Someone recommended /r/AskAnthropology as a high-quality subreddit, so I took a look. One of today's questions is about... GameStop, and one of the answers is full of badeconomics. I started writing a reply there, but I thought that the points were basic enough that I should write it here. Fortunately, they are less about GameStop, and more about the economics of the stock market, and the limitations of a purely anthropological approach. To be fair, I have no idea if the answer I am critiquing is by an anthropologist or an interested amateur. I will also make some points that are only loosely inspired by the original answer.

The original question is about what Graeber would say about the GameStop situation. I don't know what Graeber would have thought of it -- the man was an economics hot-take generator, so maybe he would have loved it -- but the answer I want to comment on relies on vague anthropological generalities, rather than any of the specifics that happened.

There's an old joke about archaeologists that if they dig up an old building and they don't know what it's for, they declare it a temple. Probably you could make a similar joke about anthropologists, where if they don't know what something is for, it becomes a ritual full of symbolic meaning. (The joke about economists from the outside would be something about how we want to eat the poor, or something. The joke about economics from the inside is that we mutter something about incentive compatibility or first-order conditions, and then write 30 papers that never come to a definite conclusion.)

Let's see what the joke about anthropologists looks like when applied to the stock market:

Stonks could thus be thought of as a competition within the group of financial market players over whose way of playing the game is best. Yet both WSB and the hedge fund managers could be thought of as upholding a "financialized" notion of value: that is, that the logics of financial markets are the most important in today's society; that one's ability to play these markets is the overriding basis for determining one's worth in today's society (as opposed to, say, one's ability to express oneself in song or dance, or ability to commit to one's promises, or to put in socially-useful work...)

Here's the thing, though. GameStop is a company. It generates revenue. The stock market is a mechanism that determines where that revenue gets directed. "Why does it work this way?" is a question that certainly anthropologists could potentially bring insight to. But in the end, GameStop is a profit-making business because it sells game consoles and games for more than it pays for them. If the stock market values that revenue too low, then you can get a slice of that revenue for yourself for cheap. If the stock market values that revenue too high, then you are better off going elsewhere. You can buy GameStop shares for the sheer pleasure of owning GameStop shares, the way you might collect vintage cars, but for most people that pleasure is thin indeed.

The value of financial markets is, in some ways, a contingent fact about our society. The government could ban the joint-stock-ownership company tomorrow, or courts and police could stop enforcing the legal private property rights that underlie the publicly-traded corporation, or the SEC could suspend all stock market trading tomorrow. But given the ground facts, the fact that society places a high value on financial markets is inevitable. Profit-making companies can generate tremendous revenue because they make outputs using inputs, and they charge more for the outputs than they pay for the inputs. This may be good or bad, but if you want Animal Crossing, and you have to buy it from me, and I ask for money in return, you are going to have to find some money to give me. If you weren't a selfish degenerate you would give that money to charity, but you are, and I've got Animal Crossing, so pay up.

Ironically, the two other examples of what society should value are things that actually do have cash value. The main business of credit markets is evaluating the "ability to commit to one's promises". The dream customer of every credit card is someone who makes a promise to pay something back, and then keeps that promise. If they know that you are that kind of person, it is financially rewarding in terms of the interest rate you get when you borrow. The "ability to express yourself in song and dance" is highly valued by our society when it's Taylor Swift, and not-so-highly-valued when it's you or me. Well, me, at least. This is a contingent fact of our society -- the government could drop intellectual property protection for Taylor Swift albums tomorrow -- but given it, and given that time itself is a scarce input, and that Taylor Swift sings better than I do, again the way things worked out is not very surprising.

This next paragraph is just the usual not take.

Many of the events of this week did exactly that: that financial markets are sophisticated; that participation in it should be left completely to experts and insiders; or, that the "free market" isn't truly free. When push comes to shove, the people who are presently in power back on familiar levers: Google's fiat power over app ratings, the trading platforms artificially restricting market conditions, getting on-side politicians and talking heads to delegitimize WSB and their actions.

This is lazy talk about the people in power. Groups brigade Google's app ratings all the time, and Google periodically pushes back. We literally had politicians as far apart as possible -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz -- called out Robinhood. Robinhood had to open a credit line for a billion dollars to keep their doors open, so doing the oligarchy's bidding is less rewarding than it looks. I look forward to anthropological insight into the T 2 rule, though.

The open question then is how this Emperor's New Clothes moment is read. From a distance it isn't clear whether WSB players have a fundamentally different notion of value. Do they wish to win Wall Street's game, but with their own rules? Or do they wish to render as illusory any notion that there are any rules to Wall Street's game, in the first place?

I don't have the benefit of anthropological theory, but I do have the benefit of having read WallStreetBets, and having heard of it before this week. The original logic behind the GameStop buy is exactly the standard logic of the stock market. People on WSB did "fundamental analysis" on GameStop -- they looked at the underlying cash flows that you have a claim on -- and decided it was undervalued. Then they relied on the rules of the game -- the way short sales work. Short sales are subject to margin requirements, so if you can push the price of the stock past the margin limits you can force people to buy at the inflated price.

One way in which the rules may have changed is that the short squeeze may have attracted people who are willing to lose money for the sole purpose of bankrupting a hedge fund. If this is true on a permanent basis, then that will change the rules of the game. But since hedge funds are not in the business of letting themselves be bankrupted, it will not change in the way people think. If stocks become unshortable, this will give the market an upward bias, and the value that society places on the stock market will become even larger. Unless it crashes, of course.