alt Hacker News> Unless it's some sort of complete post-scarcity, it has to be understandable in market terms.
No, it does not, and that's Graeber's whole point.
"Markets" are not some sort of physical law of the universe.
A simple example of this is it's the norm in hunter gatherer societies to take care of people who never will make an equal contribution back in the transactional sense.
Because the social ties in those societies are not simply transactions.
If your model fails to accurately describe empirical reality, time to improve/expand the model.
These social ties are real (they are a kind of wealth, or social capital, for the persons involved) but they're also limited to very small social groups, the equivalent of a modern small village neighborhood or HOA. The point of the market is that it scales well beyond those.