|
Those differences can and will have to be reconciled if any serious revolutionary project is going to get off the ground. Zinn for instance, amongst others, was for some kind of reconciliation and ultimately cooperation between Anarchists and Communists although pretty much nobody has any real good ideas on how to go about doing so. In general the left needs to be a hell of a lot more solidary than it has been historically, the hegemonic forces of capital have sure as gently caress become more unified than they ever have been and that's going to be a problem.
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2012 04:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 11:14 |
|
|
Loving Life Partner posted:So if you read a book like Capital that destroys capitalism, and a book like something Mises writes that destroys socialism, and it seems like you can probably find a book that posits good theories and decent inferences to destroy any established system or order or government, so where the hell do you decide to stand as an individual? Don't worry about the cheerleaders who uphold the political binary that lets them split the world into goodies and baddies. Feel free to put something new on the table, I'm sure there's lots of clever ways to structure a society's wealth that nobody has thought of yet. Don't let dead beardy guys have the lost word on this. As a side note: distributism might be worth checking out. The work of E.F Schumacher is also pretty interesting.
|
|
#
?
Jul 26, 2012 18:56
|
|
|
Rogue0071 posted:post There are some problems here: The Kapp Putsch was indeed stopped by a general strike, but it was a strike had been called on by the government, which was hardly revolutionary in outlook. It was anything but a spontaneous reaction that rose from the bottom up, which is the impression that comes from your narrative. Hindenburg came to 'power' in the first place because of the intransigence of the KPD in the 1925 presidential election, as Thallman didn't withdraw in favor of the Center/Left candidate. The KPD's work in helping right wingers in Germany succeed predated 1929. The bigger problem, however, is that you try to graft the narrative of class struggle onto events that resulted from nothing more than truly dreadful economic conditions. quote:The general flow of events, however, were dictated by the struggle for control between two classes and not by vacillations in (for example) prices or employment. This is simply incorrect. There is in fact a very strong and clear connection between economic conditions and political stability. quote:The putsch failed, and the Nazis were temporarily repressed, but continued to gain strength as the proletarian struggle weakened. This is an oversimplified characterization of the events that to place. The Nazi Party won 12 seats in the Reichstag 1928; 1930 saw that number increase to 107 and the first election of 1932 to 230. Attributing to numbers to weakening resolve among the proletariat ignores the simple reality- the economic collapse drove voters in the direction of parties who promised extreme solutions (hence the parallel rise of the KPD). You talk about an inevitable slide towards collapse, but prior to the outbreak of the Great Depression, voters expressed a collective preference for parties that supported a broadly democratic political order. Germany during Weimar period was not too different from a modern social democratic state- it simply was unstable as a result of the shame associated with defeat in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, the internal violence that took place after the war and multiple economic crises. One of those can indeed be connected with the class struggle, but it is much more difficult to do the same for the other two. quote:It's the same basically everywhere, to the point where the SPD has the sheer gall to use the post-war period as the historical base of their ideology. The SPD is the worst because they're not even competent social-democrats and have basically never been. The SPD aren't the only example of "reform socialists" or social democrats essentially playing an actively reactionary role regarding ongoing revolutions, either - it's happened in France, in Hungary and in Norway as well, and that's just off the top of my head. Arguably it also happened in Russia before the Bolshevik seizure of power. They stood for democracy and a somewhat reasonable form of government when most every other party Germany abandoned such ideas and for that they have the right to be proud (though their effectiveness certainly was not too great).
|
|
#
?
Jul 28, 2012 11:03
|
|
|
Along the lines of "helping D&D debate", the next time someone tries to tell you how much people in socialized medicine countries complain about their healthcare, remind them that the UK literally did a huge, long, massive production number in honor of the NHS during the damned Olympic opening ceremonies.
|
|
#
?
Jul 30, 2012 19:07
|
|
|
How do you argue back against MRA people when they post custody statistics and videos of things like a paid couple abusing each other where the male gets told of by strangers when he's the abuser and the woman doesn't.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2012 10:16
|
|
|
Ask them what conclusion they draw from those statistics and then tell them to apply that same conclusion to similarly treated black people, Muslims and battered women. Smash all bigotry, free Zeitgueist. That series of videos is really good.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2012 21:30
|
|
|
I've been watching David Harvey's lectures on Capital, and I want to know how much of Marx's critique remains intact. Although I find Marx's theories intuitively appealing, many of them appear to be "discredited," notably the labor theory of value (which has been replaced by the dominant theory of marginal utility). However, economics is a discipline that is notoriously subject to the powers that be (http://michael-hudson.com/2012/07/veblens-institutionalist-elaboration-of-rent-theory/). I'm not an economist, so I'd like some help understanding the technical concepts behind these theories of value. Namely, I'd like to know how much of the labor theory of value still stands.
Can someone give a concrete example of the process by which marginal utility determines the value of a commodity independent of labor? Are embedded labor-time and marginal utility simply different measures of scarcity? It seems to me that these two theories explain the origin of value in different ways: Marx argues that labor "creates" value while neoclassical economists argue that marginal utility "determines" value. While marginal utility helps explain the value of a commodity in the marketplace, it ignores the production process and the valorization that occurs therein.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2012 04:02
|
|
|
Golbez posted:This stuff about the history of Germany and how it was a class struggle is absolutely fascinating. Really? I always hear this but I thought I had a typical American education and the term came up in multiple years. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2012 04:33
|
|
I mean, it might seem obviously like that to you, but I went through a typical American education, the term "class struggle" never came up.
|
GreenCard78 posted:Really? I always hear this but I thought I had a typical American education and the term came up in multiple years. I don't remember ever being taught much about interwar Germany. Or maybe I have a lovely memory.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2012 05:32
|
|
|
I didn't want to start a new thread and this seems as good a place as any to ask; what are some generally independent, reliable news sources? I had a list of links way back that included Al-Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Pro Publica, Salon and some others. I don't know how to tell a good news source from a bad one, so I wanted to know if these are decent places to read and what all else you guys read to know what's going on in the world.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2012 16:01
|
|
|
I used to have a subscription to Foreign Policy at one point, and I kind of noticed a neoliberal undercurrent to it (how surprising). It's still a good source if you read it in the same way you might read something like The Economist.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2012 17:50
|
|
|
^^^^I find Foreign Affairs to be a lot more tolerable and respectable than Foreign Policy, myself.Small Talk posted:I've been watching David Harvey's lectures on Capital, and I want to know how much of Marx's critique remains intact. Although I find Marx's theories intuitively appealing, many of them appear to be "discredited," notably the labor theory of value (which has been replaced by the dominant theory of marginal utility). However, economics is a discipline that is notoriously subject to the powers that be (http://michael-hudson.com/2012/07/veblens-institutionalist-elaboration-of-rent-theory/). I'm not an economist, so I'd like some help understanding the technical concepts behind these theories of value. I can't help you much about the LTOV, except to say that it's totally irrelevant to modern economic discourse, for better or for worse. Honestly I don't think there's much point in studying it if you're a layman, there's other aspects of Marxist thought that are way more relevant. As for marginal utility, though, it's a pretty intuitive concept. It doesn't work independently of labor, and it doesn't exclusively determine price- price, in classical economics, is determined where the marginal cost of the commodity (the cost to produce one more) is equal to the marginal utility of the consumer (the utility gained from buying one more). MC and MU are in turn derived from abstract "production functions" and "utility functions," respectively. They're set so that the consumers and producers on the margin are actually indifferent to their decisions. So, let's say that the equilibrium price is $2- that means the marginal consumer gains $2 of utility from it, while the marginal producer pays $2 to produce it. Every other consumer gains more than $2 worth of utility from the goods they're consuming- this is consumer surplus. Every other producer pays less than $2 to produce these goods- this is producer surplus (not the same thing as profit). This is the simplistic Econ 101 explanation. Within the framework of classical economics, it makes more sense to think of commodities as "monopolistic competitors" (e.g. why does a bottle of Coke have a marginal cost of a few cents, but is priced far higher than that?). and you can take into account informational asymmetries, various other frictions, that sort of thing... once you introduce those concepts, Marxist concepts like surplus value come into view. So you're right that marginal utility ignores production- it's marginal COST that takes the production process into account. Similarly, marginal utility doesn't have much to do with scarcity, but marginal cost does. edit: to be clear, it's not like classical economics "disproved" LTOV at any point. They're just two different ways of looking at economics, with different notions of and implications for how capitalist society functions. These aren't hard-and-fast scientific laws, but rather models and worldviews we're dealing with. So when I say LTOV isn't worth studying, it's not because it's wrong, but just because it's no longer used. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Aug 6, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2012 19:14
|
|
|
I just finished an increasingly uncivil (no, I'm not proud) argument with someone who claims that any estate tax, even if only on sums of money in excess of an arbitrarily high amount, is immoral because it's an unjustified government intrusion in his right to spend his money how he chooses. He said he would continue to hold his current view even if, for example, I was able to show, with irrefutable evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a world with an estate tax leaves literally every person happier and healthier than they would be otherwise. I just don't know how to engage in a fruitful discussion with someone like this... is there no point? Once a discussion reaches gets to this place, should I just give up, shake hands, and walk away?
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2012 07:51
|
|
|
Juffo-Wup posted:Once a discussion reaches gets to this place, should I just give up, shake hands, and walk away? Yes. If it was in a public place then hopefully you gave him enough rope to hang himself in the eyes of other people.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2012 08:18
|
|
|
These are my impressions of LTV and the criticisms of LTV, so if you think I'm full of poo poo lemme know. LTV allows one to examine different constituent parts that go into the final product and its "final value": primarily exchange value in a exchange-centric market economy. LTV is taken by critics of LTV to be the end-all-be-all proscriptor of value. It is an unfortunate byproduct of the separation between labor and capital, but when people present LTV as a method of contributing to the determination of value in an economy, there's always someone ready to discredit LTV by saying it has been discredited, without presenting any evidence besides the Polished Turd scenario. True, in a vacuum with no other considerations, LTV is fallacious because it is possible for labor to put a lot of work into an object that, in the end, has no use value and therefore no exchange value. This is the rudimentary LTV that Smith described. Ricardo and Marx have both expanded LTV and Marx attempted at least to connect it to marginal utility, or use value. Labor, however, is the only thing that can imbue an item with use value, or heighten its use value in its various ways and exchange value is, objectively, the least objective determination of value. e: on value... When I've tried in the past to examine value, I've used the hammer in my garage. It has been easily months since I've picked that thing up. It cost me about $20 in exchange value, and I might be able to get $5 for it if I tried really hard. The moment I took it out of the store, its exchange value dropped by at least half, yet its potential utility has always remained the same. A handful of guys in a factory produced thousands of these that day. Three hundred years ago, it would have taken much more time for one of those people to produce this hammer. Thanks to the Capital present in the factory, the labor is multiplied and it requires less labor to create the same utility. Now here's where things get a little funny. I can really only utilize that hammer to a certain extent. Even if I used it all day to produce other items bearing utility, I cannot utilize this hammer during the night, as I require rest. Were I to lend the hammer to a neighbor at the end of the day so that he could imbue products with use value, this hammer's use value doubles instantly, without any additional labor. trollstormur fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Aug 7, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2012 22:40
|
|
|
I'm not entirely certain this is the place to ask, but it seems the most appropriate. A post at The Monkey Cage (http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/...otential-fraud/) has piqued my interest as to political science analysis of the current situation in Romania. Could some goons be so kind as to share any blog posts, made by political scientists who are ideally not activists in the situation, on the topic?
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2012 17:00
|
|
|
Someone on facebook is claiming that the free market is the solution to all our problems; I responded by pointing to the industrial revolution era as an example of what an unregulated free market brings: "worker conditions were abhorrent, consumer safety was abysmal, environmental responsibility was utterly nonexistent, and, at the top levels of management and organization, the trend was towards monopolization and conglomerization." His response is that quote:You cannot ignore the dramatic increase in the standard of living across the board following the industrial rev. It can be argued equally well that it was not regulation that led to this standard of living increase, but instead it was due to the increasing bargaining position of individuals that comes from a demand for educated workers of a developed economy. This phenomenon occurs naturally as an economy develops (in the united states case rapidly due to free markets) and company's begin to rely on specialized labor... Obviously, it wasn't "increased bargaining position" that led to a standard of living increase, but I'm having trouble formulating exactly why that is the case.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2012 00:29
|
|
|
The Industrial Revolution was the destruction of specialised labour under the guild system and the development of specialised machinery which is operated by generic labour in a wage labour system. Bargaining power of individuals was smashed until they organised into labour unions and used non-market operations like strikes and riots against corporate and corporate-demanded state oppression to force better living and working conditions. The potential for increased living conditions was based purely on the technological level of development, which would have had much better results if it was properly orientated to increase living standards rather than facilitate market operations. Actual living standards for the urban proletariot were often significantly worse than their marginal rural counterparts but the countryside could no longer sustain them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2012 00:51
|
|
|
Precisely, a good chunk of people were forced, either by starvation or gunpoint, to move into cities and take part in this 'revolution' by accepting dangerous jobs with long hours (for poo poo pay) in city factories to make a few capitalists very rich. It wasnt much of an improvement until people got sick of working themselves to death for gently caress all and did something about it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2012 00:57
|
|
|
"At the present stage of advanced Capitalism, organized labor rightly opposes automation without compensating employment. It insists on the extensive utilization of human labor power in material production, and thus opposes technical progress. However, in doing so, it also opposes the more efficient utilization of Capital; it hampers intensified efforts to raise the productivity of labor. In other words, continued arrest of automation may weaken the competitive national and international position of Capital, cause a long range depression, and consequently reactivate the conflict of class interests. " Marcuse One Dimensional Man
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2012 02:39
|
|
|
I've never seen how marxism relies on the LTV. All it relies on is the claim that workers can employ capital for themselves and hence using the law to create profit that goes to individuals/a few individuals is extractive.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2012 16:03
|
|
|
Cahal posted:I've never seen how marxism relies on the LTV. All it relies on is the claim that workers can employ capital for themselves and hence using the law to create profit that goes to individuals/a few individuals is extractive. If value is derived externally from production then class struggle is just the struggle of individuals in the workplace over that value rather than exploited surplus value from labour to the bourgeoisie. Of course even without alienation you can generate a very strong social critique based on the outcomes and imbalances of this struggle but it tends to lead to social democratic frameworks rather than socialist ones.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2012 19:59
|
|
|
namesake posted:If value is derived externally from production then class struggle is just the struggle of individuals in the workplace over that value rather than exploited surplus value from labour to the bourgeoisie. Of course even without alienation you can generate a very strong social critique based on the outcomes and imbalances of this struggle but it tends to lead to social democratic frameworks rather than socialist ones. You also can't account for capitalist crisis as an internal necessity of the system without realizing that commodity production contains within itself a contradiction.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2012 21:46
|
|
|
trollstormur posted:True, in a vacuum with no other considerations, LTV is fallacious because it is possible for labor to put a lot of work into an object that, in the end, has no use value and therefore no exchange value. This is the rudimentary LTV that Smith described. Ricardo and Marx have both expanded LTV and Marx attempted at least to connect it to marginal utility, or use value. Labor, however, is the only thing that can imbue an item with use value, or heighten its use value in its various ways and exchange value is, objectively, the least objective determination of value. There is a curious and widespread belief that people like Ricardo and Marx who spent their lives grappling with this stuff somehow missed these simple, off-top-of-the-head counterpoints to naive labor theories of value. "Mudpies," "polished turds," etc. are not really satisfactory critiques. I can see that you're also unimpressed by those arguments, though your explanation of why seems slighly off, so I hope you don't mind if I elaborate, here. (I'll be going mostly off of Marx's take on it, since I'm more familiar with him than Ricardo.) For starters: A lot of the confusion in present-day economic discussion concerning the LTV stems from a failure to recognize the distinction between LTV and marginalist conceptions of "value." In fact, in debate, I often do away with the word altogether to avoid annoying pitfalls like being accused of tautologous reasoning or equivocation. -In contemporary discourse, "value" is a subjective determination of a thing's usefulness and thus what you're willing to give up to have it. (It's a little more complicated than that once we take into account the marginal aspects, but this will do for now.) -Under the (Marxian) LTV, "value" is not individually determined, but rather a social relation brought into play by the anarchy of production and the division of labor in a market economy. More specifically, a thing's value is how much "socially necessary labor time" is embodied in it. This is different from saying that it's a simple count of the hours that went into it; you could make a thing in ten hours that someone else might be able to in five, yet you've both produced the same thing with the same objective value. So "socially necessary" serves a few important purposes: first, it distinguishes the labor as "necessary," as if to say that no labor time is wasted in production, and to dispel the notion that slower labor produces more value - indeed, value is the social average of necessary labor time. Faster workers balance out with slower. Describing it as "social" also indicates that it's serving a social need; it's produced for exchange, and someone will want the thing you've made. So unless you take precaution, a discussion may feature one person talking about subjective value while the other discusses objective value, and soon you'll be running around in circles. That's why, as I said, I sometimes prefer to excise the adulterated term "value" and use "utility" for the former and "SNLT" for the latter. Next: under the LTV, the commodity form is also a social relation. This is where fetishism connects, and I'm not going to get into that here, but what is relevant for the value theory is that only commodities have value. A commodity breaks down to use-value and exchange value (a la David Harvey's diagram): the terms people are more likely to recognize. If the final output of labor doesn't have both of those things, then any labor time that went into it was not socially necessary; thus, it is not a commodity. (Note: Marx does briefly get into the exceptions where things can have prices without value - uncultivated land, abstracts like "honor" - but this is generally due to rents and other such social arrangements.) So, where does that leave us? If you just spent ten hours polishing a turd and nobody wants it, then the labor time you spent was not socially necessary; you have not created value. Marx did not attempt to connect it to the concept of marginal utility, though his system always did have a demand side, and a crucial dependence on the consideration of use-value. Marginal utility was mostly developed after Marx had solidified his own political economy; Marx's Grundrisse, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and 1861 manuscripts all predated Jevons's Theory of Political Economy (1862-3), and volume 1 of Capital (1867) came out the same year that Menger began the investigation that would result in his own Principles of Economics (1871). As for your final sentence, labor is not the only source of use-value; rather, labor is the only thing that can imbue a commodity with value, which is expressed on the market as exchange value. Its use-value is its physical form, in which people recognize utility. Whether a good comes from nature or human production, it's still got its use-value; the value that the LTV concerns itself primarily is the other, social sort. Small Talk posted:I've been watching David Harvey's lectures on Capital, and I want to know how much of Marx's critique remains intact. I happen to think accounts of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. Small Talk posted:Are the labor theory of value and the marginal utility theory of value mutually exclusive? They appear to be incommensurable. For one thing, as explained above, they are talking about very different things as "value" (and thus the basis of market prices and the laws of motion of the economy). They both have different explanations for the same phenomena, and there is not a lot of room to pick them apart to salvage pieces of one for the other. One thing people tend to assume is that LTVs ignores supply and demand, which would appear to be a point for marginalism, seeing as those are clearly important determinants of market prices. However, supply and demand are entirely compatible with labor values. This post explains how it all fits together. I highly recommend it. Small Talk posted:Are embedded labor-time and marginal utility simply different measures of scarcity? We know now better than ever that equilibrium prices are not just scarcity indices (see, e.g., the Cambridge Capital Controversy). Once supply "covers" demand, supply and demand no longer tell us anything useful about the ratios at which commodities exchange for one another. This does not present a problem for the LTV. (Though rather than "scarcity" per se, it is not entirely out of line to think of the LTV sort of like a "how-hard-stuff-is-to-get" theory of value.) Guy DeBorgore posted:So when I say LTOV isn't worth studying, it's not because it's wrong, but just because it's no longer used. Of course, when what IS used is horrendously broken, it's hard to blame people for wanting to see what's behind other doors. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Aug 14, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2012 10:24
|
|
|
Hey guys, sorry if this has been asked, but could any of you provide me with a source explaining the benefits of lowering the age for Medicare eligibility? I get the concept, but I need solid numbers regarding the amount of revenue the influx of healthier beneficiaries would bring into the system to go towards paying for the program.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2012 04:09
|
|
|
gaan kak posted:Someone on facebook is claiming that the free market is the solution to all our problems; I responded by pointing to the industrial revolution era as an example of what an unregulated free market brings: "worker conditions were abhorrent, consumer safety was abysmal, environmental responsibility was utterly nonexistent, and, at the top levels of management and organization, the trend was towards monopolization and conglomerization." His response is that It sounds like what he's trying to say is that even without government intervention, private industry would eventually have reformed itself based on pressure from workers and consumers. But he hasn't proved that counterfactual at all. Ask him to explain in detail, citing real-world examples, how that process is supposed to work.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2012 05:21
|
|
|
Talking with a friend bout the subprime lending crisis, does anyone have the debunking of the community reinvestment act's " forcing" lenders to give out terrible loans handy? Also his central claim is all republican congresses create jobs to the tume of 2.3 million a year.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 01:15
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:Talking with a friend bout the subprime lending crisis, does anyone have the debunking of the community reinvestment act's " forcing" lenders to give out terrible loans handy? Wikipedia has a very good section in the CRA article about this very subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act#Alleged_relation_to_2008_financial_crisis Also here is an actual paper about the CRA and the subprime crisis http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research/publications/subprime-lending-and-community-reinvestment-act quote:There are many causes to the collapse of the housing market and the recent financial turmoil, but the contribution of the CRA appears marginal. While banks did engage in subprime lending in their assessment areas, they did so at a lower rate than the market in general and accounted for only a small fraction of subprime loans to lower-income borrowers and lowerincome neighborhoods. The data suggest that far from being forced into risky corners of the market, the institutions under the scrutiny of the CRA were crowded out by unregulated lenders…
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 02:18
|
|
|
Aeolius posted:One thing people tend to assume is that LTVs ignores supply and demand, which would appear to be a point for marginalism, seeing as those are clearly important determinants of market prices. However, supply and demand are entirely compatible with labor values. This post explains how it all fits together. I highly recommend it. that blog posted:
This is pretty much bullshit. First off, why is there a sharp division between workers and capitalists? Neoclassical economics describes a worker selling labor, a corporation selling machines and a guy selling bananas at a roadside stand in the same terms. Why should they be any different? This is an ideological distinction, not a legitimate one. Second, with the healthcare example, people who "can't afford" it still buy it, just very little of it. You pay for one operation instead of the six or whatever you need. Just because they may physically require it to survive or be happy doesn't matter. People who can't afford healthcare who don't buy it have maximized their utility. If they stopped buying food to get healthcare they would be dead, aka worse off. That doesn't make that price illegitimate. That's not what economic theories are for, that's what philosophy and morality are for. Third, the bolded parts are false, and possibly intellectually dishonest. No, corporations don't get more profit the more inputs they buy. They may or may not depending on what their production function is. That's one possibility, but it doesn't continue indefinitely. At some point the market will become saturated and they won't be able to sell the poo poo they're buying. No, rich people do not continue to buy regardless of price. If yachts became 100$ trillion apiece nobody would buy them anymore. This whole article is garbage. Its entire criticism of neoclassical economics is "Well some people can't afford healthcare/food/happiness at the market price, therefore the market price is WRONG!!!!" What if society cannot provide those things at any price? What the hell is the point of saying that the entirety of human civilization before technological advancement was horrific and unjust? Duh? Why make a whole bullshit theory to dress up that statement? I think people have a right to healthcare, but trying to inject morality and philosophy into economics like this is very unhelpful. Keeping the systems separate allows you to make societal and political decisions much easier. edit: Jesus, this article makes me angrier as I reread it. quote:Neoclassical economics draws the demand and supply curves as mirror images of one another in this way conflating the motives of consumers and capitalists. This allows economists to claim that just as capitalists seek to sell at a price which maximizes their profits consumers buy at a price that maximizes their utility, giving them a “consumer surplus”. Yet unlike capitalist profit, which is a real objective magnitude measured in money, this consumer surplus can’t be found anywhere in the real world. It exists only in the minds of economists. A surplus of money is a clearly objective phenomenon. Psychological satisfaction is not an objective thing. It can’t be measured in any numerical amounts, and there clearly can be no such thing as a surplus of subjective satisfaction over an objective amount of money spent. That’s like having a surplus of love over bananas. Such logical mistakes abound in marginal utility, reducing its theories to circularity and meaninglessness. Are "capitalists" and "workers" like two entirely different species or something? The people who run a corporation don't do it because they're robots that literally measure their life's worth in cash money profit, they're people who do it sometimes to get money, sometimes to get luxuries/stuff, sometimes for status, whatever. Corporate Profit is not an objective thing, just like personal satisfaction is not an objective thing. Just because the libertarian/Adam Smith-esque ideal of two naked men in the woods exchanging fish for medical services doesn't exist and never existed doesn't mean it can't be a useful tool to explain economics. Nobody thinks that that exists. It's just an assumption, a backdrop to make useful commentary on the world around us. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Aug 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 04:12
|
|
|
So liberal simplifications that never existed are useful tools but socialist simplifications that actually existed strongly in the past are not "legitimate" (whatever the hell that means)
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 05:23
|
|
|
Enjoy posted:So liberal simplifications that never existed are useful tools but socialist simplifications that actually existed strongly in the past are not "legitimate" (whatever the hell that means) But both capital and money both have diminishing marginal utility. To claim otherwise is not a "socialist simplification" but an outright lie.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 05:32
|
|
|
quote:This is pretty much bullshit. First off, why is there a sharp division between workers and capitalists? Neoclassical economics describes a worker selling labor, a corporation selling machines and a guy selling bananas at a roadside stand in the same terms. Why should they be any different? This is an ideological distinction, not a legitimate one. Because they clearly play different roles in the economy? Capitalists - the recipients of profit - consume a lot less of their income and invest/save more. Workers consume most of their income. quote:I think people have a right to healthcare, but trying to inject morality and philosophy into economics like this is very unhelpful. Keeping the systems separate allows you to make societal and political decisions much easier. Morality and economics are inseparable - you are making judgments about how we should allocate scarce resources. Neoclassical economics itself is full of value judgements - competition is good, choice is good, markets are desirable. karthun posted:But both capital and money both have diminishing marginal utility. To claim otherwise is not a "socialist simplification" but an outright lie. There is truth here but you have no units for capital or utility so this is not a scientific proposition.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 06:07
|
|
|
Cahal posted:Because they clearly play different roles in the economy? Capitalists - the recipients of profit - consume a lot less of their income and invest/save more. Workers consume most of their income. And the (upper) middle class? What about small business owners / people who have money invested somewhere and also an actual job? People who mortgage their home and work? They don't exist according to this theory. I'm not saying we should focus society on them, but in this dichotomy they don't exist. You're either a fatcat billionaire or a tenement slum wage laborer, with no room in between. This is visibly not how society is composed, and therefore it is a bad theory. edit: This is why marxism never caught on in America and to an extent western Europe. It basically tells the fairly sizeable petit bourgeoisie middle class 'get hosed, you don't exist'. Cahal posted:Morality and economics are inseparable - you are making judgments about how we should allocate scarce resources. Neoclassical economics itself is full of value judgements - competition is good, choice is good, markets are desirable. No it isn't. This is the whole loving point. Neoclassical econ doesn't say free markets are good, it says they're efficient. That's it. Those two concepts are not linked in any way. Many people think those two are the same, but the theory itself says nothing of the sort. Enjoy posted:So liberal simplifications that never existed are useful tools but socialist simplifications that actually existed strongly in the past are not "legitimate" (whatever the hell that means) Neoclassical economics (which is morally neutral / not really concerned with morality) can be combined with philosophy to flexibly produce ideas on how to run society. This Marxist theory rolls the two into one and can't really be adapted in any way. So if those socialist simplifications cease to exist in the future (many of them already have, like the lack of a real proletariat with the demise of the industrial economy) it is now a useless theory. Final edit: and one last thing. Remember that this marxist economics is NOT the same as 'socialism'. All socialism refers to is the democratic ownership of capital. There is no reason at all why you can't base a socialist ideology on neoclassical economics. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Aug 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 07:05
|
|
|
Except it obviously has been adapted so you're full of poo poo. Third Worldism, feminism and minority studies have all benefited from class analysis. Even right-wing shills like Christopher Hitchens and Niall Ferguson have said they're heavily influenced by Marxian ideas Enjoy fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Aug 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 15:15
|
|
|
Here's something this thread seems designed for: Please tell us about "margin." Just in the last few posts I see "marginalism", "marginal utility", "at the margin" and I have no clue what this means, in economic terms.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 15:44
|
|
|
Golbez posted:Here's something this thread seems designed for: Well, in terms of (diminishing) marginal utility at least, the idea is that for each additional (thing) you have, each additional thing is less useful than the one before it. 'Marginal utility" refers to how much gain in usefulness ("utility") each additional (thing) gives you, after the first (thing). Example: you're stranded on a desert island. A tooled-steel modern hammer washes up on shore. Suddenly you can build yourself shelter, you have a weapon you can kill prey with, you can dig and break open coconuts, so on and so forth; that hammer is incredibly useful. The next day a second hammer washes up. Ok, now you can run around with a hammer in each hand, you have a spare in case you lose or break your hammer, still useful but not as useful. The third day a third hammer washes up. You don't even bother picking it up, because what are you going to do with it that you couldn't already do with your first two hammers? The fourth day a crate of ten thousand hammers washes up on shore. Joy. They're more useful for the wood content of their handles than as tools. The same general principle extends to money. When you're dead broke, the first dollar you earn is incredibly useful: now you can eat! The first few hundred are also incredibly useful: you can get a bed for the night, or even the month! Maybe clothes to wear! The more money you earn, the less directly useful to you each additional dollar is. Maybe you buy fancier shirts or better food or a better place to live, but the difference between a $1 hamburger at Wendy's and a 10$ hamburger at a sit-down restaurant isn't as big as the difference between starving and fed, and the difference between at $10 hamburger and a $100 hamburger at a five-star restaurant might be something you only notice if you're paying attention. At the extreme end, once you get into Mitt Romney territory, it's hard for the rest of us to even figure out what you're possibly gaining by amassing such huge sums of wealth, other than some sort of abstract sense of competitive accomplishment. This is part of why progressive taxation is morally justified and regressive taxation is evil. Someone making only $11000 per year suffers far more horribly from a 5% tax on their income than someone making $110,000,000 would suffer from a 95% tax. Take away a few hundred dollars from someone making $11,000 a year, they might literally starve. Take away a hundred million from someone making a hundred and ten million a year, they're still making ten million a year, the only way they're going to suffer is the pain they feel at seeing smaller numbers in their bank statement. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Aug 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 16:06
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:And the (upper) middle class? What about small business owners / people who have money invested somewhere and also an actual job? People who mortgage their home and work? They don't exist according to this theory. I'm not saying we should focus society on them, but in this dichotomy they don't exist. You're either a fatcat billionaire or a tenement slum wage laborer, with no room in between. This is visibly not how society is composed, and therefore it is a bad theory. Sure, we can split it into more classes. Are you suggesting that because there are many different classes, we should just say 'gently caress it, let's use a single representative agent?' Anyway, capitalists and workers is one of the more important distinctions. This is demonstrated by the past few decades, where median wages have roughly stagnated, whilst profits have risen. This has resulted in a build up of debt. With two (or three, maybe bankers) classes, you'd be able to see this. But with a single representative agent it doesn't show. quote:edit: This is why marxism never caught on in America and to an extent western Europe. It basically tells the fairly sizeable petit bourgeoisie middle class 'get hosed, you don't exist'. True, perhaps, but it was created at a time where they didn't really exist. quote:No it isn't. This is the whole loving point. Neoclassical econ doesn't say free markets are good, it says they're efficient. That's it. Those two concepts are not linked in any way. Many people think those two are the same, but the theory itself says nothing of the sort. Neoclassical economics pretends to be value free, sure. But it isn't. As you said, it thinks 'efficiency' - more q, less p, is good. There you go: value judgement.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 17:34
|
|
|
I guess the fact that 10 to 20% of the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish population openly saying they're communists or anarchists shows that marxism is a wee-bit more popular in western europe than you might think. And this is after decades of red-hunting and blaming everything wrong on the communists.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 19:37
|
|
|
Cahal posted:Neoclassical economics pretends to be value free, sure. But it isn't. As you said, it thinks 'efficiency' - more q, less p, is good. There you go: value judgement. Well except for the fact that I said the opposite of that? People use economics as a tool to push right wing policy, but the economics itself is neutral. Coming up with a whole new system of economics with a leftist slant to compete with this perceived right wing slant is not good. Do you deny that we should at least try to keep economics, as a social science, at least somewhat grounded in, you know, science? It's not like history where you can say nobody is unbiased because economics actually works with real world, objective numbers and data. You're saying "well gently caress science, some people can and do use it for bad things". This is the same reasoning behind Austrian economics, that intellectual honesty doesn't get us what we want, so toss it out. Enjoy posted:Except it obviously has been adapted so you're full of poo poo. Third Worldism, feminism and minority studies have all benefited from class analysis. Even right-wing shills like Christopher Hitchens and Niall Ferguson have said they're heavily influenced by Marxian ideas So what you're saying is to throw out neoclassical economics entirely, and abandon any pretense of the scientific method or objectivity because everything has to be adapted to fight the right? That 100% of economic thought should be heavily stained with ideological and philosophical thought? Congratulations, like I said, you're no better than an Austrian economist. Mans posted:I guess the fact that 10 to 20% of the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish population openly saying they're communists or anarchists shows that marxism is a wee-bit more popular in western europe than you might think. Spain and Portugal don't really count, seeing as they aren't as developed as the rest of Western Europe and were military dictatorships until the 70s, and Italy isn't particularly left wing. France is the best example here, but it still isn't anything near a socialist paradise. The brand of left wing thought that succeeded in Europe (and in America) was social democracy, or flavors of socialism that weren't based on economics written in the 1860s. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Aug 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 20:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 11:14 |
|
|
icantfindaname posted:So what you're saying is to throw out neoclassical economics entirely, and abandon any pretense of the scientific method or objectivity because everything has to be adapted to fight the right? That 100% of economic thought should be heavily stained with ideological and philosophical thought? Congratulations, like I said, you're no better than an Austrian economist. I just pointed out Marxism isn't heavily strained with ideological and philosophical thought since right-wingers can easily adapt it to analyse the world too. I don't think you addressed my point.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2012 20:21
|
|