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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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I love it when they tell me economic theory is wrong as a way to win an argument. You see only communist economic theory from the one book they read, written by some maoist farmer that was summarized in a lemmygrad post they read while taking a shit, is correct.
I strongly believe we need to employ more socialist and communist ideas into Western society/economics. That's not kosher with them though. We have be lead by a dictator who starves millions of people to death or it's not real communism enough.
Bet they don't even know what a Kibbutz is when they heard of them being attacked.
It's not about political ideology it's about being right and always be afraid of an angry person who "knows they're right".
I can't fake being afraid of them but I'll happily feel sorry for them.
I prefer my debates about economic theory to exclude Maoism, yeah. I did enjoy Unlearning what macroeconomics 101 taught me, though.
In the west basic economics focuses far, far to much on creating the most "value" without enough focus on why or who benefits. Macro 101 pushes a ton of comparative advantage free trade shit without any thought for exploitation and impacts. That crap is what got us Walmart and Amazon filling landfills with cheap plastic poor quality products who made a handful of people billions.
MacroEcon 101 is about how markets work pretty much exclusively and understand how these thing happen and the influences that go with them. MacroEcon 102 is about how government intervention is a good thing due to things such as negative externalities or the Free Rider problem. MacroEcon 103 is dependent on where you are and can consist of saying hey the individuals will inform themselves so we should give all power to a "benevolent" dictator.
There's no reason to bring any more of Marx into neoclassical economics than has already been taken. The stuff we left out was the invalid stuff
I disagree. The principals of Marxism employed aren't done well enough and most changes I would like to see in society would be more Marxist than neoclassical.
The "heavily progressive income tax" that used to be a staple ont he American economy has been eroded to a shell of what it was for example. That needs to be restored to its former glory. I wish that's what they meant when they say make America great again.... Workers having more equity/stake in companies could solve a lot of our current end stage capitalism bullshit. Marx believed in abolishing inheritance, which I think would help a ton with the rampant nepotism bullshit we suffer from. At least some type of cap and regulating all the ways the wealthy circumvent inheritance taxes. Oddly enough Smith, the "invisible hand" free market god of the right wing also believed in abolishing inheritance.
This is tangential to your point, but every time I see an implication that Smith had anything in common with a modern conservative I feel the need to point out that not only did he not believe in inheritance as you said; he also believed in social welfare programs like public education, and anything else that the market would predictably not be able to handle. In his time healthcare was only starting to get to the point of realizing that cowpox was a useful innoculation for chickenpox, but I have no doubt he would believe in socialized healthcare in a modern context.
Smiths free market was never supposed to be this free:
Wealth of Nations, V:I.b, p.709-710
Wealth of Nations, V:I.b, p.715
Wealth of Nations, I:XI.e, p.210
Theory of Moral Sentiments, I:III, p.61
Wealth of Nations, V:II.h, p.888
Wealth of Nations, V:II.e, p.842
As with everything from an intellictual, the Republicans took Smith and held it up to a fun house mirror when selecting the parts they liked. Reagan was the real inflection point for them on economic theory. They called Raegons economic platform "voodoo economics" in the primaries. It never made any sense, never had any grounding in reality. Yet now is their accepted platform.
Smith is supposedly their north star and they contradict his theory continually and ignore all the parts they don't like. In college reading Smith I was shocked at how much I agreed with him. There are so many things in his theories that would make free market capitalism more practical that we don't employ.
Marx was wrong about a bunch if stuff most importantly is he was 100% incorrect about the labor theory of value. Why should economics incorporate ideas that are without question not correct?
Every economist had ideas that don't work in practice. It's not a reason to discount all of their work and theory.
Im not saying discount all their theory though. Neoclassical economics took the stuff that works from guys like Marx and Smith and dropped the stuff that was incorrect.
Suggesting we should bring more of Marx back in would mean adopting more of the stuff we know is invalid or incorrect in Marx's case.
I guess that interpretation is valid if you think neoclassical economics is successful and working.
If's a method of explaining the way resources are allocated. It isn't supposed to "work" and anyone suggesting it should has no idea what economics is.
Ah, yes I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'll go burn my econ degree in effigy.