; I tried to check with him but he didn't answer the email"

https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/141536818398113792 "no I mean Richard Wolff the Marxist economist whose student did a study of the origins of Apple and never published it"

Around six months later he blames a copyeditor[1]:

> The endlessly cited Apple quote was not supposed to be about Apple. Actually it was about a whole of series of other tiny start-ups created by people who’d dropped out of IBM, Apple, and similar behemoths. (Of them it’s perfectly true.) The passage got horribly garbled at some point into something incoherent, I still can’t completely figure out how, was patched back together by the copyeditor into something that made logical sense but was obviously factually wrong. I should have caught it at the proofreading stage but I didn’t.

Good luck trying to track down the startups that Graeber says he was referencing, or the report that he claims he got the information from. The much more likely explanation is that he wrote some nonsense, got called on it, and refused to own up to his mistake.

1. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/02/seminar-on-debt-the-fir...

How'd that sentence make it into the first edition? And who wrote it?

David Graeber wrote it, and the first question is answered in the comment you're replying to?

Are you making a larger point?

If everyone is to be judged by the worst sentence they've written then literally everyone ends up in the junk pile. This is not a substantive argument, and it's completely off topic. Please don't take HN threads further down lame generic tangents.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>If everyone is to be judged by the worst sentence they've written then literally everyone ends up in the junk pile.

I disagree.

I have no doubt written things that are wrong, including things that are very wrong. But I very much doubt that I have ever packed that amount of wrongness into one sentence.