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Maybe the OP could use some links about how people actually form beliefs and then act on them? In Europe, North America and the Middle East we are seeing the formation of huge popular movements on both the left and right that seek to draw large chunks of the population into some sort of activism. I've posted a link below to a really excellent book about abortion that examines the actual relationship between political ideology and joining a social movement. I'll illustrate why I think this is relevant by responding to another poster in this thread: Bob Nudd posted:Firstly, I appreciate your measured response. I think this quote highlights my point though. Hypocrisy exists in every movement, it being an integral part of the human condition. Human failings do not in any way affect the truth or validity of an argument. Let's say there's a debate about the existence of God going on: sooner or later, someone on the religion side will bring up the many atrocities committed by the Godless Russian communists. It's a fallacy worthy of a six year old: as if Stalin being nasty means that God must exist. What you are saying is fair as far as it goes, but its built around the fallacious assumption that the main point of that article is to actually convince pro-Lifers or fence sitters. I see these kinds of criticisms in D&D a lot: "X action won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced, so what's the point?" I think what is useful about that article is that it demonstrates how the abortion issue isn't based around some kind of rational calculus. People don't form their beliefs (either pro-life or pro-choice) after doing a rational assessment of the situation, rather they tend to be drawn into the movement based on social connections with people who are already involved. The Making of pro-life activists: how social movement mobilization works by Ziad W. Munson, pp. 5-6 posted:Scholars typically treat the role of beliefs in social movements in one of three different ways. The standard approach is to look at the role of ideas in social movements under the rubric of frame analysis (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford and Snow 2000), in which the focus lies on the ties between the beliefs of the individual and the ideology of the movement. Ideas are seen as possessing mobilizing potential to the extent that they can be made to resonate with the beliefs of potential recruits. The second way is to see ideas as the central offering of a social movement: a social movement's core task is to reflect and affirm the identities and beliefs of its members. This view is common in new social movement theory (Inglehart 1977; Melucci 1989; Larana, Johnston, and Gusfield 1994). Rationalist explanations offer still a third approach, incorporating ideas and beliefs as a component of motivation. Beliefs are the impetus for people to get involved; activism is a way in which people express and act on their ideas (Lichbach 1994, Mason 1984, Muller and Opp 1986). Seeking to win the abortion debate through a calm and rational argument that gradually changes the minds of the other side or that slowly convinces the fence sitting middle to become pro-choice is a huge diversion of energy and resources. I'm not saying that no time should be spent on convincing people, but I am suggesting that your implicit suggestion, i.e. that we need to focus on constructive dialogue and the impartial sharing of ideas, is based on a false notion of how people actually develop beliefs and then act on them. That article is useful precisely because it warns us that prioritizing calm and rational debate at the expense of other tactics may actually be a huge waste of time and energy. Leftwing ideology tends to come loaded with all these childish humanist assumptions about how people act and make decisions. We need to start dispensing some of that naive utopianism so that we can actually get traction on the social and economic issues confronting society. Also: Hieronymous Alloy posted:Not to bog this thread down in issue debates, but are people still talking about gun control? I thought the general consensus on this forum was that gun control was a red-herring issue that simply wasn't worth talking about, given the political cost & the fact that it's like the only civil rights issue the Republicans can still legitimately claim to be on the constitutional side of. Many of us are not American and do not consider gun ownership a "civil right". I also find the idea that gun control is just some kind of "red herring" bizzare in light of what happened in Arizona and Norway this year. In the Arizona case Loughner was able to use a 33 round magazine to spray into the crowd. It was when he finally had to reload that people in the crowd rushed him and took his gun away. Those clips had been illegal under the 1994 assault weapon ban, but when the ban expired they went back on the market, and they probably played a big role in inflating his number of kills. I mean, I don't want to derail the thread or whatever, but the idea that limiting the ability of random citizens to kill dozens or hundreds of people on a whim doesn't seem like a 'red herring'. At the very least you should take this post as an indication that there isn't as much consensus on gun control here as you think.
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Oct 20, 2011 18:04
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evilweasel posted:Nobody undecided is ever actually convinced by the argument "the other side are hypocrites" nor should they be. Its not actually an effective argument and only resonates with people already on the other side. How often do you think rationally convincing someone in an argument actually sways a modern political debate?
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Oct 21, 2011 19:04
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pawsplay posted:I think it was instrumental in the repeal of Prohibition. Do you have any documentation of this? I've always been under the impression that Prohibition ended because it was virtually impossible to enforce it and the attempts to do so were creating huge amounts of business for organized crime, but admittedly I know very little about the nuances of the debate surrounding Prohibition.
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Oct 21, 2011 19:07
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evilweasel posted:I mean its not convincing to anyone except the convinced. Emotionally or logically. It's one of those arguments people think is a lot more effective than it actually is. It's not an effective method for convincing undecided people. Why are you assuming that its primary purpose is to convince the other side? Rationally convincing people is a far smaller part of politics than many people on these forums want to accept. Besides, that document could be tactically useful for pro-choicers because it helps to illustrate the pro-life mindset. Politics is mostly about organization and mobilization. Convincing large numbers of people to join your side by making logical and convincing arguments is, by and large, a misuse of resources. I'm not saying its totally worthless, but it really isn't half as significant as people make it out to be. Waco Panty Raid posted:Hey, the 1994 AWB didn't make possession or even sale of large/normal capacity magazines illegal, it just legally prevented any more being sold to non-law enforcement. All the ones then-currently on the market were unaffected except for a rise in cost for some models. So unless you are arguing that spending a few extra bucks would have prevented him from acquiring the 33 rounder, you're pretty much full of poo poo and this is precisely why gun control probably shouldn't be in the OP at all. No, I'm arguing that the high capacity magazines should be illegal. So should handguns and automatic rifles, frankly. I don't have much knowledge of the AWB so I'm basing that claim about high capacity clips being illegal on a newspaper article I read. If the AWB didn't actually ban those rounds outright then thats a good example of how the legislation wasn't strong enough. I really have no stake in defending the AWB as a specific piece of policy and I think its telling that your counter argument was basically just a nitpick rather than any kind of substantial criticism.
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Oct 22, 2011 06:56
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Waco Panty Raid posted:Oh yes, a "nitpick" to point out that the very law you cited for your Loughner fantasy doesn't even work the way you think it does, and you think that is telling on me? Maybe instead of attacking me for "nitpicking" you should rethink why you hold these opinions if all you are using as basis is some article you read that doesn't even get basic facts right. I don't think handguns or automatic rifles should be available on demand to regular citizens because they make it far too easy to commit the sorts of massacres that occured in Arizona and Norway this year. I'm not sure why you pointing out that the AWB was actually weaker than the article I read said it was doesn't strike me as a reason to change my opinions on gun control - it really just reflects that the AWB was a laughably weak piece of legislation. If you want to argue about why its important that citizens be allowed own dangerous killing machines then I'm happy to hear your arguments, but I really could care less about the details of the AWB. Interlude posted:Whether or not you consider gun ownership a "civil right" by the standards of your home country's law, it is here in America and thus your standard of judgment is inapplicable. We aren't in America, friend, we're on the internet.
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Oct 22, 2011 19:33
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Waco Panty Raid posted:I agree that the AWB was really just a nuissance to legal gun owners, which is why it is laughable that anyone still brings it up (especially in the US) and doubly laughable that someone would actually try to credit it with stopping/lessening a spree killing. I also live in a large urban centre that has a rising problem with gun related homicides, many of which come from America. There's also a lot of documentation about how American guns are flowing into Mexico and being used en masse by the cartels. We can agree to disagree, and I'm happy to stop derailing the thread, but my opinion isn't a knee jerk response. Either way, I think this debate serves to prove that there is no consensus here about "gun control being a red herring", which is the post I was originally disputing.
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Oct 22, 2011 22:13
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cremnob posted:Reducing the welfare state in Germany has lead to economic growth and low unemployment. That article lists all kinds of factors that almost certainly had a much bigger impact than welfare reforms, like an an undervalued Euro, the short work program, the good working relationship between big unions, big business and the government, and the highly competitive performance of Germany's manufacturing sector (which is heavily subsidized, by the by). There's literally nothing specific in that article about how welfare benefits were distributed before and after the reforms or about the specifics of how the reforms altered your eligibility by "paring unemployment benefits to encourage work". Hell, the article's author, Rattner, doesn't even cite the welfare reductions as being any more or less important than the numerous other factors he discusses, and to I think anyone with half a brain can probably see that the short work program is the leading factor in low unemployment. When your making a political economy argument you need to get a bit more sophisticated than "in 2005, German welfare was reformed. In 2011 German unemployment was 7.1%. Therefore welfare reform created created economic growth and employment."
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Oct 24, 2011 18:53
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cremnob posted:I never actually said reducing the welfare state was the sole reason for economic growth and low unemployment, so I find it amusing how you're trying to minimize it. I strongly doubt that very many American conservatives would agree that having the state directly paying employee's wages to keep them employed is a good example of "reducing the welfare state". And given that German welfare benefits are still substantially higher than American benefits, I suspect that most Americans liberals (and I am emphatically neither American nor a liberal) would probably embrace a "reduction" of their welfare state that left their country more closely resembling the German system. quote:I realize it's uncomfortable because liberals in America often look to Germany as the Socialist Utopia, but saying "That article lists all kinds of factors that almost certainly had a much bigger impact than welfare reforms" and then "I think anyone with half a brain can probably see that the short work program is the leading factor in low unemployment" is pretty rich considering that I "need to get a bit more sophisticated". Why exactly do you think that its ridiculous to argue that a program in which the government literally steps in to start paying employees on behalf of their employers is the main reason that unemployment has dropped in Germany? On the face of it that is a much more plausible explanation than the idea than your rather vauge account of how unspecified welfare reforms five years ago suddenly caused unemployment rates to decrease last year. If you actually have specific evidence for the idea that German economic growth was improved by 'welfare reform' as opposed to the short work program, a devalued Euro and an internationally competitive manufacturing sector then please post it. In the article you posted so far only two sentences are devoted to the totally unspecified change in benefits, whereas your own article says that: "According to a 2009 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the program saved approximately 500,000 jobs during the recent economic recession." quote:But yes the short work program was apart of Agenda 2010 which was the government's way to ensure job security in return for holding wages down. That's what the "good working relationship between big unions, big business and the government" was about. But this still doesn't actually substantiate the idea that a change in how welfare compensation rates were determined had a positive impact on German economic growth and employment. Just because one specific part of a policy package had good effects doesn't mean we can simply assume that the entire package was equally effective or justified. quote:e: And according to Goons in the German politics thread, Agenda 2010 was overall a necessary step. Then why don't you repost the substance of their arguments, rather than making an extremely vague appeal to authority? Here's a much better article that gives a clearer picture of how the system works: quote:U.S. Should Try Germany's Unemployment Medicine If you want to argue that increasing labour market flexibility in Germany by reducing unemployment benefits resulted in higher GDP growth which resulted in a reduced unemployment rate in 2011 then I am sure there are interesting points to be made on both sides... But first you'd actually have to make that argument, and back it up with a coherent analysis and some evidence.
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Oct 24, 2011 21:00
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Zeitgueist posted:Every time I talk about wages being stagnant over the past few decades, the counter-argument I get is "technology explains the disassociation of productivity from wage". The technical term for this argument is "skill biased technical change". The single most compelling piece of counter evidence is the fact that wage rates in different OECD countries diverge significantly, which would be hard to explain if the only factor influencing compensation were technology. Another important piece of data here is the fact that the income of college graduates has only improved very marginally since 1970. The vast majority of the gains from productivity aren't being evenly shared by educated workers, they are flowing directly to the top 1%. If he's making a moral argument, i.e. if he's saying "work life is easier than ever so why should anyone earn more money?" Then you can go a couple of routes. Most surveys of workplace satisfaction indicate that Americans overwhelmingly think that work life has become harder and less pleasant over the last few decades. There's also the fact that housing, education and transportation and utilities have all risen substantially in cost. The stagnation of wages has forced households to become dual income, which hurts family life, and it has also pressured people to maintain their living standards through credit arrangements, which in turn has created a massive debt overhang, which is now depressing consumer demand and limiting entrepreneurship in the debt ridden middle class. So there's also a pretty good technocratic argument against this arrangement that has nothing to do with morality. Another argument along these lines is that by raising labour costs you incentivize employers to invest in labour saving machinery which improves the economy's overall productivity. By the way, Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal" attempts to offer an alternative to the Skill Biased Technical Change explanation, primarily focused on the employer's war on unions in the 1980s. I don't always agree with Krugman's analysis, and to be perfectly honest I think he has a typical neoclassical economist's habit of seeing all economic activity as being so fundamentally similar that he probably doesn't give the Skills Biased Technical Change argument quite as much credit as it deserves, but nevertheless he lays out an impressive and relatively robust account of how labour politics, rather than technological change, is what drove the stagnation of working class wages in America.
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Nov 3, 2011 23:42
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Using science to genetically tinker with plants and animals is fine in principle, but the devil is in the details. Given the horrible state of modern intellectual property laws we need to be cautious; the devil is in the details. Monsanto.com posted:In agriculture plants and seeds with enhanced traits or genetics may be patent protected. This is true in the U.S. for plant varieties as well as biotech innovations. Monsanto is one of many seed companies that patent their innovations. Growers who purchase our patented seeds sign a Monsanto Technology/Stewardship Agreement — an agreement that specifically addresses the obligations of both the grower and Monsanto and governs the use of the harvested crop. The agreement specifically states that the grower will not save or sell the seeds from their harvest for further planting, breeding or cultivation. In a the frictionless world of Econ101 rational utility optimizers at Monsato will use patent protections on genetically altered food to achieve higher profits which in turn finance more research and development, which in turn pushes down costs, which are passed on to the rational utility optimizing farmers, allowing the farmers to produce more and creating a virtuous circle of economic activity from which everyone benefits. In the real world this is a great set up for loving over some of the world's most vulnerable populations by transforming them into 21st century share-croppers.
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Nov 8, 2011 19:47
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Strudel Man posted:Well, except that you can always go back to using regular seeds. I'm by no means an expert here but my understanding is that in addition to buying the seeds you need to buy all sorts of fertilizers and equipment in order to get a sufficiently high yield from your crop to justify the switch-over. Of course in Econ101 land this isn't an issue, but in practice its easy to invest in GM seeds based on unrealistic expectations about crop yield only to find yourself locked into a dependent relationship with the person who sold you the seeds. Plus if you use modified seeds one year and were unhappy with your performance then I assume it'd be virtually impossible to switch back to traditional seeds the next year without inadvertently allowing for at least the possibility that some of the GM seeds will get mixed with some of the "regular" seeds.
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Nov 10, 2011 02:17
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Strudel Man posted:The most popular variety of genetically-modified crop, the one that most of the legal wrangling is over, is Monsanto's "Roundup-Ready," which actually exists for a number of different plants. All it does is render the plant highly resistant to Roundup-brand herbicide, so that you can douse your fields in weed-killer without killing your crop. I confess that the further this discussion proceeds the less relevant the fact that the seeds in question are GM seems to matter. I'm sorta swamped with school work this week so I'm not in a position to dig up more specific information on how these arrangements might contribute to a dependent relationship on the part of the families. Either way I'm read to concede that this is an issue that should be separated from the question of how desirable GM food is in general. Touchdown Boy posted:So has anyone got any sugeestions to get through to this brick wall: You may find this paper, "Illness and Injury as Contributors to Bankruptcy" helpful. If you don't have access to the pdf then you can access an hour long video about a talk given by Elizabeth Warren, "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class", where she outlines in very precise terms what the financial situation facing regular families. Starting at 20.00 she starts discussing where families are now spending the majority of their incomes. Watch these videos and you should have ample statistics from a well respected academic source demonstrating how housing, medical costs and cars (dual income households usually require multiple cars) are the primary expenses facing most families. Note that Warren also identifies that taxes on families are higher these days so there's at least something here that will help make the overall message more palatable to your friend.
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Nov 10, 2011 22:27
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If you're friend is inclined to assume people like Warren are biased then you could always try showing him private corporate research that verifies that these trends really exist. A couple years ago Citigroup wrote this charming little memoCitigroup posted:The latest Survey of Consumer Finance data was released Friday 24th of February. It shows that the rich in the US continue to be in great shape. We thought this was good time to bang the drum on plutonomy. Back in October, we coined the term ‘Plutonomy’ (The Global Investigator, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, October 14 2005). Our thesis is that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand in many economies around the world (the US, UK, Canada and Australia). These economies have seen the rich take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years, to the extent that the rich now dominate income, wealth and spending in these countries. Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries. Also, new media dissemination technologies like internet downloading, cable and satellite TV, have disproportionately increased the audiences, and hence gains to “superstars” – think golf, soccer, and baseball players, music/TV and movie icons, fashion models, designers, celebrity chefs etc. These “content” providers, the tech whizzes who own the pipes and distribution, the lawyers and bankers who intermediate globalization and productivity, the CEOs who lead the charge in converting globalization and technology to increase the profit share of the economy at the expense of labor, all contribute to plutonomy. Indeed, David Gordon and Ian Dew Becker of the NBER demonstrate that the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US – the plutonomists in our parlance – have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US. ( See “Where did the Productivity Growth Go? Inflation Dynamics and the Distribution of Income”, NBER Working Paper 11842, December 2005). By contrast, in other countries such as Japan, France and the Netherlands (read much of continental Europe), egalitarianism has kept the rich to a similar share of income and wealth The advertising industry has made similar conclusions: quote:The American middle class, concludes a new study from the ad industry’s top trade journal, has essentially become irrelevant. In a deeply unequal America, if you don’t make $200,000, you don’t matter. Corporate America is well aware that the age of mass affluence is on course to end in the next decade or two and they are planning accordingly. As the Citigroup memo illustrates, the wealthy themselves are well aware that pro-government policies are instrumental to maintaining their high incomes. Meanwhile Corporate America doesn't seem to share your friends idea that regular families are well positioned to go on a spending binge.
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Nov 10, 2011 22:48
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evilweasel posted:They're terribly ineffective holier-than-thou sermonizing that makes it readily apparent your goal isn't to convince someone. It validates the implied criticism that you're trying to attack. This is just basic human interaction: its clear your goal is "winning" the discussion and being an abrasive twit. You are clearly unreasonable not because of whatever position you were trying to argue, but because you're "that guy" that's an unpleasant sermonizing jerk to talk to. So I guess this is kind of a "do as I say not as I do" situation.
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Nov 21, 2011 05:54
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This is SA and mods can do as they please, but in the context of that argument you sorta shot yourself in the foot there.
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Nov 22, 2011 16:59
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Zeitgueist posted:I think the way to attack Austrians is to attack the rational actor model. By the by, I've just created a new thread that I'm hoping will spur further discussion about economics from a more pragmatic perspective and perhaps be useful to those of us who feel the need to debate with the Austrians. Sorry about the forums necromancy.
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Jan 8, 2012 21:21
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Directorman posted:MY GIRLFRIEND is taking a class this semester taught by a tremendous supply-side douchebag. Honestly I'm not sure that you should waste very much time debating that guy. In that interview he tries to blame the passage of the minimum wage law many decades ago for high unemployment amongst black teenagers today (in other words he completely ignores the fact we're in the midst of the worst recession in more than fifty years). He also completely ignores both offshoring and skills-biased technical change, both of which are commonly cited by economists (especially sbtc) as important factors in the decline of wages. Unsurprisingly he also doesn't mention the decline of unions. This is something you'll see economists do quite often when they speak with the media. Unless this guy is a complete and total hack then I guarantee you that when he is having a conversation with another PhD economist he definitely talks as though he's aware of how technological change and globalization have had a far greater impact on wages than minimum wage laws. He's being intentionally condescending and misleading in that interview. The one point he makes which most economists wouldn't have trouble agreeing with is the idea that raising labour costs encourages businesses to invest in new labour saving machinery. Even here, however, he's being extremely misleading to the point of dishonesty. Any competent economist will acknowledge that a marginal change in labour costs (say, raising minimum wages by 20%) is only one of literally thousands of factors weighing on a business person's mind (and another typically much more important is how much demand there is for products, something which a minimum wage can help increase by raising purchasing power for workers). He wants to pretend that a marginal change in labour costs could somehow be responsible for a system wide change in the economy. As for the broader issue of how to argue with a guy like that, the book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely is a fairly short and accessible read with numerous examples of how cultural and sociological factors shape our decisions far more extensively than neoclassical economics allows for. It has some neat experiments showing how the amount we're willing to pay for something is extremely easy to manipulate and how common economic models of decision making turn out to be inadequate. I'd also have to recommend Erik Reinert's How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, which is arguably one of the best books written on economics in the last decade. Reinert does an extensive and convincing take down of neoclassical economics with a focus on what he calls the "equality assumption". People very often go after economists for assuming people are too rational, but I think that in many ways Reinert's criticism is both deeper and more pervasive. He directly attacks economics for fairly to distinguish between qualitative, as opposed to merely quantitative, questions about economic activity. Like I said though, if the arguments that guy presented in the interview are any indication, he isn't going to debate honestly. He's trying to use his academic position to sell a particular vision of the world. I'm sure deep down that he thinks its for the greater good and that he's only telling a simplified version of the truth (as opposed to a lie) but the effect is the same. ShadowCatboy posted:Okay I'm back to debating with a libertarian about Austrian economics. Unfortunately when it comes to econ I've never taken a single class and am an ignorant stupidhead. Most of what I've learned is cribbed from D&D, and I'm trying to make my way through the two Austrian Economics threads in my downtime. Here's Peter Schiff, a prominent Austrian economist, predicting the collapse of the housing bubble during a debate with Reagan adviser Art Laffer. Pretty impressive, right? He even recognizes that this won't just be a minor slowdown, but rather a major economic disruption. One gets the impression from Schiff's comments that he is overemphasing the role that insurance rates played in popping the bubble. He seems to be assuming that rational actors in the market are going to start charging higher interest rates, and that higher interest rates will then lead to a recession. This is actually a much sunnier version of the story than what actually occurred. In actuality the market chugged along until a bunch of big financial institutions suddenly couldn't roll over their debt anymore, which triggered what was in all but name a run on the banks (except instead of formally being banks, these were institutions like AIG that had taken on banking functions but which weren't regulated as such). So Schiff was correct in predicting a housing bubble but somewhat off on the particulars. He has also repeatedly been predicted that the Obama administrations policies and the Fed's Quantitative Easing would lead to Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation. So far that prediction has turned out to be blatantly false. Also note someone else who predicted the bubble several years earlier than Schiff and who is absolutely not an Austrian, Dean Baker. Here's a paper pointing out the housing bubble that was released in August 2002. This is, so far as I know, long before Schiff or any other prominent Austrian raised any warnings. Here's an article by Baker in the August 16 2004 edition of the Nation, again predicting the bubble. Here Baker writes: quote:The crash of the housing market will not be pretty. It is virtually certain to lead to a second dip to the recession. Even worse, millions of families will see the bulk of their savings disappear as homes in some of the bubble areas lose 30 percent, or more, of their value. Foreclosures, which are already at near record highs, will almost certainly soar to new peaks. This has happened before in regional markets that had severe housing bubbles, most notably in Colorado and Texas after the collapse of oil prices in the early eighties. However, this time the bubble markets are more the rule than the exception, infecting most of real estate markets on both coasts, as well as many local markets in the center of the country. Baker is very big on Keynesian economics, and yet his predictions are made earlier and are much more specific and accurate than the predictions made by Schiff and other Austrians that I'm aware of. Furthermore, Baker has repeatedly suggested that rather than being admired for recognizing the bubble, he thinks we ought to condemn all the economists who missed it. Baker notes that the bubble was easy to predict if one simply compared rental prices to the prices people were paying for homes, and that the dire effects of the bubble were easy to predict using arithmetic if one employed fairly standard economic assumptions about how much demand would decrease once houses were revalued. What this suggests to me is that whether or not you predicted the bubble had very little to do with how smart you are. Instead the economists who predicted the bubble tend to have been those who for one reason or another are on the outside or the periphery of the mainstream intellectual establishment. Economists of both the left and right who crave respectability or who have financial incentives to downplay the bubble are going to do so, whereas economists who are invested into the Halls of Power have strong incentives not to identify such a bubble, or to downplay its significance. In other words, Austrians were safely irrelevant enough that, like many socialists, they were comfortable predicting the housing collapse. You know who else predicted this recession? Lyndon LaRouche. So merely predicting the collapse shouldn't be seen as too impressive. quote:2) What exactly IS stagflation and how does the stagflation of the 60s and 70s disprove Keynesianism? Or does it? First of all its important to note that Keynesianism as a doctrine is distinct from the writings of Lord Keynes the economist. Keynes changed his mind on various issues, was sometimes unclear in his meaning, and from time to time contradicted himself in his various writings and public statements. His views also changed over time. He also died very shortly after WWII which limited his ability to directly influence postwar economics. However his ideas were seized upon with great excitment, especially thanks to authors like Hicks and Samuelson who mathematized Keynes insights and made them more model driven and closer in appearance to the old microeconomic models employed by the marginalist school in the 1870s-1930s. Keynesianism as an academic doctrine and government ideology developed numerous ideas we still use today. The very concept of measuring GDP, for instance, comes from measurements Keynes made of the British economy's capacity during the War. Another important idea that emerged from Keynesianism-as-academic-doctrine was the idea of the Philips Curve. The Philips Curve suggested that there was an inverse link between inflation and unemployment. When inflation increased it triggered an automatic decrease in unemployment as people found it easier to get jobs. Conversely, if fewer people were able to find work then the demand for goods would decrease and thus inflation would go down. This is a simplified picture of reality that was immensely attractive to government policy makers because it seemed to offer a very simple and workable way of managing a capitalist economy. When you're worried about inflation you raise interest rates, when you're worried about unemployment you reduce interest rates again. I'm obviously presenting an extremely simplified version of events here but that's the essence of it, and this system worked pretty well for a while. Then the 1970s happened. Just what lead to stagflation depends on who you ask. Some people blame price controls introduced by Nixon, others blame the sudden and sharp rise in oil prices thanks to the OPEC embargo (this is the explanation I think makes the most sense), some think it was technological and social factors. Either way something about the old Keynsian model seemed to break down, because suddenly society was experiencing rising unemployment and rising interest rates. The traditional government solutions no longer worked. Whether or not Keynesian policies contributed to the economic factors that lead to stagflation (and there may be some basis for these arguments) its undeniable that Keynesianism as an intellectual toolkit was caught flat footed. Since then Keynesianism have made substantial alterations to the theory, though not always for the better. I have to run out now so I hope that helps answer your question somewhat. If you have more specific questions I might be able to direct you to helpful secondary or primary sources. You should also google "Philips Curve" and do your own reading on the subject. quote:3) Buddy is claiming that Keynesians all think that debt and inflation are ultimately good for the economy. This sounds like a gross oversimplification to me... what exactly is going on in his head and what are the real facts? Keynesians advocate for government deficit financed counter-cyclical spending. What that means is that when the economy enters a downturn Keynesians advocate taking on public debt through increased expenditures and/or lower tax rates so that they can enact government measures that will raise aggregate demand. Then when the economy is booming again they advocate (at least in theory) cutting back government spending and raising taxes to prevent the economy from becoming "overheated". Many Keynesians also have a favourable view of moderate inflation under the right circumstances because it encourages people to spend money and because under Keynesian theory inflation is associated with economic growth. So basically your friend is drastically oversimplifying things, but its completely true that under some circumstances Keynesian economists think that both public debt and inflation can be worthwhile policies to pursue. Trying to say that they think these things are "ultimately good for the economy" is actually a pretty telling example of the difference in how the two groups think. Austrians seem to be of the view that we should have a single economic policy for all situations and that any deviation from these policies is both tyrannical and assured to result in disaster. Keynesians, by contrast, tend to think that different economic conditions or circumstances call for different policy responses. The idea that a Keynesian would ever say that inflation is "ultimately good for the economy" is silly, because the whole point of Keynsianism is that we can and should readjust our economic policies to fit present circumstances rather than only thinking about what the "ultimate" direction of society it is. This is exactly what lead to Keynes' famous quote that while it may be true, as Austrians in his day asserted, that in the long run the recession would solve itself, that this didn't matter much because "in the long run we are all dead."
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Jan 18, 2012 00:23
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ShadowCatboy posted:Hoooly poo poo thanks so much, Helsing! "Mainstream" economic theories, assuming you mean the stuff that has dominated the neoclassical tradition since the 1970s, performed pretty disastrously during the build up to the crisis. A lot of prominent economists claimed we'd essentially tamed the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism and a lot of people who knew better failed to spot what was coming. Even a Liberal hero like Paul Krugman, who is one of the better neoclassicals out there today, basically failed to anticipate the crisis. He made some warnings right before it hit but if you read his "Conscience of a Liberal", which he wrote in 2006, there's no indication whatsoever that he thinks a crash is coming. The Austrians were correct in calling the bubble, but as as been noted, they thought it would be caused by higher interest rates (basically the market belatedly pricing the assets correctly and suddenly doing its job again) instead of being brought on by a de facto run on banks (an outcome that makes the market look far less rational). Since the crisis, however, Austrians have started making all sorts of bad predictions about how interest rates in America are going to skyrocket any day now and inflation is going to go berserk. On the other hand, plenty of neoclassical economists like Eugene Fama have made similarly fallacious claims about government spending crowding out investment (even though private firms are sitting on their money rather than spending it!). Austrian economics also has some weird ideas about the role of savings vs. demand in driving the economy. I haven't really discussed these issues in depth for over a year now so I'd want to re-familiarize myself with the debate before weighing in on that topic. Anyway, I hope this is all helpful. I'll try to see if I can think of anything more specific.
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Jan 22, 2012 06:13
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Oh, and here's a fascinating Malcom Gladwell article about IQ:quote:What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race. Its a short article and by the time you hit the end you'll have plenty of devastating counter arguments under your belt.
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Jan 22, 2012 06:17
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Any privatized first world emergency service will still have enough regulations and government mandates attached to it for him to pull the no-true-Friedman claim. At least neoliberals tend to say that the reason they support neoliberalism is because its demonstrably the best way to raise everyone's standard of living. Libertarians, by contrast, don't justify Libertarianism by saying everyone will be better off. Sure, some of them believe that, but I've never met a Libertarian who tried to justify his political position based on the idea it would actually maximize universal welfare. Instead they claim it will maximize everyone's freedom. Thats the goal, in and of itself. More freedom, with freedom defined as lack of government (but not private) coercion. You can argue with him about the disastrous effects of specific Libertarian policies all day long. It doesn't matter because his commitment is a pseuo-religious one. It would be like arguing with a Christian Dominionist that theocracy is bad for GDP. What do they care? I think the best tactic is to try and corner him on the question of whether people should die in the streets. Force him to admit that without a social safety net there will be cases where people will die if society doesn't step in. Under these circumstances would he really be comfortable with people dying rather than having a small mandatory pool of social insurance devoted to helping these people. If you can get him to accept, in principle, that there should be a small but mandatory fund for smoothing over life's rough patches, then you have a wedge through his arguments. Once he's accepted a compromise of personal liberty like that you might be able to point out other borderline cases. If, on the other hand - and this is quite likely - he says he's fine with people dying in the street, or if he's so dishonest he simply cannot accept that this would ever ever happen in Libertopia, then its unlikely any argument will get through to him. The best I can say about such people is that I doubt many of them have the courage of their convictions - if they were actually confronted with the kind of society they claim to want, I think a large number of Libertarians, especially younger ones, would probably recoil in horror. I mean even just in the space of the last ten years you can see how the Great Recession has cut very deeply into the 1990s bumper crop of Libertarians. This is an ideology that tends to flourish at the height of our boom economy and which mostly hibernates during the busts.
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Jan 28, 2012 20:13
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It makes sense to think of Libertarianism as being more of an attitude than a doctrine. Its an extreme reaction against government authority more than its a reasoned set of positions on how to best secure the good life or increase the general welfare. That makes it much harder to argue the merits of the system because you either value their rather arbitrary idea of liberty or you don't.
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Jan 28, 2012 20:46
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The T stands for "Temporary". You get a lifetime maximum of 60 months of benefits and according to wikipedia some states have further limited that number. It also mandates that you have to prove your looking for jobs and take the first job available to you.
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Feb 29, 2012 23:33
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Doug posted:Devil's advocate here, but from what I've seen of being on unemployment in Indiana, it doesn't take much to "prove" that you're looking for jobs. A friend of mine came down with his boyfriend and he was on unemployment. While he was there he logged into the unemployment website and said he had applied for jobs at the places we had gone sightseeing that day. I'm not so sure the proof of looking and accepting the first job are standards that can really be enforced in any meaningful way. Once your sixty months are up you lose eligibility for life. ed: i.e. you are never again eligible, they don't execute you or anything
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Mar 1, 2012 04:03
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If you're talking about changing taxes by a couple percentage points then in most cases the impact will probably be minimal. Certain right wingers have promulgated this notion that corporations are super sensitive to minute changes in the tax code and will unleash their productive energies as soon as marginal rates drop a couple percentage points. We wouldn't want to simply take that argument and flip it: "you're right, the tax code is the solution, we just have to raise taxes!" Whether you're raising or lowering chances its unlikely that a swing of a few points will have a huge impact on corporate decision making given all the other issues that entrepreneurs have to be calculating. This isn't to disagree with the idea that raising corporate taxes could spur investment under the right circumstances (though that is the kind of too perfect solution in economics we should always be sceptical about), I'm just noting that you should keep the entire exercise in perspective.
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May 25, 2012 15:37
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He's halfway right, he's just failing to realize that the relevant conflict in his life is almost unquestionable going to be the ceaseless war between economic classes, not some idiotic imagined clash of the civilizations. War, conflict, and enemies - foreign or domestic - are a prop for the powerful men in society to keep their power and expand it. That is why its so deeply ironic to hear people carrying water for these imperialist scumbags. The policies that they think are helping their "side" win the clash of civilizations are actually the same set of policies that are being used to lower your standard of living. He cites the example of Rome in Gaul. What he fails to realize is that the Roman conquest of Gaul lead directly to the bloody civil wars and the end of the Republic. Foreign conquest didn't make Rome strong, it tore apart its valued political traditions, ushered in decades of bloodshed, and allowed a tyrant to seize power. Basically your friend is an idiot. He benefits from the success or failure of his side in about the same way a dedicated sports fan benefits from their team winning big. Beyond the nebulous sense of fulfilment he gets, he's essentially trading his support away for free to people who would hold him in contempt if they could be bothered to even contemplate his existence. So yeah, your friend is a sucker. I guess you could argue against him, but why? He'll just move on to some equally dumb idea on a different part of the political spectrum. His criteria for greatness are meaningless. In the long run we're all dead, that is what matters. From any meaningful perspective, none of these wars and battles and other great monuments are any more meaningful than a five year old stubbing his toe. Your friends sad attempts to create some semblance of meaning out of the pointless shifting of lines on maps is pathetic. He doesn't live in Athens. He isn't at risk of having his land looted and his wife raped. Anyone talking about that clash of civilizations poo poo in the 21st century is an idiot, full-stop (and by the way if you talked seriously that way in the 20th century you weren't an idiot, per se, but you were a Nazi or one of their intellectual fellow travellers).
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Jul 9, 2012 02:41
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Yeah capitalism tends to mean an industrial system of production where most of the means of production are privately controlled, it has never been seriously understood to be a pure laissez-faire system. Its also worth pointing out that capitalism isn't some sort of platonic ideal that floats above civilization. it isn't some eternal map written into the fabric of the universe that each country can choose to follow or shun. Rather capitalism is a specific set of historical institutions that emerged at a distinct point in history, in a distinct geographical region. Following this emergence in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe capitalism gradually replaced earlier feudal methods of production. This is a historically identifiable moment in time when, gradually, merchants began to accumulate sufficient resources to take various craft workers who had once been independent or part of separate guilds, and to concentrate those workers in a single location. Since the fifteenth century capitalism and industrialism have, of course, undergone substantial changes, and its true that gradually the class that has benefited the most from the development of capitalism has articulated a laissez-faire attitude that dictates that the 'state' should not interfere with the private marketplace. However this ideology should not be mistaken for capitalism which, just to restate the point, is a historically existent system rather than a set of abstract ideals. The next thing to note is that capitalism has always been a regional rather than a national phenomenon. From its very inception capitalism was an international system in which different geographical regions end up with dramatically different economic functions. Thus in Europe in the fifteenth century you already have an economic "core" developing centred on southern England, northern France and Belgium. This core comes to specialize in the developing of textiles - the advanced manufacturing sector of the day - thanks to government policies and state intervention. In Britain, for instance, Henry VII establishes tarrifs on the export of raw wool that causes French textile manufacturers to relocate into England. At the same time, however, Eastern Europe comes to specialize in the production of raw commodities such as grain. In the West, where textile manufacturing takes off, the emerging capitalist class requires the protection and subsidization of the state to develop. Meanwhile in the East the landlord class who own the vast estates where raw produce can be profitably grown and exported have the opposite interests: unlike manufactures, raw commodity producers don't require much state assistance. As a result they lobby for weak states that won't threaten them with high taxes. They also want to keep a large class of landless labourers at their beck and call. As a result the rise of textile manufacturing in western Europe coincides with the re-enserfment of Eastern Europe and Russia. This relationship - a set of wealthy high-wage core countries that specialize in whatever the advanced manufacturing technology of the era is who trade with a low wage collection of periphery countries that are kept locked into poorer activities like agriculture and mining - has always accompanied capitalism as a historical system. From the Dutch Republic to the British Empire to the American hegemony you'll invariably find that the state has played an extensive interventionist role, assisting the owners of capital in their struggles both domestically and internationally. Attributing American decline to over regulated is therefore spurious. Wealthy capitalist countries have never had laissez-faire economies. That treatment is invariably reserved for colonies - whether its internal colonies like Ireland or external ones like America's holdings in South America. Of course even if you don't want to look at capitalism from a historical perspective, the argument that America is over regulated fails on much simpler grounds as well. The American economy has unquestionably become much less regulated in the last 40 years. Even a serious liberal economist will acknowledge that. On top of this, for the entirety of the Bush administration virtually every government regulator became a literal apologist for their respective industry. Claiming that over regulation is at the heart of America's problems is idiotic because so far there has be little to no correlation between the level of regulation and the speed of economic growth... actually, if anything, there has been a correlation going the opposite direction to the one that Libertarians would like to believe in.
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Jul 20, 2012 01:09
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All societies are characterized by continual class struggle of one kind or another so I find the statement "a class struggle once started must be carried out to one end or another" somewhat questionable. Perhaps you mean that once class warfare crosses a certain threshold of intensity then it will inevitably be resolved by one class or another seizing power (or the ruin of that society)? I suppose all class struggle has to be resolved in the same sense that in the long run we're all dead, but nothing in your admirably detailed account actually substantiates your thesis. You've written an excellent descriptive narrative of the events but your conclusion doesn't actually follow from what you've written. You just present a lot of historical data to which an arbitrary sounding assertion has been artificially attached. You also seem to be over emphasizing the idea that the Nazis were a dictatorship of the bourgeois. While it is undeniable that the bourgeois made Hitler's rise to power possible it doesn't follow that he was their agent. Hitler deftly outmanoeuvred the actual establishment parties represented by Hindenburg and von Papen and pushed Germany in a direction that did not always reflect bourgeois desires or interests. Your account seems overly mechanistic in this regard and leaves out the degree to which Hitler's particular ideas and experiences shaped the regime that he lead. Why couldn't the class struggle in Weimar have continued on and off again for another two or three decades? The course of the 20th century in countries like America, France, Britain and Canada have demonstrated numerous successes and setbacks for both labour and capital, even if capital has always maintained the upper hand. Stating that one side or the other must inevitably "win" seems overly reductive, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "win" and you're alluding to a more temporary sort of success rather than permanent domination.
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Jul 25, 2012 02:53
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icantfindaname posted:
This is such a pathetic way to retreat out of a discussion in which you've generally shown yourself to be clueless. As to the wider argument here: you can pick any neoclassical textbook that you want and it will have a similar. Here is liberal Paul Krugman's textbook presenting the principles of economics. They include: quote:■ “How much?” is a decision at the margin. Usually the question is not “whether,” but And here's Krugman advancing a totally unscientific and anthropologically ridiculous story about how humanity's inherent tendency to truck and barter leads to divisions of labour within society: quote:Principle of Interaction #1: There Are Gains from Trade By way of support he then goes on to quote Adam Smith. This is presented as fact, but its in fact a totally ridiculous hypothetical that doesn't fit well with the disciplines that actually study the origin of things like the division of labour. Nor is this some entirely innocent little rhetorical flourish. This is an important introduction to how neoclassicism views both the individual and social institutions (which are just the contractual relations that rational individuals create to accomplish this more efficiently, as Krugman is implicitly saying). Open any neoclassical textbook and flip to the chapter on "Money" and you'll get a similarly ridiculous and ideological fairy tale about how people switched to using money because it was more convenient than carnying around cows and sheep to barter with. Neoclassical marginalist economics were developed in the 1870s and 1880s at a time when capitalists were explicitly concerned about the theoretical challenge of Marxism to classical economics. Marginalism was explicitly understood at the time to be an argumentative counter thrust to Marxian arguments about labour and value. Follow the history of the "science" since then and you'll find that at every juncture the interests of powerful businessmen have shaped the direct and research agenda of the discipline. Paul Samuelson's mathematical proof for Ricardo's free trade theorems appeared at the time of the Berlin blockade. Rational choice, systems analysis and game theory are all derived from research done at the RAND corporation, and early on during their inception were again explicitly understood to be ideological counter points to Marx which would undermine economic theories with more collectivist implications. Neoclassical economics is very obviously a system of thought that represents certain implicit (and sometimes explicit) value judgements, and anyone familiar with its intellectual history has to acknowledge that it has proceeded based along whatever paths are most convenient for big business. You can argue that with enough 'paradigm maintenance' (i.e. introducing externalities, market failures, etc.) you model real world phenomena. The overwhleming question becomes why you would waste your time rebuilding the walls of a house with thoroughly rotten foundations? There's nothing about neoclassical economics that really justifies saving it as a theory. No doubt many of the same thinkers who informed neoclassicism might be reconsulted when building an alternative, but in terms of actually preserving the core of what currently constitutes neoclassical econ? What exactly is there that is worth saving?
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Aug 18, 2012 01:10
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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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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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esquilax posted:That's why the CTU is right, but the mayor also has valid arguments. I know its hard for some people to grasp, but there are often two sides to an issue, particularly when it's negotiations. Or maybe Rahm could make an actual "tough decision" and raise taxes. Just a thought. But hey lets refer to the fact that school teachers are getting paid poorly elsewhere as a justification to pay them even worse.
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Sep 10, 2012 21:57
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Its true that you'll find people who are so deluded that they think there is some kind of magical property to gold that makes it the ideal unit of value. Some libertarians will claim that the gold standard occurs throughout history and that this proves that the free market considers gold the optimum currency. The more intelligent advocates of the gold standard will tend to recognize that the real "benefit" of the standard is that it strongly limits government intervention in the economy. First of all it largely removes the government's ability to practice monetary policy. Keynesian economists right now are advocating for higher inflation as a way to get the economy moving. A gold standard would, presumably, make it impossible for the government to actively stimulate inflation. Since inflation eats away at the value of debt (i.e. maybe you lend out five dollars of purchasing power today, and you only get back $4.50 of purchasing power thanks to inflation) this can tend to make creditors unhappy. Another way that the gold standard limits government intervention is by putting heavy constraints on spending. The government can't simply print money to purchase bonds. The idea is to create a straight jacket on government. This is currently accomplished pretty effectively by international bond markets however, which is why most serious conservative intellectuals and journals (i.e. The Economist or the Wall Street Journal) are not calling for a return to the Gold Standard.
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Sep 18, 2012 22:21
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How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor by Erik Reinert would be my first suggestions. Bad Samaritans by Hajoon Chang is also pretty good, though its a bit less comprehensive. Ultimately they make excellent companions to each other. Both of these cover topics beyond early modern capitalist development, but they also both devote substantial portions of their text to the subject. Reinert's book is somewhat more theoretical and Chang's is more historical. This paper, The Role of the State in Economic Growth, by Erik Reinert, is available online and gives a good overview of early modern economic development. This paper by Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, is not about the development of early modern capitalism but it does look at how countries that industrialized later had to adapt to these circumstances. Its a well known and widely cited paper and worth reading if you have the time and are interesting in the history of industrialization and capitalism. Since I'm recommending papers, The Road to a World Made Safe for Corporations: The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics by Robert Van Horn and Philip Mirowski is a great read on the intellectual development of the Chicago school.
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Sep 18, 2012 22:54
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the2ndgenesis posted:
This is a good suggestion. Hobsbawm's "Age of Revolution: 1789 - 1848" is a great overview. Another recommendation that I cannot believe I somehow forgot to mention in my last post would be Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Barrington Moore. It's easily one of the best single volume works on the subject of economic development. Just the chapters on Britain, France and America alone are extremely insightful and interesting.
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Sep 19, 2012 17:52
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A city with completely open boarders surrounded by a state with laxer laws isn't going to be a particularly good test case for gun control. Likewise a society that already has an entrenched gun culture and black market in illegal firearms probably posses additional problems that wouldn't exist if we were designing all of our laws from scratch. To actually work effectively I imagine that gun control would need to be widely implemented and there's need to be some sort of check point dividing the controlled region from areas with laxer enforcement regimes. If Canada outlawed all firearms tomorrow but also abolished boarder inspections then I can't imagine the result would be much of an impact on (illegal) gun ownership because there would still be a large supply and existing criminals have already internalized a culture of gun ownership. Policies need to be scaled properly, so to adequately test gun control you need to implement it on the right scale, and policies also need to be sensitive to history. To illustrate: I think its highly possible that a very aggressive and militant police campaign many decades ago might have halted the spread of crack cocaine. At this point, however, crack has become so endemic that militant police tactics are not only ineffective, they're outright destructive. This is one of many examples where a policy that might have been sensible once becomes overtaken by subsequent events. Effective gun control won't be some kind of timeless one-size-fits-all policy. If it were going to work it'd have to be implemented based on a close analysis of the existing situation. Simply passing, say, a blanket ban on handgun ownership (as my current city is currently thinking of doing) is mostly just a way for politicians to demonstrate that they are doing something, but that doesn't mean that some other methods of gun control might not be effective.
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Oct 18, 2012 19:38
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I'm not really sure what point you thought I was making, or what point you were trying to make, but thanks for confirming that pretty much any post starting with "Welp" is going to be terrible.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:14
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Regulating firearms doesn't require a literal police state. Firearms are already regulated and heavy weaponry tends not to be made available to the public. Ammunition and clip size can and are also regulated. These regimes are imperfect, and improving them would be hard, but the dilemma you're presenting is totally false.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:29
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computer parts posted:If this: No, it doesn't. The point about "checkpoints" was to illustrate why an American city isn't the appropriate administrative scale for fire arms control, it wasn't a suggestion that placing domestic checkpoints around the country is the only (or the best) way to regulate firearms. I mean you do realize that current firearm laws substantially regulate the industry, right? Modern states are capable of outlawing high powered rifles, anti-tank weapons, hand guns etc. without resorting to a police state. Unless that is you consider the boarder crossing (i.e. a more realistic example of a check point than what you're thinking) between America and Mexico is tantamount to a police state.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:47
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Given what Americans will tolerate in the war on drugs or in schools or at airports, I'm not sure anybody can authoritatively predict what future generations of Americans will or will not tolerate. I doubt Orwell ever imagined that a 1984 style surveillance state would be adopted voluntarily through Facebook and google. You're right to point out the substantial political obstacles to gun control, but it isn't impossible. It already exists in America. What we're discussing is actually modifying an existing regime, not imposing an entirely new one. One obvious example of prudent gun control that could be implemented by focusing on the supply side rather than the demand side would be regulating clip size. That would be achievable within the pre-existing regulatory framework (though it'd require new legislation) and could be more focused on manufacturers than end users. Many of these policy questions are fundamentally technocratic. How do we thinker a bit here, alter a bit there, fudge the margins here, etc. to get slightly better results than what we have now? Politics is the art of the possible, and that includes regulatory regimes. So I'm not coming in here and saying "Follow steps X, Y and Z and gun control will be easy to implement in America." What I am saying is that gun control is a complex and multifaced problem. Its neither solvable by a blanket ban on firearms in a single city, nor is the larger issue reducible to "its guns or a police state, you have to pick one."
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Oct 18, 2012 21:06
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:47 |
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This talk given at the London School of Economics called "War in the Borderlands" is a really interesting discussion of how the use of drone warfare is on the cutting edge of a new style of conflict. Honestly the technology behind drones is far from the most revolutionary part about them. In principle they are just a really efficient evolution on missiles or human guided aircraft. What makes drones so fascinating and controversial is that they are being developed in a geopolitical context where traditional warfare is being superseded by low intensity asymmetrical conflicts. Drones are also being deployed domestically in the war on drugs, so technologies that are currently being tested overseas will eventually find their way into civilian law enforcement. This is analogous to the way that security equipment and new techniques get live tested by Israel and then eventually adopted by domestic US security and police. When people discuss drones it really isn't just the technology they are discussing. Drones are part of a wider change in how our society fights conflicts.
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Oct 20, 2012 18:13
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