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Hopefully this won't derail the Marxist economist discussion, but I want to know if I should continue this argument or accept that my opponent will never offer any rational discussion or back up their statements with facts, so I should declare victory and walk away. Originally posted in the "crazy political email" thread. Basically Chinese people are going nuts again over a few specks of rock in the ocean. The last time this happened the school I work at had primary 5 students speak at the morning flag-raising ceremony about "Japan has violated sacred Chinese territory! Japan get out of our islands!" ... when we have Japanese children attending our school. Since I wanted to be ready in case it happens again, I did some research on the issue and the following argument ensued. I'm green, my sensible Chinese friend is blue and red is a Chinese ex-coworker who is now a school vice-principal. Red also knows that my uni major was Asian history and I can speak/read Japanese and Chinese. I hope I argued correctly.  tl;dr: I lay out some basic facts about the sovereignty issue at hand, ex-coworker talks about Nanjing Massacre, I ask what that has to do with the sovereignty issue, ex-coworker says I wouldn't understand anyway and walks away.
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Aug 19, 2012 09:14
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Aeolius posted:Even without invoking a Marxian perspective, there are plenty of extant critiques of the neoclassical supply/demand framework. Steve Keen's recent Debunking Economics, for example, covers a number of them, some of which originated from within the neoclassical school itself. The blog Unlearning Economics is currently going through the book and discussing the major themes and findings in a series of posts. Maybe that will be of interest to you. That's me btw. Also, good post. icantfindaname, I don't want to jump to conclusions but you seem to be opining on marx whilst not really knowing a lot about him. That's fine - I don't either, as capital is long and I haven't had time to read it yet. But you were similar with our 'discussion' of value judgements: assume your opponents have made obvious and stupid mistakes, don't really engage with them fully. That's not really a great way to advance debate. I mean, seriously, how you look at mine and Helsing's textbook excerpts and say 'well, economics is completely objective and not concerned with what is good/bad for society at all?' Imperialist Dog posted:tl;dr: I lay out some basic facts about the sovereignty issue at hand, ex-coworker talks about Nanjing Massacre, I ask what that has to do with the sovereignty issue, ex-coworker says I wouldn't understand anyway and walks away. "Hey, it's just an opinion, man." I get that a lot from my friends. Things are just an opinion, no matter whether they make sense, are backed up by facts etc. Unlearning fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Aug 19, 2012 |
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Aug 19, 2012 10:30
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Cahal posted:"Hey, it's just an opinion, man." It's because they don't want to talk about it, either at all or any longer. Imperialist Dog, no offense but I think you've done basically everything wrong. Don't be that guy who tells people what 'logical fallacies' they're committing, especially when the issue seems to be precisely this frustration with, or belief in the dishonesty of, 'logical' legalism (and colonialism is of course always 'legal'). If anything, it's you that's committing the 'fallacy' because you don't seem to understand, or are rejecting, or ignoring where your ex-coworker is coming from. Your ex-coworker is rejecting this legalistic argument completely, as a 'logical' cover for a historical crime -- to respond with this 'oh, you're being illogical, don't you know XYZ law says such-and-such' isn't a response because its the very legitimacy of that kind of statement that's in question. But that doesn't mean they actually care to talk about it in any detail. This is just flatout social advice, dude. Sometimes people don't want to argue poo poo and you have to decide if you want to press it or not. Kieselguhr Kid fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Aug 19, 2012 |
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Aug 19, 2012 16:37
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icantfindaname posted:It's been mentioned multiple times here that economics should stop pretending to be unbiased, like history does (or so I hear?). Thinking of it, I guess that's not really the same thing as a lack of objectivity, but this attitude seems to carry with it a lack of emphasis on mathematical models and data. I'm saying that stuff is very important. This is not an inherent thing in Marxian economics, though I sort of understand what you're getting at. The problem is, Marxist economic analysis sees economics as a continuation of class politics - it's essentially what it's there for, to examine the class dynamics of the economy. The scientific aspects of current economics - i.e. the analysis of technical aspects of concrete phenomena - are also possible under Marxist value judgments. Soviet economists worked in a similar fashion to how western economists do now, for instance. It's important to emphasise that economics is inherently predicated on subjective judgments, however - neither the relations of exchange nor those of production are objectively mandated, and the current economic paradigm's attempts to describe them as such is pure ideology.
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Aug 19, 2012 18:09
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Economists like to paint critics as simply math-phobes, but really economists use incredibly hamstrung mathematical techniques that were abandoned by real scentists long ago. ODEs and chaos theory would be far more appropriate for modelling a dynamic system like the economy, and economists have attracted a lot of flak from the physics community for failing to learn and incorporate them.
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Aug 19, 2012 18:14
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icantfindaname posted:My main criticism at this point is the seeming eschewal of the idea of objectivity by Marxist economics. Something really doesn't sit right with me with a theory that says "Well, it's impossible to be unbiased, so let's not even bother". Marxism can be a useful analysis, but I maintain that it's not an end all theory that makes everything else obsolete. Neoclassical economics can actually take a particular market, examine it, and produce a (rough, usually) number for say the elasticity of demand, or do regression analysis for businesses and banks. Obviously this isn't the end all of economics, but saying it's useless and should be thrown out because it usually promotes a bad ideology seems dangerous to me. The Enlightenment notion of objectivity has been eschewed by pretty much everyone except for Objectivists.
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Aug 19, 2012 21:08
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:It's because they don't want to talk about it, either at all or any longer. No offence taken. I'm not very good at argument or persuasion and the only reason I had the confidence to engage this time at all is years of lurking D&D. I guess I included the fallacy links because I always thought that one should always include sources. I won't press the issue further with ex-coworker, but if my entire line of legalistic reasoning is being rejected, what should I have done?
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Aug 20, 2012 02:09
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I'm not the person you asked but in very broad terms, knowledge of the underlying structure of arguments and when they are fallacious allows you to construct powerful rhetorical devices and counter-arguments that take advantage of your enemy's mistakes. But you do this without going 'haha you have activated my fallacy trap card' or something. Other than that, remember that people tend to believe what they want to believe and simply telling them they're wrong or even exposing them to proof of an opposite position is not a surefire way to change their mind. People are irrational and don't like their egos being assaulted, which is what you're doing when you're saying they're wrong: it opens the door to the (albeit fallacious itself) belief that if they were wrong on this then they must be wrong on other things / must be stupid / fundamentally broken etc. Finally, give up on the idea that there exists a position which is free of ideology or 'objective'. If you are convincing someone then you are replacing one ideology with another and there's nothing wrong with that. Or don't!!! What do I know!!!
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Aug 20, 2012 13:43
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icantfindaname posted:Marxism can be a useful analysis, but I maintain that it's not an end all theory that makes everything else obsolete. Neoclassical economics can actually take a particular market, examine it, and produce a (rough, usually) number for say the elasticity of demand, or do regression analysis for businesses and banks. Obviously this isn't the end all of economics, but saying it's useless and should be thrown out because it usually promotes a bad ideology seems dangerous to me. I've enjoyed reading the back-and-forth between your brave self and a few of the other posters, and this post seems like a fair way to wrap it up. In my view punches were landed on either side, and I think that neither Marxism nor neoclassical economics emerges unscathed. Just as I'd expect: certainty is not easily had in this world, and just because your side is flawed doesn't mean my side is infallible. We need to drop St. Marx thinking. Consider, say, someone like Ha Joon Chang; one can dissent strongly from modern economic orthodoxy without reverting to simple socialism. My own feeling is that structuring your economy requires subtlety and wisdom. We don't have grand sweeping theories that give us a perfect template for designing microprocessors or antibiotic drugs. Some questions are necessarily complex, and I see no reason why the challenge of resource allocation would be well-served by doctrinaire thinking.
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Aug 20, 2012 13:44
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Bob Nudd posted:I've enjoyed reading the back-and-forth between your brave self and a few of the other posters, and this post seems like a fair way to wrap it up. In my view punches were landed on either side, and I think that neither Marxism nor neoclassical economics emerges unscathed. Just as I'd expect: certainty is not easily had in this world, and just because your side is flawed doesn't mean my side is infallible. I would like you to summarize what you feel were the "punches landed" for each side of the debate.
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Aug 20, 2012 14:20
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Bob Nudd posted:I've enjoyed reading the back-and-forth between your brave self and a few of the other posters, and this post seems like a fair way to wrap it up. In my view punches were landed on either side, and I think that neither Marxism nor neoclassical economics emerges unscathed. Just as I'd expect: certainty is not easily had in this world, and just because your side is flawed doesn't mean my side is infallible. Oh the truth lies somewhere in the middle does it? 
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Aug 20, 2012 14:40
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Re the Marx chat: I have to say that while he's a provocative and stimulating thinker, Marxian economics seems to have major flaws. Marx's idea of "socially necessary labour time" seems impossibly vague and imprecise, and his argument (as I understand it) seems to be that using the labour theory of value you can objectively determine the value of a commodity, which in practice doesn't seem to actually be achievable. There are also some pretty significant problems with unmodified Marxian class analysis. Marx was a very insightful theorist but it shouldn't be controversial to point out that his approach to issues had real flaws, and that a century and a half after he wrote it is possible find problems in his methodology. icantfindaname posted:My main criticism at this point is the seeming eschewal of the idea of objectivity by Marxist economics. Something really doesn't sit right with me with a theory that says "Well, it's impossible to be unbiased, so let's not even bother". Marxism can be a useful analysis, but I maintain that it's not an end all theory that makes everything else obsolete. Neoclassical economics can actually take a particular market, examine it, and produce a (rough, usually) number for say the elasticity of demand, or do regression analysis for businesses and banks. Obviously this isn't the end all of economics, but saying it's useless and should be thrown out because it usually promotes a bad ideology seems dangerous to me. I'm not a Marxist and I don't get the impression Cahal would identify as one either. This is yet another example of you projecting assumptions onto the debating position of your adversary. As for neoclassical economics, the problem here isn't simply that it supports bad ideology. Its also supports what Imre Lakatosh would call a degenerative research program. Rather than pushing its own limits and frontiers outwards neoclassical economics is largely devoted to maintaining a set of assumptions about individuals, markets and institutions that are obviously inadequate (in fact you can go back to the late 19th century and find economists like Thorstein Veblen raising criticisms of economics that are still applicable today for having a psychologically and anthropologically absurd approach to institutions and behaviour). The reason that neoclassical economics continues to receive so much support in the academy has a lot to do with its extreme usefulness to business. Again, I'd submit that you need to actually examine the relevant intellectual history here to see this clearly. Bits and pieces of the neoclassical paradigm might be worth preserving as insights that can be integrated into a new theory of human behaviour, but I'd be interested to know what core of the theory you think ought to be preserved.
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Aug 20, 2012 18:47
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Helsing posted:As for neoclassical economics, the problem here isn't simply that it supports bad ideology. Its also supports what Imre Lakatosh would call a degenerative research program. Rather than pushing its own limits and frontiers outwards neoclassical economics is largely devoted to maintaining a set of assumptions about individuals, markets and institutions that are obviously inadequate (in fact you can go back to the late 19th century and find economists like Thorstein Veblen raising criticisms of economics that are still applicable today for having a psychologically and anthropologically absurd approach to institutions and behaviour). This is more correct than even you might think. Most neoclassical theories are built up from individual behaviour. However, when neoclassical economists try to aggregate upwards, they (naturally) run into pesky emergent properties and fallacies of composition. This happens with the aggregation of demand curves (which can have any shape at the market level, unless you restrict it with various assumptions, including one that consumers are identical). The neoclassical economist William Gorman realises this and proceeds to say: quote:The necessary and sufficient condition quoted above is intuitively reasonable. It says, in effect, that an extra unit of purchasing power should be spent in the same way no matter to whom it is given... Parallel straight lines that all pass through (0,0) (no consumption = no utility) are, of course, the same line! These are the kind of mental acrobatics you get from neoclassicists trying desperately to preserve their original models at each step, rather than seek to undermine and apply them in different ways. You'll see similar things in the jump to macroeconomic representative agents and other areas. P.S. Yes, Icantfindaname, I am not a marxist.
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Aug 20, 2012 19:36
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I'd say that Marx's labour theory of value does retain its primary function, namely to serve as a theoretical objective measure of value which can be used to illustrate the nature of the bourgeoisie political economy. As far as modelling goes, it's not very useful, I'll agree with that (and obviously the concept loses a lot of its lustre when you can't actually use it for anything concrete), but I wouldn't go so far as to call it useless. Marxian class analysis is also somewhat more sophisticated than it's often given credit for, though this is in large part the work of later thinkers, especially Rosa Luxemburg (well, at least out of the ones I've read to any significant degree) - the class structure is more of a collective endeavour (e.g. in a publicly traded company the shareholders collectively act as the capitalist) - it becomes a designation of a social function rather than a descriptor of an individual. I mean, I'll admit that there are quite a few flaws in Marx' unmodified analysis, and also several serious doctrinal problems in Marxian praxis which remain unanswered as far as I am aware, but many of the things that are typically mentioned are addressed by later writers. To my knowledge, the most potent critiques actually tend to come from modern/post-modern continental thinkers.
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Aug 20, 2012 20:14
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rscott posted:Oh the truth lies somewhere in the middle does it? No, what I mean is that there is no middle. An electric motor is not a compromise between a diesel and a petrol engine. It's a different solution to the same problem. There are potentially millions of ways of allocating resources in a society, and arranging those various systems along a straight spectrum bookended by Marx and Hayek is meaningless.
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Aug 21, 2012 01:21
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At this point I'm willing to accept any empirical validation for neoclassical theory. Because this thread was intended as a place to aggregate evidence, I'll post some articles that are relevant to this debate; if the op wants to include them, that's cool: The Road to a World Made Safe for Corporations: The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics (Found this somewhere in another D & D thread; details the intellectual history of the Chicago School and demonstrates that it was fueled by vested interests from the start) http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN342/Corporations_Chicago.pdf Veblen's Institutional Elaboration of Rent Theory (I posted this with my original question: another article detailing the intellectual history of the neoclassical school; shows how the Marginalist revolution attempted to discredit the idea of "unearned income") http://michael-hudson.com/2012/07/veblens-institutionalist-elaboration-of-rent-theory/ The Capital Debates: A Brief Introduction (Saw this posted somewhere in D & D, I think. It reviews the capital debates during the 1960s and in doing so reveals some structural problems with neoclassical theory. I'll admit, there's too much econospeak for me to understand all of this.) http://nakedkeynesianism.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/capital-debates-brief-introduction.html Bonus: Deleuze and Guattari explained in terms of a subject that everyone can understand: http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/charmander.html Small Talk fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Aug 21, 2012 |
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Aug 21, 2012 01:26
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Bob Nudd posted:No, what I mean is that there is no middle. An electric motor is not a compromise between a diesel and a petrol engine. It's a different solution to the same problem. There are potentially millions of ways of allocating resources in a society, and arranging those various systems along a straight spectrum bookended by Marx and Hayek is meaningless. Actually it is pretty meaningful since some of those "millions" of ways benefit larger proportions of society than others: those ways are on the left. Ways which benefit fewer people than the status quo are on the right. That's what left and right have always meant, and pretending that they don't mean anything is equivalent to giving up on improving society.
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Aug 21, 2012 01:35
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Helsing posted:Marx's idea of "socially necessary labour time" seems impossibly vague and imprecise, and his argument (as I understand it) seems to be that using the labour theory of value you can objectively determine the value of a commodity, which in practice doesn't seem to actually be achievable. It certainly can seem vague, though I have found it to grow less so as pieces continue to fall into place. As with many facets of Marx, there's sort of a give and take in SNLT; just as he argues it embodies value in a commodity form, and thereby gives the basis for exchange ratios, so to does it owe its existence to the market. By this I mean that judging the "necessary" character of labor is made possible because of the strictures of market competition, which do not abide waste. The labor time itself is measured in hours, but relates to costs in terms of wages, which means that there is a direct bridge between value as discussed in vol. 1 and the prices of production discussed in vol. 3. (Tangentially: In the sense of administered prices based on costs, it actually has a lot in common with current Post Keynesian price theories, though it takes it to a more fundamental place.) And after that, you go by an average. But the presence of market competition is essential; Marx noted (and I can't find the quote right now, but it seemed that he may have been anticipating the Calculation debate) that without a market, there could be no such thing as value as defined here, as the market is what determines necessity. This is part of the problem with using this theory as the basis for a central planning based on labor hours. You are correct, though, that this does not enable one to go into a store, read the price tag on a good, and immediately know anything about whether it is selling above or below its value. As I noted previously, the individual commodity is basically an atomic unit for this analysis. But the point then is not to figure out the exact spin of its nucleus — as you move to lower and lower levels of analysis, the details all grow more indeterminate. Rather, the goal is to figure out how it fits into the bigger picture, to characterize economic phenomena at larger scales. In particular, he tended to focus on the rate of profit as the most significant macro-scale indicator, describing its downward tendency as "the most important law in political economy." It's a notion that's been subject to a lot of scrutiny, to be sure. However, for an empirical example of it, you can't do much better than Andrew Kliman's most recent book, The Failure of Capitalist Production. It's sort of a continuation of his previous Reclaiming Marx's Capital, which debunks a lot of the claims of inconsistency in the theoretical system. In Failure, he takes the theoretical interpretation expounded in Reclaiming and sets it to work crunching numbers, and his findings are pretty impressive: a secular fall in the rate of profit from after WW2 to the millennial, not even significantly offset by neoliberal policies of the 80's and on, until the present crisis. Here's a synopsis with excerpts. I think it's a pretty important work, worthy of a broader conversation within the field. Helsing posted:Marx was a very insightful theorist but it shouldn't be controversial to point out that his approach to issues had real flaws, and that a century and a half after he wrote it is possible find problems in his methodology. I don't doubt that there are flaws, not the least of which being in the presentation of the matter (especially the posthumous stuff), though I can't say I have come across many that aren't already answered somewhere else in the text or by subsequent authors, to echo V. Illych L. In particular, those two Kliman books I mentioned have really done a lot to improve the plausibility of this value theory for me. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Aug 21, 2012 |
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Aug 21, 2012 02:32
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SSJ2 Goku Wilders posted:I'm not the person you asked but in very broad terms, knowledge of the underlying structure of arguments and when they are fallacious allows you to construct powerful rhetorical devices and counter-arguments that take advantage of your enemy's mistakes. But you do this without going 'haha you have activated my fallacy trap card' or something. I think that was my mistake. I should have said something like "How can you say that I just "wouldn't understand"? You mean I wouldn't understand because I'm not Chinese, right? So despite majoring in Asian history at university and reading several books on Nanjing and the Hong Kong occupation, I'm not qualified to weigh in on the subject because I'm from the wrong ethnic group? Isn't that a bit racist?" ... but wouldn't this come off as egotistical "look at my degrees!" patronising? Upon reflection, I think that's another reason why I just posted a fallacy link as a robotic and emotionless "You have used a fallacious argument. Please choose another" way to remain at arm's length. You're also correct about the backfire effect, but as for ideological replacement, both Ex-Coworker and I have master's degrees in education, so we are both supposed to know the importance of objectivity, dispassionate study and solid argument. I guess that's what gets me.
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Aug 21, 2012 03:49
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Anybody have some good information or sources debunking the myth that welfare just encourages reliance on the government and people are just gaming the system? I've explained that poor people aren't more likely to do drugs, that more serious drugs are less likely to be caught than soft drugs, so they've retreated from their "Welfare recipients should be drug tested" claim and have gone on to claiming that it's not the drugs that are the problem, it's that welfare breeds reliance.
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Aug 21, 2012 18:44
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Just ask them what percentage of welfare recipients are gaming the system.
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Aug 21, 2012 18:50
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This is really weird, but how do I approach a friend who believes that the attacks on the WTC were an inside job? The most hilarious part is that neither of us are from the USA. It really blew my mind to hear this, because my friend is quite rational if a bit stubborn when it comes to correcting himself. He would counter everything with "I am studying arquitecture, buildings don't do that!", so in the end I just said whatever and went to pour myself another beer. Should I just try to derail the conversation if it ever comes up again?
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Aug 21, 2012 21:44
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I have a good one but it'll only work on the guys that reduce it down to 'ILLUMINATI!!!'. Who's his secret bogeyman?
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Aug 21, 2012 21:48
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This picture explains alot to Mr. Architect The buildings were held up by that central column. The rest of the structure was well distributed and balanced but when the column failed it just kind of crumbled. The first WTC bombings were trying to do the same thing but in the basement. If that had worked they might have fallen sideways catastrophically. Has anyone brought up the work Adam Curtis has done? Great historical background on how power has evolved in the past 50 years. Better than Ancient Aliens by far.
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Aug 21, 2012 21:55
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Cahal posted:This is more correct than even you might think. Most neoclassical theories are built up from individual behaviour. However, when neoclassical economists try to aggregate upwards, they (naturally) run into pesky emergent properties and fallacies of composition. This happens with the aggregation of demand curves (which can have any shape at the market level, unless you restrict it with various assumptions, including one that consumers are identical). The neoclassical economist William Gorman realises this and proceeds to say: I've been told that advanced DSGE models get rid of representative agents altogether, but it isn't clear to me what they do instead to make the whole system hang together coherently. Do you have any comments on how DSGE deals with these issues? I mean lets leave aside for a moment that DSGE doesn't seem to have any real predictive value (or does it?), have they at least gotten to a point where they can somewhat realistically model the economy without representative agents or was that claim misleading? Aeolius posted:It certainly can seem vague, though I have found it to grow less so as pieces continue to fall into place. As with many facets of Marx, there's sort of a give and take in SNLT; just as he argues it embodies value in a commodity form, and thereby gives the basis for exchange ratios, so to does it owe its existence to the market. By this I mean that judging the "necessary" character of labor is made possible because of the strictures of market competition, which do not abide waste. But market competition does abide a great deal of waste. This seems to be an example of Marx being overly credulous toward 19th century models of how perfect competition would function. The entire argument that value is invested labour seems really questionable to me. I realize that this is supplemented by the acknowledgement that everything has a fundamental 'use value' as well, but that dichotomy seems unnecessarily cumbersome. Anyway the entire idea that to determine the value of a commodity you need to perform some kind of estimation of how many man hours the average worker in that industry using the average amount of capital would take to produce that commodity and then this estimation can somehow be turned into an "objective" indicator seems highly questionable to me. I'd want to see some really impressive predictions being made via Marxist theory to actually justify using this system to actually understand the economy. quote:The labor time itself is measured in hours, but relates to costs in terms of wages, which means that there is a direct bridge between value as discussed in vol. 1 and the prices of production discussed in vol. 3. (Tangentially: In the sense of administered prices based on costs, it actually has a lot in common with current Post Keynesian price theories, though it takes it to a more fundamental place.) And after that, you go by an average. But the presence of market competition is essential; Marx noted (and I can't find the quote right now, but it seemed that he may have been anticipating the Calculation debate) that without a market, there could be no such thing as value as defined here, as the market is what determines necessity. This is part of the problem with using this theory as the basis for a central planning based on labor hours. So hypothetically how would I go about determining the socially necessary labour time that goes into making an intel computer chip? Is there actually a conceivable way to do this in reality, rather than just saying "well if you could precisely measure X, Y, and Z and then aggregate them then that would be your answer"? quote:You are correct, though, that this does not enable one to go into a store, read the price tag on a good, and immediately know anything about whether it is selling above or below its value. As I noted previously, the individual commodity is basically an atomic unit for this analysis. But the point then is not to figure out the exact spin of its nucleus — as you move to lower and lower levels of analysis, the details all grow more indeterminate. Rather, the goal is to figure out how it fits into the bigger picture, to characterize economic phenomena at larger scales. I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but it also sounds dangerously similar to the justifications that neoclassical economists use for employing their own elaborate theoretical apparatuses. There needs to be some justification for these manoeuvres beyond the internal consistency they provide to the theory. quote:In particular, he tended to focus on the rate of profit as the most significant macro-scale indicator, describing its downward tendency as "the most important law in political economy." It's a notion that's been subject to a lot of scrutiny, to be sure. However, for an empirical example of it, you can't do much better than Andrew Kliman's most recent book, The Failure of Capitalist Production. It's sort of a continuation of his previous Reclaiming Marx's Capital, which debunks a lot of the claims of inconsistency in the theoretical system. In Failure, he takes the theoretical interpretation expounded in Reclaiming and sets it to work crunching numbers, and his findings are pretty impressive: a secular fall in the rate of profit from after WW2 to the millennial, not even significantly offset by neoliberal policies of the 80's and on, until the present crisis. Here's a synopsis with excerpts. I think it's a pretty important work, worthy of a broader conversation within the field. I've only read summaries of Kliman's work so far but I admit that I find his apparent fixation on demonstrating that Marx didn't have logical inconsistencies is... weird. It seems like real world applicability or predictive power are vastly more important ways of evaluating a theoretical framework than internal consistency. I looked up one of Kliman's papers because I found the idea that we've been mismeasuring the rate of profit very interesting, however when I went to the references section all it said was that the paper was based upon calculations that weren't publicly available. He said something to the effect of "buy the book if you wanna check my math" which isn't really something I have the money to do right now. Do you know whether he has elaborated on his theories about profit measurements in a publicly accessible place? quote:I don't doubt that there are flaws, not the least of which being in the presentation of the matter (especially the posthumous stuff), though I can't say I have come across many that aren't already answered somewhere else in the text or by subsequent authors, to echo V. Illych L. In particular, those two Kliman books I mentioned have really done a lot to improve the plausibility of this value theory for me. Marxian class analysis just doesn't seem to have panned out. The idea that there are economic classes that are in constant struggle - sometimes openly, sometimes covertly - is easy enough to demonstrate, but in terms of Marx's more specific predictions it seems as though he missed a great deal. He didn't anticipate the degree to which ethnic and national cleavages would interrupt the formation of a unified proletariat, he seems to be over estimated the speed with which intermediary classes between proletarian and bourgeois would disappear (whether they are going to disappear at all is not entirely clear even 150 years after he was writing) and he never seems to have anticipated that industrial capital might become subservient to finance capital. In fact, so far as I can tell (please correct me if I'm misunderstanding) he doesn't really have a coherent framework for analysing finance at all. He groups financiers into the 'lumpenproletariat', a class that also includes hobos. A theory written in the late 19th century really should be able to present a more workable analysis of finance. There's plenty of interesting stuff in Marx and I'd say he plays a comparable role in the social sciences to the role that Galileo or Copernicus played in astronomy. It isn't really clear to me what how useful the system laid out in capital actually is for analysing the modern functioning of capitalism. I admit I have only read excerpts of the work and while I've been trying to read it cover to cover since midway through summer, my progress so far has been slow. At present, however, I'm having trouble seeing how I'm going to apply the insights in the book except as intellectual history. Maybe its just the incredibly slow pace of Volume I, but so far the entire thing seems to be asking me to grant Marx far too many intellectual assumptions. V. Illych L. posted:I'd say that Marx's labour theory of value does retain its primary function, namely to serve as a theoretical objective measure of value which can be used to illustrate the nature of the bourgeoisie political economy. As far as modelling goes, it's not very useful, I'll agree with that (and obviously the concept loses a lot of its lustre when you can't actually use it for anything concrete), but I wouldn't go so far as to call it useless. Marxism certainly performs far better as a research project than it does as "the assembled works of Karl Marx". Taken as a collaborative effort by many thinkers to understand the nature of political economy I'd say Marxism has many noteworthy successes. Nevertheless I think leftists should probably be devoting more intellectual energy to developing a more up to date intellectual framework for understanding capitalism. A lot of Marxist theory seems to be showing wear and tear after a century and a half.
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Aug 21, 2012 22:21
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This got a bit long, sorry.Helsing posted:But market competition does abide a great deal of waste. This seems to be an example of Marx being overly credulous toward 19th century models of how perfect competition would function. True enough, it does abide waste; in particular, as the economy booms, and factors like fictitious capital become more prevalent, there's more leeway for things to go off-kilter. Never is the market's capacity to discover value more broken than at the top of the boom. Ultimately, though, the "law of value" will assert itself again, as in a crisis. At the bottom of the crisis, a little waste can be the difference between solvency and bankruptcy, at which point the enthusiastic purging thereof is not an unreasonable assumption at all. At any rate, where perfect competition is assumed, it also serves another critical purpose: it makes all the best possible assumptions about the functioning of the system and nevertheless shows that, at the end of the day, crisis is still inevitable. Helsing posted:The entire argument that value is invested labour seems really questionable to me. I realize that this is supplemented by the acknowledgement that everything has a fundamental 'use value' as well, but that dichotomy seems unnecessarily cumbersome. It all stems from the analysis of the commodity given within the first few chapters of vol 1. The idea is that a commodity has both a physical and a social existence, corresponding with the basic things you can do with a commodity: consume/dispose of it, or exchange it. The dichotomy, like all the various dualities and contradictions, is really the essence of the sort of dialectics he employs in his analysis. I guess there's not much I can say if it seems a certain way to you; to each his own. Though, if not by those aspects, how might you prefer to define and analyze a commodity? Or, more specifically, how would you define it in objective terms, so one is not left to make appeals to "utils" or the like? Helsing posted:So hypothetically how would I go about determining the socially necessary labour time that goes into making an intel computer chip? Is there actually a conceivable way to do this in reality, rather than just saying "well if you could precisely measure X, Y, and Z and then aggregate them then that would be your answer"? This depends on your interpretation. Under, say, a dual system interpretation, you'd keep separate accounting of labor time and money costs. I prefer the single system approach, in which the two basically compound as you go, such that there isn't a discrete "price" or "value" system. So let me try to construct the example you're looking for: Because we have to draw a line somewhere, you start off with a resource firm that does mining and other basic productive activities to provide raw materials. Since we're exclusively focused on the capitalist mode of production, we begin with the capitalist at the head of the operation, assuming it is a private firm owned by a single individual for simplicity's sake. Said individual spends money to buy necessary machinery* and labor-power to set everything in motion. Once a product emerges, for a given rate of surplus value — which is determined exogenously by the class struggle, i.e., the relative bargaining positions of capital and labor — you can calculate a rate of profit. All together, the cost price (what was spent on labor and capital) and the surplus creates a new commodity price. Quoting from Kliman's Reclaiming (p. 27, emphasis mine):
There's a whole lot on what puts pressure on rates of profit to equalize across industries and such, but I'm not going to get into that here because this is already looking like it'll get long enough that many readers' eyes will glaze over. Anyhow, so once you combine the cost price with the average rate of profit, you get the price of production for an industry, around which market prices further fluctuate due to supply and demand (as I previously described), and other institutional factors that are beyond the scope of this discussion. The emerging market price helps shape the value of the next commodity along the chain. These raw materials are taken and turned into intermediate materials: unadorned circuit boards and the like. A firm buys the raw, sells more specialized materials by the same method. The value of their output builds on the last firm's. The new firm lays out money that constitutes the new cost price: enough value to acquire means of production (in this case including the previous raw materials at their sale price) and labor power, operating at new rates of surplus value and profit, and so on. From there, the process repeats with each new stage until you have a finished commodity. The rough framework of the process (buy labor/capital, produce good/service, sell for more than you invested) describes business in a fashion realistic enough to reflect the experiences of people I know who've started businesses. As I previously noted, this also bears a number of similarities to the common theories of price used within the Post-Keynesian tradition: cost prices plus a markup. This is expressed in a few ways, like Weintraub's General Theory of the Price Level, which can be simply expressed as "P = kw/A" (P = price level; w = wage rate; A = output per worker. The 'magic' k is a constant representing a markup multiplier, or a rate of profit of sorts; Jan Kregel notes that the latter is seen by some as "the natural heir of the velocity constant and the basis of the theory [capable of supplanting] the quantity theory explanation of prices"). Sraffa had a system a bit closer to Marx, retaining the surplus approach, albeit employed a bit differently. According to the TSSI crowd, Sraffa and those who followed in his steps made the mistake of failing to recognize the social character of value and therefore judge surplus based purely on physical quantities. I can't comment on this beyond the arguments others have made, though, since I haven't read The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, yet. I do have it saved; it is just wedged somewhere in my Sisyphean reading list that won't friggin' stop growing. *There's actually an interesting hitch to this that isn't developed until vol 2, but against Smith's notion that ultimately all prices resolve to wages, Marx argued that within "Department I" (his term for the sector of the economy that produces the means of productions, as opposed to Department II, which produces consumer goods) circularities can exist — e.g., mining firm mines metal, sells it to another company that turns it into machines that sells it back to the mining firm. He goes on to argue that this circulating mass of constant capital that never resolves is the first thing that has to grow before the economy itself can grow. I can't get into this in much greater depth at present, since I'm still only working my way through all of this, myself; just inserting it as an interesting aside. Helsing posted:I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but it also sounds dangerously similar to the justifications that neoclassical economists use for employing their own elaborate theoretical apparatuses. There needs to be some justification for these manoeuvres beyond the internal consistency they provide to the theory. The underlying justification for his aggregate equalities comes from his distinction between labor and labor-power, which is how he solved the problem that stymied Ricardo — i.e., how surplus can arise from equal exchange between capital and labor. If all surplus value is unpaid labor, you can formulate a coherent system of accounting, complete with constructs like said equalities. Helsing posted:I've only read summaries of Kliman's work so far but I admit that I find his apparent fixation on demonstrating that Marx didn't have logical inconsistencies is... weird. It seems like real world applicability or predictive power are vastly more important ways of evaluating a theoretical framework than internal consistency. Well, he's not the only one working with the TSSI tradition; there's also Alan Freeman, Guglielmo Carchedi, John Ernst, Ted McGlone, Manuel Perez, and others. The 'fixation,' I think, is understandable to the extent that the interpretation does appear to do the things it claims. I find it pretty convincing, at least. And, again, he stepped away from theory in the recent book to focus on empirics, which is always welcome; after all, determining that a system is internally consistent is different from determining that it corresponds to reality. I don't want to delve too deeply into Kliman on a personal level apart from noting that he can come across as somewhat abrasive in informal debate, should you ever happen upon it online. Best to stick to his published stuff. Helsing posted:I looked up one of Kliman's papers because I found the idea that we've been mismeasuring the rate of profit very interesting, however when I went to the references section all it said was that the paper was based upon calculations that weren't publicly available. He said something to the effect of "buy the book if you wanna check my math" which isn't really something I have the money to do right now. Do you know whether he has elaborated on his theories about profit measurements in a publicly accessible place? Was this the paper you read? If not, maybe it will be of use? Otherwise, I may have to get back to you on this. Helsing posted:Marxian class analysis just doesn't seem to have panned out. The idea that there are economic classes that are in constant struggle - sometimes openly, sometimes covertly - is easy enough to demonstrate, but in terms of Marx's more specific predictions it seems as though he missed a great deal. He didn't anticipate the degree to which ethnic and national cleavages would interrupt the formation of a unified proletariat, he seems to be over estimated the speed with which intermediary classes between proletarian and bourgeois would disappear (whether they are going to disappear at all is not entirely clear even 150 years after he was writing) I am not sure exactly how optimistic he was about the timeline, on a personal level, but yeah, this seems a valid criticism. I am dubious about most efforts to predict the future where human action is concerned. Even if we came out with a theory that perfectly predicted economic phenomena, we'd ultimately game it and render it useless again. If we're going to maintain fair epistemological footing, the best we can do is observe broad social phenomena — e.g., the Marxian emphasis on the downward motion of the rate of profit or the Post-Keynesian/Circuit Theory emphasis on aggregate debt levels (or even the view that the former begets the latter and so on). We can get a sense that the storm is growing, we just won't be able to pinpoint exactly when and where lightning will strike, beyond the occasional lucky guess. Even those people who predicted a bubble in real estate with massive debt-deflationary consequences for the rest of the economy couldn't tell you anything so specific as what event would trigger it or what day (or month or in most cases even calendar year) it would occur. Still, understanding the broad conditions is valuable in its own right. Helsing posted:and he never seems to have anticipated that industrial capital might become subservient to finance capital. In fact, so far as I can tell (please correct me if I'm misunderstanding) he doesn't really have a coherent framework for analysing finance at all. This is treated in volume 3, as I understand it. My reading of volumes 2 and 3 have mostly taken the form of hopping around to a chapter here, one there, as I've needed to acquire certain concepts. In terms of thorough, cover-to-cover reading, I'm still pretty early on in 2, so I can't really speak to this. I've read here and there that there is a place for finance in the theory, but I don't know if the "competition between money capital and industrial/commercial capital" angle is Marx or a subsequent theorist in the tradition. It does seem to fit well, though, and it even includes a role for expectations, in the pricing of fictitious capital. The idea that, as the rate of profit falls and money becomes more scarce relative to real capital, market interest rates will want to rise until on average they've swallowed up the profit of enterprise (destroying the incentive to produce and kicking off a crisis) does have an intuitive appeal. Further, it would be easy to see how government stimulus might have the unintended effect of prolonging this state of lethargy and financial excess; it would not allow the crisis to fully resolve itself by swinging power back the other way through the destruction of capital and the restoration of the rate of profit. But I'm still getting acquainted with the nitty-gritty of this part, myself. As a side note, that blog I linked tends to place a great deal of focus on gold as "real" money. While the points it makes to the usefulness of that are not awful, it seems most current theorists prefer a measurement called MELT, or "monetary expression of labor time," which sort of creates an abstract money commodity of sorts without relying on a single commodity (thus allowing it to work with fiat money). As it is based on the aggregate equalities, it fits the theory perfectly. However, lest you worry that it is shenanigansy in some way by relying on those aggregates, it can also be demonstrated that the MELT is algebraically identical to the commodity-based approach Marx used. Helsing posted:There's plenty of interesting stuff in Marx and I'd say he plays a comparable role in the social sciences to the role that Galileo or Copernicus played in astronomy. It isn't really clear to me what how useful the system laid out in capital actually is for analysing the modern functioning of capitalism. I admit I have only read excerpts of the work and while I've been trying to read it cover to cover since midway through summer, my progress so far has been slow. At present, however, I'm having trouble seeing how I'm going to apply the insights in the book except as intellectual history. Maybe its just the incredibly slow pace of Volume I, but so far the entire thing seems to be asking me to grant Marx far too many intellectual assumptions. It can be slow going, no doubt. It speeds up, though; the first three or so chapters are super-dense, but then after that he pretty much pares down to one or two new ideas per chapter. Whether you ultimately agree with it or not, it's good that you're approaching it with an open mind! For my own part, I am not closed off to the possibility that Sraffa or others may have had the better of the discussion, though at this moment in time I find Marx's account more plausible (though politically I am much closer to an anarchist than anything). A couple of blogs I follow that operate in the Post-Keynesian tradition (Naked Keynesianism and Thoughts on Economics) have both recently been going at the subject pretty hard, though at the end of the day both still gladly admit that, despite their contentions, "Marxist political economy should remain a live and exciting field of scholarly research." Aeolius fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Aug 22, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 04:20
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baw posted:Just ask them what percentage of welfare recipients are gaming the system. I did that with some of my relatives. In Ontario, after an Auditor General report, it was found that 0.1% (yes, a tenth of a percent) were found to be committing welfare fraud. Their response was "The statistics can't be trusted."
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Aug 22, 2012 04:27
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Whenever that happens, I just ask if they could point out any specific flaws in the study's methodology. Usually they subconsciously realize that the burden of proof is on them (never explain that to someone unless you want to sound like a dork) and get cornered if you just ask them for the stats. Sometimes their filibusters are entertaining, but keep hammering the point. Maybe you'll even be treated to a meltdown. I don't argue with friends or family on Facebook, so I don't mind pissing strangers off with a persistent, unanswerable question. 
baw fucked around with this message at 08:59 on Aug 22, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 08:50
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spidoman posted:Anybody have some good information or sources debunking the myth that welfare just encourages reliance on the government and people are just gaming the system? I've explained that poor people aren't more likely to do drugs, that more serious drugs are less likely to be caught than soft drugs, so they've retreated from their "Welfare recipients should be drug tested" claim and have gone on to claiming that it's not the drugs that are the problem, it's that welfare breeds reliance. Welfare articles http://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/403814-debunking-welfare-myths.html http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/26743067?width=639 https://www.msu.edu/user/skourtes/myths.html http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1302 http://womenslawproject.wordpress.c...-tanf-benefits/ http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2009/04/26/debunking-conservative-welfare-myth http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...3WMPHvsFZwZu4Wg (a .pdf) A really good angle on this is comparing corporate welfare to actual, people welfare. Guess which one we spend more on to less economic benefit! http://www.corporations.org/welfare/ http://www.faireconomy.org http://www.progress.org/banneker/cw.html http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/ The best thing about this line of attack is that even self-professed conservative websites and blogs will admit that corporate welfare is out of control http://m.townhall.com/columnists/kenconnor/2012/08/22/propping_up_corporate_america http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/15/3764234/when-corporate-welfare-is-taken.html It stands to reason that if they are against one form of supposedly unnecessary and extravagant welfare, they should be against all forms of it. If they're not, you can begin poking holes in their world view and keep poking till the hot air blows out. http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/tenets.htm this is a useful link in general Happy arguing  If you come across any further trouble, don't hesitate to post in this thread or PM me. And post screencaps!
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Aug 22, 2012 09:40
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Be careful with posting a wall of links because it's pretty easy for someone to type "welfare fraud" into google and counter with their own wall of right-wing bullshit and expect you to refute every one. Then you get into an endless back and forth which is the biggest thing you need to avoid. Before you post any citation, be sure that you understand it enough to defend it in your own words. Also it's a good way to learn 
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Aug 22, 2012 09:48
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Sorry for the double post, but here's an example from a few months ago (I am the sane one.) Context is an anti-occupy wall street page. Any "liberals" there get chased off pretty quickly, which is great for me because I don't like it when other people agree with me during these things:  So after Marko (seriously crazy guy who started calling me "monkey" at some point) lost his poo poo and stopped posting, it actually turned into a productive conversation with a few more open-minded posters. The funny part is that the "jackass" thing was meant to point at me, but it missed and ended up pointing at the crazy guy. It's a dumb hobby and I only get into it at points in my life when I have nothing else to do, but little things like this are kinda rewarding. edit: wow i forgot that he came back a few hours later and continued his meltdown  
baw fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Aug 22, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 10:12
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Jesus, that was too much like gazing into the abyss, I don't know how you can do it. Just debating my backwards relatives and friends is sometimes more than I can stand, I don't think I'd have the patience to listen to that Marko fuckstick for more than one or two posts; it's about as productive as participating in the comments section of youtube or foxnews.
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Aug 22, 2012 14:08
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I have a few irl friends who occasionally follow my Facebook antics and we call arguing on the groups "going into the trenches." Everyone says a few political things to friends and family on Facebook but the real poo poo is in the conservative groups. The one I go to is good because it isn't super busy and the regulars manage to chase off anyone vaguely left-wing who shows up, so that just leaves me vs them. Also, the group's owner refuses to block anyone from the group, which is something rare in conservative groups. In most other groups I'd have been blocked long ago. It's a perfect little niche for me to post in. It's mostly pointless but I do it sometimes because 1) it keeps me sharp and 2) there are people who lurk. I'll never change Marko's mind, but I may have an impact on Michael or Mary. One of the worst things that ever happened was a discussion about Israel that I got into there. The bile and hatred that it spawned when I pointed out Israeli vs Palestinian deaths made me have to go out for a walk and not post for a few days. I obviously don't take the insults personally but seeing so much hatred from people using their real names who are probably very normal and nice in real life really made me uncomfortable. I'd dig it up on my timeline but it was really disturbing.
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Aug 22, 2012 14:56
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baw posted:Sorry for the double post, but here's an example from a few months ago (I am the sane one.) Context is an anti-occupy wall street page. Any "liberals" there get chased off pretty quickly, which is great for me because I don't like it when other people agree with me during these things: Just wanna say that while you may not have convinced him of anything, eliciting a meltdown of that proportion with so few words is a victory in and of itself. I would have probably shifted gears and tried a few different arguments, or arguments from a more conservative angle. And why do you let him call you monkey and poo poo man? Don't insult him back, but I probably would have tossed back some item about how relying on insults betrays a weakness of position. Once you've presented your evidence, I think it's on you to hold your debate partner to either address it, or explain what's wrong with it fundamentally. If they don't, or if they do, you can only keep going down one route of argumentation so long before you see that it's not bearing fruit. As for arguing in groups, gently caress that poo poo. It's hard enough to have a decent debate with conservative people I consider friends, or actual conservatives out in the street. Let alone total strangers on Facebook groups whose only goal is to be a conservative echo chamber.
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Aug 22, 2012 15:05
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Imperialist Dog posted:I did that with some of my relatives. In Ontario, after an Auditor General report, it was found that 0.1% (yes, a tenth of a percent) were found to be committing welfare fraud. Their response was "The statistics can't be trusted." What I might try then, if they refuse to believe the statistics, is asking them why welfare fraud is unacceptable. That is, even if, say, 50% of welfare recipients were committing fraud, would it be worth it to gut the system if that ends up hurting the 50% that actually need it?
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Aug 22, 2012 16:06
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dorkasaurus_rex posted:}And why do you let him call you monkey and poo poo man? Don't insult him back, but I probably would have tossed back some item about how relying on insults betrays a weakness of position. If you tell them that insults aren't productive and indicate the weakness of their arguments, then they call you a "pussy" or "human being" for being a whiny liberal, and they all dogpile. It's "best" to just completely ignore it. Actually the best thing is to just avoid it all together. I'm on hiatus from that poo poo for now but I may come back to it if I ever get bored enough again. Idran posted:What I might try then, if they refuse to believe the statistics, is asking them why welfare fraud is unacceptable. That is, even if, say, 50% of welfare recipients were committing fraud, would it be worth it to gut the system if that ends up hurting the 50% that actually need it? This is nice too. poo poo they know the figure isn't anywhere near that, but hopefully they wouldn't argue that cutting the entire program is the only logical solution. Maybe they have some ideas about how to reduce welfare fraud instead of eliminating it completely. (They probably won't think of anything that hasn't either been tried or isn't already being done) baw fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Aug 22, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 17:08
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baw posted:It's "best" to just completely ignore it. I agree. Unless this person was someone you knew outside of this thread, I would have said leave the moment he started calling you a monkey. There's nothing to be gained from this.
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Aug 22, 2012 17:38
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Idran posted:What I might try then, if they refuse to believe the statistics, is asking them why welfare fraud is unacceptable. That is, even if, say, 50% of welfare recipients were committing fraud, would it be worth it to gut the system if that ends up hurting the 50% that actually need it? You might also throw in the unrelated fact that when Florida decided to start drug testing welfare recipients, which was done under the assumption that people were getting on it in order to be able to buy drugs essentially, they foud that 97.5% of the people were drug free. I feel like it's safe to assume that a guy who thinks there's a lot of fraud in welfare would also be thinking that they must be "worthless druggies" or something, so that might sway him.
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Aug 22, 2012 17:49
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Helsing posted:I've been told that advanced DSGE models get rid of representative agents altogether, but it isn't clear to me what they do instead to make the whole system hang together coherently. Do you have any comments on how DSGE deals with these issues? I mean lets leave aside for a moment that DSGE doesn't seem to have any real predictive value (or does it?), have they at least gotten to a point where they can somewhat realistically model the economy without representative agents or was that claim misleading? Eh, advanced papers sometimes use two agents but they are still 'representative.' Having said that, I don't have a problem with representative agents in and of themselves - what's wrong with saying 'households,' 'workers,' 'capitalists' etc? The problem is that economists refuse to use classes, partly due to ideological reasons (neoclassicism was invented to get away from marx), and partly because - I think - once they go beyond 2 RAs, too many of the vital assumptions fall apart for them to preserve the core. DSGE generally starts with a single representative agent, then after a crisis it doesn't predict, makes an ad hoc modification so that there are a couple of agents, the dynamic between the two being what causes a crisis in an otherwise stable system. This paper and this paper both fit this characterisation.
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Aug 22, 2012 18:24
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I decided to find the Israel thing in my timeline, screenshot the entire thing and blank out last names. I don't think any background is needed, except I will tell you that the group spends most of its time documenting crimes committed by OWSs and the comment thread is very long. I'll linked the imgur album if anyone is interested: Trigger Warning: Hate You'll want to take a nice walk outside if you read the whole thing. edit: Golbez (thanks man!) pointed out that i forgot to blank a name. fixed baw fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Aug 23, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 18:38
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