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Also look into Capital: A Critique of Political Economy https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vol/dp/1453716548 https://www.amazon.com/Capi

Also look into Capital: A Critique of Political Economy https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vol/dp/1453716548 https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vo...

notahacker 4y ago
Kapital is extremely interesting from the point of view of understanding Marx's very singular view of the world, but doesn't tell you much about how modern economists think about modern economies even from a contrasting perspective since neither existed at the time of writing...
- fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
  “Modern economists” aren’t really a thing, at least in the sense that a consensus or collective understanding of economics is shared by a group denominated as such. There is vigorous disagreement in the field regarding just about everything. The title of the underlying article may more appropriately be, “Popular Economics for Non-Academics.”
  - notahacker 4y ago
    There is vigorous disagreement in the field regarding just about everything, but some of the few things they agree on (and the key fault lines for what they disagree on) didn't exist at the time Kapital was written.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      What are the few things they agree on?
      - mamonster 4y ago
        Subjectivism vs Labour theory of value is a pretty easy one.
      - unmole 4y ago
        Krugman and Manikw are ideological adversaries. They both wrote Macroeconomics textbooks which fully agree with each other.
        UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
        krugman and mankiw are adversaries in the sense one prefers the current world neoliberal order designed for the benefit of the us to be led by democrats and the other prefers it to be led by republicans to the average citizen of the world they are indistinguishable
      - notahacker 4y ago
        Most of Econ 101, as a sibling comment notes, from basic approaches (definitions, deductive reasoning from models using algebra, testing of models with data) to detail (marginalism, "new consensus" macro modelling). Macroeconomics and econometrics are two major subfields which literally didn't exist in Marx's day: economists may disagree significantly on conclusions and somewhat less significantly on certain assumptions models make, but they're focusing on the same variables (interest rates matter and fiscal policy somewhat matters, inflation is a thing which can be reduced, boosting employment and staving of recessions is more difficult) and doing similar maths.
- VictorPath 4y ago
  For modern topics, read the Monthly Review ( https://monthlyreview.org https://monthlyreview.org ). This article on the 2008 financial crisis has lots of interesting references to government data. Then you can see if you reach the same conclusions as the authors. https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-stagnation https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...
unmole 4y ago
Hot take: Capital is not about economics. Reading it will in no way help you understand how economists think.
- Bakary 4y ago
  Could you please expand on this?
  - fennecfoxen 4y ago
    Not original poster, but Economics is about making decisions when your decisions have trade-offs because you have limited resources. Everything has a price, but the prices aren't always measured in a nice money-based price tag for your convenience, they're ultimately measured by the next-best alternatives. Decisions and policies don't just have consequences, they have second-order effects and third-order effects and you need to chase those down too, because excluding anything makes you understand the costs wrong (e.g. add highway lanes to relieve congestion -> now there is more traffic, because of "induced demand", not sure that was a good idea -> but why was there even induced demand? where are those trips coming from and what was the cost of the previous configuration? is this a housing-policy thing now??). You also learn to worry a lot about how decisions are actually made by self-interested decision-makers, rather than by abstractions-seeking-the-greater-good, and you examine what the decision-makers' incentives are.... Whereas a work like Das Kapital tells you very little about how to think this way. It's not intended to; it's more about the relative influence of various actors within a political-economic system, while raising tough questions about the meaning of private property.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      >Economics is about making decisions when your decisions have trade-offs because you have limited resources. But land isn't limited in the sense that there isn't enough of it for everyone, there is a fixed quantity of land on this planet but more than enough for everyone. Somehow some people got this absurd theory in their head that once there is abundance there is no need for economic allocation mechanisms. This completely ignores that even if there is enough land for everyone, a single person may have more land fenced off than he needs for himself, meaning that someone else ends up with less land than he needs for himself. Despite abundance of land you still need to allocate it properly and you still need economics to do that but economists shrug and do nothing. Artificial scarcity is the new normal. Since all producable goods tend toward market saturation you will have this problem in more and more sectors in the economy as your country gets wealthier. In fact the problem isn't poverty, the wealthier we gets the worse things get. Why is that the case? Why does the economy fail to allow abundance to happen? Why did economists put on a brain cage that tells them that scarcity is absolute and that if something isn't scarce it should be made scarce? Reality is quite boring. Assume that there is a floor on capital yields meaning the income share in labor can never reach 100%. Since economic activity gets siphoned off into the pockets of the owners of capital aka the rich get richer and they don't spend their wealth back into the economy, the rest of the economy must shrink. A game of musical chairs starts. There must be a loser and people will do absolutely everything to not end up as the loser. To prevent the non rich economy from shrinking and shriveling into nothing, we must keep up this farce of endless economic growth so that living standards don't get worse.
nilaykumar 4y ago
Note: Capital is available to read for free here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ The beginning of Capital is quite dense (establishing the basic definitions of a study often is, and Marx's dialectical approach takes some getting used to if, like me, you never could understand Hegel) so I would recommend reading it along with David Harvey's lectures available on Youtube. However, the book does open up from there and becomes very much more concrete: working day lengths in the factory, increasing automation of industry, transition from feudalism by expropriation of land from farmers, ... It is of course important to understand the works that Marx was critiquing or building on. Smith's Wealth of Nations, for example, is available for free from Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-nations https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-n...). This translation is very readable so I encourage you to take a look.
PheonixPharts 4y ago
As a fairly big (philosophical) Marxist, it's important to recognize that Marx is much like the Bayesian Statistics of economics. For me personally, it was Marx that first made sense when I read it, very much like Bayesian statistics first made sense to me where I found Frequentist stats very confusing. That said it shares the same problem: If you learn Bayesian statistics the Summer before Stats 101 in college, it will likely hurt your performance in that class. Likewise, while Marx makes a lot of sense, understanding Marx will mean you have an even more difficult time communicating with mainstream/orthodox economists. However from a Marxist perspective this is no accident. One of, if not the most, important ideas coming out of Marx is the idea of ideology. The idea is that even our most basic thinking and views about the world are formed around the idea of maintaining existing social relations in favor of the ruling class. An example of this (my own) is the way that Christianity in Medieval Europe quickly evolved into a belief system where the natural order involves an all mighty ruler that must not be questioned. The idea that the natural order of things involves a strict monarchistic hierarchy was fundamental to the Medieval European world view. Clearly this is a beneficial world view if you are a ruling monarch. You still see the impact of this today in the way we tell stories about princesses who, even when their identity is either unknown or hidden, are innately superior to other around them, or in other narratives where justice is satisfied only when the "true king" sits on the throne. Orthodox economics, from a Marxist perspective, is referred to as bourgeois economics. That is, at a fundamental intellectual level, orthodox economics exists to reaffirm a capitalist worldview, in a similar way to medieval theology evolves to support monarchistic rule. An example of this is the way that the role of labor in the creation of value is fairly hidden, the economic inputs and outputs are all framed in a way to distract from the very idea that the worker creates value. Another good example of the difference is the "business cycle" vs Marx's crisis theory. In orthodox economics the business cycle is a borderline supernatural process that we just accept as "how things go". For Marx periodic market crises are because Capitialism is filled with unresolvable internal contradictions (one example is the incentive for Capitialist to maximize the exploitation of the worker while simultaneously depending on that worker for the creation of surplus value). Marx spends a good chunk of Capital vol III developing this idea. For Marx the big concern is that deep contradictions in the foundations in the logic of Capitialism will ultimately lead to it's collapse. So while I do recommend nearly everyone read Marx, it will likely hurt, not help, you understand mainstream economic theories.

Also look into Capital: A Critique of Political Economy https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vol/dp/1453716548 https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vo...

notahacker 4y ago

Kapital is extremely interesting from the point of view of understanding Marx's very singular view of the world, but doesn't tell you much about how modern economists think about modern economies even from a contrasting perspective since neither existed at the time of writing...

fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
“Modern economists” aren’t really a thing, at least in the sense that a consensus or collective understanding of economics is shared by a group denominated as such. There is vigorous disagreement in the field regarding just about everything. The title of the underlying article may more appropriately be, “Popular Economics for Non-Academics.”
- notahacker 4y ago
  There is vigorous disagreement in the field regarding just about everything, but some of the few things they agree on (and the key fault lines for what they disagree on) didn't exist at the time Kapital was written.
  - boppo1 4y ago
    What are the few things they agree on?
    - mamonster 4y ago
      Subjectivism vs Labour theory of value is a pretty easy one.
    - unmole 4y ago
      Krugman and Manikw are ideological adversaries. They both wrote Macroeconomics textbooks which fully agree with each other.
      - UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
        krugman and mankiw are adversaries in the sense one prefers the current world neoliberal order designed for the benefit of the us to be led by democrats and the other prefers it to be led by republicans to the average citizen of the world they are indistinguishable
    - notahacker 4y ago
      Most of Econ 101, as a sibling comment notes, from basic approaches (definitions, deductive reasoning from models using algebra, testing of models with data) to detail (marginalism, "new consensus" macro modelling). Macroeconomics and econometrics are two major subfields which literally didn't exist in Marx's day: economists may disagree significantly on conclusions and somewhat less significantly on certain assumptions models make, but they're focusing on the same variables (interest rates matter and fiscal policy somewhat matters, inflation is a thing which can be reduced, boosting employment and staving of recessions is more difficult) and doing similar maths.
VictorPath 4y ago
For modern topics, read the Monthly Review ( https://monthlyreview.org https://monthlyreview.org ). This article on the 2008 financial crisis has lots of interesting references to government data. Then you can see if you reach the same conclusions as the authors. https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-stagnation https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...

unmole 4y ago

Hot take: Capital is not about economics. Reading it will in no way help you understand how economists think.

Bakary 4y ago
Could you please expand on this?
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  Not original poster, but Economics is about making decisions when your decisions have trade-offs because you have limited resources. Everything has a price, but the prices aren't always measured in a nice money-based price tag for your convenience, they're ultimately measured by the next-best alternatives. Decisions and policies don't just have consequences, they have second-order effects and third-order effects and you need to chase those down too, because excluding anything makes you understand the costs wrong (e.g. add highway lanes to relieve congestion -> now there is more traffic, because of "induced demand", not sure that was a good idea -> but why was there even induced demand? where are those trips coming from and what was the cost of the previous configuration? is this a housing-policy thing now??). You also learn to worry a lot about how decisions are actually made by self-interested decision-makers, rather than by abstractions-seeking-the-greater-good, and you examine what the decision-makers' incentives are.... Whereas a work like Das Kapital tells you very little about how to think this way. It's not intended to; it's more about the relative influence of various actors within a political-economic system, while raising tough questions about the meaning of private property.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    >Economics is about making decisions when your decisions have trade-offs because you have limited resources. But land isn't limited in the sense that there isn't enough of it for everyone, there is a fixed quantity of land on this planet but more than enough for everyone. Somehow some people got this absurd theory in their head that once there is abundance there is no need for economic allocation mechanisms. This completely ignores that even if there is enough land for everyone, a single person may have more land fenced off than he needs for himself, meaning that someone else ends up with less land than he needs for himself. Despite abundance of land you still need to allocate it properly and you still need economics to do that but economists shrug and do nothing. Artificial scarcity is the new normal. Since all producable goods tend toward market saturation you will have this problem in more and more sectors in the economy as your country gets wealthier. In fact the problem isn't poverty, the wealthier we gets the worse things get. Why is that the case? Why does the economy fail to allow abundance to happen? Why did economists put on a brain cage that tells them that scarcity is absolute and that if something isn't scarce it should be made scarce? Reality is quite boring. Assume that there is a floor on capital yields meaning the income share in labor can never reach 100%. Since economic activity gets siphoned off into the pockets of the owners of capital aka the rich get richer and they don't spend their wealth back into the economy, the rest of the economy must shrink. A game of musical chairs starts. There must be a loser and people will do absolutely everything to not end up as the loser. To prevent the non rich economy from shrinking and shriveling into nothing, we must keep up this farce of endless economic growth so that living standards don't get worse.

nilaykumar 4y ago

Note: Capital is available to read for free here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ The beginning of Capital is quite dense (establishing the basic definitions of a study often is, and Marx's dialectical approach takes some getting used to if, like me, you never could understand Hegel) so I would recommend reading it along with David Harvey's lectures available on Youtube. However, the book does open up from there and becomes very much more concrete: working day lengths in the factory, increasing automation of industry, transition from feudalism by expropriation of land from farmers, ... It is of course important to understand the works that Marx was critiquing or building on. Smith's Wealth of Nations, for example, is available for free from Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-nations https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-n...). This translation is very readable so I encourage you to take a look.

PheonixPharts 4y ago

As a fairly big (philosophical) Marxist, it's important to recognize that Marx is much like the Bayesian Statistics of economics. For me personally, it was Marx that first made sense when I read it, very much like Bayesian statistics first made sense to me where I found Frequentist stats very confusing. That said it shares the same problem: If you learn Bayesian statistics the Summer before Stats 101 in college, it will likely hurt your performance in that class. Likewise, while Marx makes a lot of sense, understanding Marx will mean you have an even more difficult time communicating with mainstream/orthodox economists. However from a Marxist perspective this is no accident. One of, if not the most, important ideas coming out of Marx is the idea of ideology. The idea is that even our most basic thinking and views about the world are formed around the idea of maintaining existing social relations in favor of the ruling class. An example of this (my own) is the way that Christianity in Medieval Europe quickly evolved into a belief system where the natural order involves an all mighty ruler that must not be questioned. The idea that the natural order of things involves a strict monarchistic hierarchy was fundamental to the Medieval European world view. Clearly this is a beneficial world view if you are a ruling monarch. You still see the impact of this today in the way we tell stories about princesses who, even when their identity is either unknown or hidden, are innately superior to other around them, or in other narratives where justice is satisfied only when the "true king" sits on the throne. Orthodox economics, from a Marxist perspective, is referred to as bourgeois economics. That is, at a fundamental intellectual level, orthodox economics exists to reaffirm a capitalist worldview, in a similar way to medieval theology evolves to support monarchistic rule. An example of this is the way that the role of labor in the creation of value is fairly hidden, the economic inputs and outputs are all framed in a way to distract from the very idea that the worker creates value. Another good example of the difference is the "business cycle" vs Marx's crisis theory. In orthodox economics the business cycle is a borderline supernatural process that we just accept as "how things go". For Marx periodic market crises are because Capitialism is filled with unresolvable internal contradictions (one example is the incentive for Capitialist to maximize the exploitation of the worker while simultaneously depending on that worker for the creation of surplus value). Marx spends a good chunk of Capital vol III developing this idea. For Marx the big concern is that deep contradictions in the foundations in the logic of Capitialism will ultimately lead to it's collapse. So while I do recommend nearly everyone read Marx, it will likely hurt, not help, you understand mainstream economic theories.