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" feel that "economics" as currently practiced has "you're not allowed to take the rich people's money" baked in as a very deep but generally unspoken assumptio

" feel that "economics" as currently practiced has "you're not allowed to take the rich people's money" baked in as a very deep but generally unspoken assumption. " It's more simple than that. The unspoken assumption is: "There's a fixed amount of money". Once you realise there is no more a fixed amount of money as there are a fixed amount of awardable points in basketball, then how many points "the rich" happen to have becomes an irrelevant concern. Then you can get onto the real issue - what are the power dynamics and are real resources being used effectively or hoarded.

HPsquared 5y ago
There is no fixed amount of money or goods, but there is a fixed supply of status (per person, at least) - and status is what really matters to most people.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Cardinality is at least potentially non-rivalrous. Ordinality is inherently zero-sum. That is, any "game" metric in which the quantity aquired by an individual, without concern for what others have is the basis for evaluation, so long as one person has a sufficient quantity, what any other party has doesn't matter. But in a game in which each contestant is ranked against others, then no matter how many participants there are, there is only one first place. And in fact the more participants are, the harsher the competition for that place. Economics claims that competition is based on profit, utility, and wealth, which are cardinalities. Evidence suggests, and Adam Smith notes, that it is instead based on power, an ordinality, and a zero-sum game.
bschne 5y ago
While you could create infinite amounts of money, that's not very meaningful if it serves as an abstract means of exchange for goods which are ultimately somewhat constrained/scarce. Also, I am pretty sure it'd be a challenge to find a single economist who claimed the amount of money was fixed. What they do think (many of them, and probably somewhat reasonably, anyway) is that you can't create infinite amounts of it without things going awry — see above.
- neilwilson 5y ago
  That's the point though. It doesn't serve as an abstract means of exchange of goods and service. Money is exchanged and retained in its own right. There isn't a one-to-one relationship between money and stuff. It's more of an inductive relationship. Something power engineers understand of course. They have to generate and deal with reactive power every day, and ensure there is sufficient generated so that electrical items can operate at full output. Too many economists believe the apparent power of the economy and the real power of the economy must be the same.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    The term you're looking for is a store of value. USD absolutely does serve as a medium of exchange (have you ever bought something..?). It also serves as a store of value - Dollars themselves are valuable _because_ they can be used to purchase goods in the future. Economists understand this perfectly well. The relationship between dollars and things depends on how many dollars and how many things are produced. Doubling the money supply while keeping the productive output of an economy the same will only half the value of dollars. You can increase the nominal dollars infinitely, but that doesn't change the productive capabilities of an economy.
    - neilwilson 5y ago
      It won't halve the value of the dollars that are stored, because they are not being spent. Only spent dollars cause price changes, and then only if the capacity to expand is exhausted. If I have a billion dollars in a cupboard prices won't change at all. More importantly if I have a billion dollars in a bank account prices won't change at all, because money in a bank account isn't available for anybody else to use. Economists struggle with the difference between a stock and a flow, which is why their accounting is terrible. Particularly their bank accounting.
avgcorrection 5y ago
The power dynamics? Well the rich have more power than the poor. And the rich rely on people being poor enough to have to sell their labor for money in order to continue being rich. So having a lot of money in absolute terms is supported by being rich in relative terms. “Basketball points are an irrelevant concern… now let’s move on to the real topic at hand: what basketball teams are the best?”
syki 5y ago
There is a fixed amount of awardable points in basketball though. The fixed amount is large and is determined by physics. Effectively though one could use as an upper bound 10% more points than the greatest number of points ever scored in a game. With regard to economics how much the rich have in relation to everyone else becomes a concern due to the nature of human psychology and social dynamics with regard to greed, jealousy, sense of fairness, etc. The social dynamics indicate that too much imbalance in wealth leads to societal instability. In the realm of economic theory it might not matter that there is great inequality but in the realm of politics and societal mechanics it is definitely something to pay attention to.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  > The social dynamics indicate that too much imbalance in wealth leads to societal instability. In the realm of economic theory it might not matter that there is great inequality but in the realm of politics and societal mechanics it is definitely something to pay attention to. You seem to have missed that what ties your first and second sentences together is that, above a certain level, wealth, by itself, brings political power. So, effectively, we end up with a system that's closer to $1 = 1 vote rather than 1 human = 1 vote. Understandably, the humans who only get 1 vote, while others get 1 billion votes, tend to get upset about this.
  - syki 5y ago
    I didn’t miss this; I didn’t state the connection with power. The real imbalance of concern is actually not “wealth” or “money” but power. However, money is a useful proxy for power in the U.S. (and most other countries too)
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Scoring opportunities may be bounded. Points are not. So long as there's an ability to make an additional score, there is no limit to the capacity to award points. No valid score will lack a point award for lack of points. The same capacity exists in an economy with a fiat currency or infinitely extensible government credit (equivalent statements FWIW). There is no limit on the government being able to award additional monetary units (points). What's upwardly bounded is the ability to produce real wealth in any given period. The analogy breaks down in the sense that points aren't transactable; there is no basketball economy in which teams exchange points for economic goods and services and engage in entrepreneurial activities to develop new point-scoring abilities within a game. And in basketball, if a score is made, the point is awarded automatically, rather than being exchanged in a market. But so far as the concept of points and monetary units not being constrained by any physical quantity, the similarity holds. I agree largely with your second paragraph, and add to that: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." -- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
hammock 5y ago
This comment is too funny, because the reality is that there is NO fixed amount of money, in fact the principal way the rich get richer is by printing more money and receiving it via the cantillon effect.
nradov 5y ago
“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know.” “If you would allow me to continue..." Ford nodded dejectedly. “Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.” -Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685739-if-the-management-consultant-said-tersely-we-could-for-a https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685739-if-the-management-co...
VictorPath 5y ago
> Then you can get onto the real issue - what are the power dynamics and are real resources being used effectively or hoarded. If you get into the real issue of power dynamics, then you realize that resources are not what is important. What is important is the social relationship between two classes - the class of heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from the class of workers who create all wealth. The very deep but unspoken assumption in the hegemony spread by the heirs is this revolves around resources. From the perspective of the worker who may not even contemplate it, is that this revolves around relationships. Even the name of the study shows this. Originally, people studied political economy. As the study itself became political on the side of the current ruling class, the word political was dropped, and the scientific sounding -ics suffix was attached - economics.
- efitz 5y ago
  The workers do not create wealth (at all). We would not have iPhones if we just had FoxConn workers. We have iPhones because we had capitalists who conceived that we could have such things, gathered people who could invent the things, gave them direction, and then organized the complex factories and supply chains so that workers would have a place to come to do their part. Likewise “heirs” is a misnomer. Most millionaires in the US did not inherit their wealth, they accumulated it. Marxism is religious bunk.
  - lucian1900 5y ago
    Accumulation of significant wealth happens through exploitation of the labour of others: paying them less than the value their labour produces. It's commonly called profit. Marxism happens to be correct as a science, even if its conclusions are against your own class interests. Possibly the most obvious example is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
    - scatters 5y ago
      And how do you determine the value of someone's labour? Marxism can't answer that, while conventional economics can. > Possibly the most obvious example is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. So your evidence of the validity of Marxism is... a 50-50 shot? Even in the replication crisis, science at least demands no more than 5% chance for hypotheses to come true by random luck.
ZoomerCretin 5y ago
You're buying into that lie we've been taught about economics: That creating the conditions for massive inequality is okay because everyone will be better off. https://www.epi.org/publication/secular-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/secular-stagnation/ Inequality stifles GDP growth.

HPsquared 5y ago

There is no fixed amount of money or goods, but there is a fixed supply of status (per person, at least) - and status is what really matters to most people.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Cardinality is at least potentially non-rivalrous. Ordinality is inherently zero-sum. That is, any "game" metric in which the quantity aquired by an individual, without concern for what others have is the basis for evaluation, so long as one person has a sufficient quantity, what any other party has doesn't matter. But in a game in which each contestant is ranked against others, then no matter how many participants there are, there is only one first place. And in fact the more participants are, the harsher the competition for that place. Economics claims that competition is based on profit, utility, and wealth, which are cardinalities. Evidence suggests, and Adam Smith notes, that it is instead based on power, an ordinality, and a zero-sum game.

bschne 5y ago

While you could create infinite amounts of money, that's not very meaningful if it serves as an abstract means of exchange for goods which are ultimately somewhat constrained/scarce. Also, I am pretty sure it'd be a challenge to find a single economist who claimed the amount of money was fixed. What they do think (many of them, and probably somewhat reasonably, anyway) is that you can't create infinite amounts of it without things going awry — see above.

neilwilson 5y ago
That's the point though. It doesn't serve as an abstract means of exchange of goods and service. Money is exchanged and retained in its own right. There isn't a one-to-one relationship between money and stuff. It's more of an inductive relationship. Something power engineers understand of course. They have to generate and deal with reactive power every day, and ensure there is sufficient generated so that electrical items can operate at full output. Too many economists believe the apparent power of the economy and the real power of the economy must be the same.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  The term you're looking for is a store of value. USD absolutely does serve as a medium of exchange (have you ever bought something..?). It also serves as a store of value - Dollars themselves are valuable _because_ they can be used to purchase goods in the future. Economists understand this perfectly well. The relationship between dollars and things depends on how many dollars and how many things are produced. Doubling the money supply while keeping the productive output of an economy the same will only half the value of dollars. You can increase the nominal dollars infinitely, but that doesn't change the productive capabilities of an economy.
  - neilwilson 5y ago
    It won't halve the value of the dollars that are stored, because they are not being spent. Only spent dollars cause price changes, and then only if the capacity to expand is exhausted. If I have a billion dollars in a cupboard prices won't change at all. More importantly if I have a billion dollars in a bank account prices won't change at all, because money in a bank account isn't available for anybody else to use. Economists struggle with the difference between a stock and a flow, which is why their accounting is terrible. Particularly their bank accounting.

avgcorrection 5y ago

The power dynamics? Well the rich have more power than the poor. And the rich rely on people being poor enough to have to sell their labor for money in order to continue being rich. So having a lot of money in absolute terms is supported by being rich in relative terms. “Basketball points are an irrelevant concern… now let’s move on to the real topic at hand: what basketball teams are the best?”

syki 5y ago

There is a fixed amount of awardable points in basketball though. The fixed amount is large and is determined by physics. Effectively though one could use as an upper bound 10% more points than the greatest number of points ever scored in a game. With regard to economics how much the rich have in relation to everyone else becomes a concern due to the nature of human psychology and social dynamics with regard to greed, jealousy, sense of fairness, etc. The social dynamics indicate that too much imbalance in wealth leads to societal instability. In the realm of economic theory it might not matter that there is great inequality but in the realm of politics and societal mechanics it is definitely something to pay attention to.

actually_a_dog 5y ago
> The social dynamics indicate that too much imbalance in wealth leads to societal instability. In the realm of economic theory it might not matter that there is great inequality but in the realm of politics and societal mechanics it is definitely something to pay attention to. You seem to have missed that what ties your first and second sentences together is that, above a certain level, wealth, by itself, brings political power. So, effectively, we end up with a system that's closer to $1 = 1 vote rather than 1 human = 1 vote. Understandably, the humans who only get 1 vote, while others get 1 billion votes, tend to get upset about this.
- syki 5y ago
  I didn’t miss this; I didn’t state the connection with power. The real imbalance of concern is actually not “wealth” or “money” but power. However, money is a useful proxy for power in the U.S. (and most other countries too)
dredmorbius 5y ago
Scoring opportunities may be bounded. Points are not. So long as there's an ability to make an additional score, there is no limit to the capacity to award points. No valid score will lack a point award for lack of points. The same capacity exists in an economy with a fiat currency or infinitely extensible government credit (equivalent statements FWIW). There is no limit on the government being able to award additional monetary units (points). What's upwardly bounded is the ability to produce real wealth in any given period. The analogy breaks down in the sense that points aren't transactable; there is no basketball economy in which teams exchange points for economic goods and services and engage in entrepreneurial activities to develop new point-scoring abilities within a game. And in basketball, if a score is made, the point is awarded automatically, rather than being exchanged in a market. But so far as the concept of points and monetary units not being constrained by any physical quantity, the similarity holds. I agree largely with your second paragraph, and add to that: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." -- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

hammock 5y ago

This comment is too funny, because the reality is that there is NO fixed amount of money, in fact the principal way the rich get richer is by printing more money and receiving it via the cantillon effect.

nradov 5y ago

“How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know.” “If you would allow me to continue..." Ford nodded dejectedly. “Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.” -Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685739-if-the-management-consultant-said-tersely-we-could-for-a https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/685739-if-the-management-co...

VictorPath 5y ago

> Then you can get onto the real issue - what are the power dynamics and are real resources being used effectively or hoarded. If you get into the real issue of power dynamics, then you realize that resources are not what is important. What is important is the social relationship between two classes - the class of heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from the class of workers who create all wealth. The very deep but unspoken assumption in the hegemony spread by the heirs is this revolves around resources. From the perspective of the worker who may not even contemplate it, is that this revolves around relationships. Even the name of the study shows this. Originally, people studied political economy. As the study itself became political on the side of the current ruling class, the word political was dropped, and the scientific sounding -ics suffix was attached - economics.

efitz 5y ago
The workers do not create wealth (at all). We would not have iPhones if we just had FoxConn workers. We have iPhones because we had capitalists who conceived that we could have such things, gathered people who could invent the things, gave them direction, and then organized the complex factories and supply chains so that workers would have a place to come to do their part. Likewise “heirs” is a misnomer. Most millionaires in the US did not inherit their wealth, they accumulated it. Marxism is religious bunk.
- lucian1900 5y ago
  Accumulation of significant wealth happens through exploitation of the labour of others: paying them less than the value their labour produces. It's commonly called profit. Marxism happens to be correct as a science, even if its conclusions are against your own class interests. Possibly the most obvious example is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
  - scatters 5y ago
    And how do you determine the value of someone's labour? Marxism can't answer that, while conventional economics can. > Possibly the most obvious example is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. So your evidence of the validity of Marxism is... a 50-50 shot? Even in the replication crisis, science at least demands no more than 5% chance for hypotheses to come true by random luck.

ZoomerCretin 5y ago

You're buying into that lie we've been taught about economics: That creating the conditions for massive inequality is okay because everyone will be better off. https://www.epi.org/publication/secular-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/secular-stagnation/ Inequality stifles GDP growth.