5 ms·

Marxism is kind of like the chiropracty of economics. Just because Marx can explain everything and point out contradictions doesn't mean they are true. QoL is

Marxism is kind of like the chiropracty of economics. Just because Marx can explain everything and point out contradictions doesn't mean they are true. QoL is still in an upward climb. Average lifetime working hours is still marching down. We've peaked out on literacy and child mortality and preventable diseases with available technology. You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production - but I can almost assure you it will not be from people following Marx's flawed analysis. It will be from people who understand either classical or keynesian economics, or whatever new understanding come from it, and apply them towards actual functional policies.

mschuster91 3y ago
[flagged]
- legitster 3y ago
  Are you arguing that Germany is not a capitalist country? I was collectively speaking about the capitalist world. > How can y'all be so damn certain you're the best in the world when five minutes worth of Googling is enough to completely destroy all your arguments?! Uhhhh, maybe read the comments a bit more clearly before jumping in. Do you always just jump in on random threads to say Americans are dumb?
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Are you arguing that Germany is not a capitalist country? I was collectively speaking about the capitalist world. Even then, assuming we're not just talking about the US, it's a stretch to say "we" peaked out. We have a lot to do before anyone can make that claim, the problem is that in most countries politicians have been bought off by rich elites to lower taxes and reduce public spending (which has been done especially to education as that's the easiest), so there is no tax base left to fund what needs to be done. > Uhhhh, maybe read the comments a bit more clearly before jumping in. Do you always just jump in on random threads to say Americans are dumb? Fair point, removed the rant.
  - insanejudge 3y ago
    Germany like many other Europeans would absolutely be considered a socialist country by most US standards (holding no distinction between socialism and social democracy). This is a big part of the confusion, intentional as far as I can tell, generated by people trying to eliminate taxed, regulations, and worker protections in that they can flexibly do things like point out how Sweden is wonderful and has no minimum wage, so we should do that too, when the reality is inverted with successful universal collective bargaining guaranteeing everyone much better wages -- something that would probably get the national guard rolled out if US workers pushed for presently.
- fileyfood500 3y ago
  Specifically for the US and Germany literacy results, I see a difference between these and past methods of measuring literacy. In the first link, the most basic sample question required the user to interpret a simple table. The second and third level questions required users to navigate websites, including a task of finding the correct link to navigate to the correct page of a site. I think this establishes a great point that we have an ever changing society with growing demands, where we now need to consider much more than just reading words. Internet literacy is a huge barrier, and it’s great to see it getting measured and accounted for as countries continue to adapt education to the changing times.
CrackerNews 3y ago
Yet there are drug and mental health crises, and there are families whose quality of life hasn't improved since the last recessions. I don't believe that progress is so neatly linear, and the Hegelian philosophy behind Marx attempts to capture that, IMO. Labor theory of value does have issues, but I don't think it can be so neatly dismissed either as alternatives appear to have vague criteria for what contributes to value.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Labor theory of value is incredibly easy to dismiss. Value is about what people will pay for things, not how much work they took to make. Bam there we go.
  - zztop44 3y ago
    This kind of shallow dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx remains one of the most relevant and influential theoreticians amongst people who do spend a lot of time thinking about economics. For a start, Marx understood well that the price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync. If you’re confused about the difference between those things, think about Dogecoin as a particularly extreme example.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      This kind of shallow dismissal of my shallow dismissal of a frankly idiotic idea that doesn't deserve a deeper dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn't spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx was popular not for his economic thoughts but for his sociological/political ones. Someone being popular doesn't make them right, but Marx was right about many things. Just not about labor theory of value. But here's a deeper dismissal for you anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/fht0ti/marxs_aggregate_labour_theory_of_value/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/fht0ti/marxs_... it even conveniently brings up your doge argument
ohgodplsno 3y ago
>You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production What an absolute load of crap. Economics as a whole is barely a science, at best a toy, and that multiple pathways exist is not an indictment of any theory. Marx's observations hold true all these years after, alongside the progress we've had. You clowns would take a system as complex as, oh, simply the whole of human activity and try to reduce it to a few simple laws. Sorry, despite what you learned online, "supply and demand" is not a fundamental law of the universe. This is not physics. There are no simple answers. There aren't even proper answers. Every school of economics holds on barely by a thread. "Assuming a rational actor" is the "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" of liberal economics.
- mikrl 3y ago
  Economics itself is a reduction of human behaviour to resource allocation. The underlying field of study of human action in general is called praxeology and was only seriously investigated by: - Austrian school economists (1900s-present) - Polish school philosophers (briefly in the interwar period, died out after WW2 when Lwów became Lviv) I think wresting praxeology free of economics would be an interesting movement in philosophy.
  - thiagoharry 3y ago
    I do not agree with the upper comment that economy is not a science. It is just a human science, where you could have different schools of thought based on different philosophies. But praxeology is indeed an example of something that is not science, as it rejects the scientific method and the empirism.
    - mikrl 3y ago
      If economics is a science, how do you run an experiment? Let’s say you want to see how phenomenon X scales as a function of population, and create a model X(p) How do you set up N identical scenarios and, ceteris paribus, vary the population? You cannot. Two separate nations are distinct systems. Setting up 2 identical factories next door, one with 100 staff and one with 1000 staff would be a monumental waste of effort, and what if the geographical separation, or airflow, or cloud cover, or… affected the experiment? Let’s say you run a single economic experiment. How do you reproduce it? How does your counterpart reproduce it?
fullspectrumdev 3y ago
> We've peaked out on literacy I mean, just look at actual literacy stats and you will find we have a ways to go on this. A frankly absurd number of people in the UK are functionally illiterate. Same in France.

mschuster91 3y ago

[flagged]

legitster 3y ago
Are you arguing that Germany is not a capitalist country? I was collectively speaking about the capitalist world. > How can y'all be so damn certain you're the best in the world when five minutes worth of Googling is enough to completely destroy all your arguments?! Uhhhh, maybe read the comments a bit more clearly before jumping in. Do you always just jump in on random threads to say Americans are dumb?
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Are you arguing that Germany is not a capitalist country? I was collectively speaking about the capitalist world. Even then, assuming we're not just talking about the US, it's a stretch to say "we" peaked out. We have a lot to do before anyone can make that claim, the problem is that in most countries politicians have been bought off by rich elites to lower taxes and reduce public spending (which has been done especially to education as that's the easiest), so there is no tax base left to fund what needs to be done. > Uhhhh, maybe read the comments a bit more clearly before jumping in. Do you always just jump in on random threads to say Americans are dumb? Fair point, removed the rant.
- insanejudge 3y ago
  Germany like many other Europeans would absolutely be considered a socialist country by most US standards (holding no distinction between socialism and social democracy). This is a big part of the confusion, intentional as far as I can tell, generated by people trying to eliminate taxed, regulations, and worker protections in that they can flexibly do things like point out how Sweden is wonderful and has no minimum wage, so we should do that too, when the reality is inverted with successful universal collective bargaining guaranteeing everyone much better wages -- something that would probably get the national guard rolled out if US workers pushed for presently.
fileyfood500 3y ago
Specifically for the US and Germany literacy results, I see a difference between these and past methods of measuring literacy. In the first link, the most basic sample question required the user to interpret a simple table. The second and third level questions required users to navigate websites, including a task of finding the correct link to navigate to the correct page of a site. I think this establishes a great point that we have an ever changing society with growing demands, where we now need to consider much more than just reading words. Internet literacy is a huge barrier, and it’s great to see it getting measured and accounted for as countries continue to adapt education to the changing times.

CrackerNews 3y ago

Yet there are drug and mental health crises, and there are families whose quality of life hasn't improved since the last recessions. I don't believe that progress is so neatly linear, and the Hegelian philosophy behind Marx attempts to capture that, IMO. Labor theory of value does have issues, but I don't think it can be so neatly dismissed either as alternatives appear to have vague criteria for what contributes to value.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Labor theory of value is incredibly easy to dismiss. Value is about what people will pay for things, not how much work they took to make. Bam there we go.
- zztop44 3y ago
  This kind of shallow dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx remains one of the most relevant and influential theoreticians amongst people who do spend a lot of time thinking about economics. For a start, Marx understood well that the price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync. If you’re confused about the difference between those things, think about Dogecoin as a particularly extreme example.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    This kind of shallow dismissal of my shallow dismissal of a frankly idiotic idea that doesn't deserve a deeper dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn't spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx was popular not for his economic thoughts but for his sociological/political ones. Someone being popular doesn't make them right, but Marx was right about many things. Just not about labor theory of value. But here's a deeper dismissal for you anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/fht0ti/marxs_aggregate_labour_theory_of_value/ https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/fht0ti/marxs_... it even conveniently brings up your doge argument

ohgodplsno 3y ago

>You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production What an absolute load of crap. Economics as a whole is barely a science, at best a toy, and that multiple pathways exist is not an indictment of any theory. Marx's observations hold true all these years after, alongside the progress we've had. You clowns would take a system as complex as, oh, simply the whole of human activity and try to reduce it to a few simple laws. Sorry, despite what you learned online, "supply and demand" is not a fundamental law of the universe. This is not physics. There are no simple answers. There aren't even proper answers. Every school of economics holds on barely by a thread. "Assuming a rational actor" is the "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" of liberal economics.

mikrl 3y ago
Economics itself is a reduction of human behaviour to resource allocation. The underlying field of study of human action in general is called praxeology and was only seriously investigated by: - Austrian school economists (1900s-present) - Polish school philosophers (briefly in the interwar period, died out after WW2 when Lwów became Lviv) I think wresting praxeology free of economics would be an interesting movement in philosophy.
- thiagoharry 3y ago
  I do not agree with the upper comment that economy is not a science. It is just a human science, where you could have different schools of thought based on different philosophies. But praxeology is indeed an example of something that is not science, as it rejects the scientific method and the empirism.
  - mikrl 3y ago
    If economics is a science, how do you run an experiment? Let’s say you want to see how phenomenon X scales as a function of population, and create a model X(p) How do you set up N identical scenarios and, ceteris paribus, vary the population? You cannot. Two separate nations are distinct systems. Setting up 2 identical factories next door, one with 100 staff and one with 1000 staff would be a monumental waste of effort, and what if the geographical separation, or airflow, or cloud cover, or… affected the experiment? Let’s say you run a single economic experiment. How do you reproduce it? How does your counterpart reproduce it?

fullspectrumdev 3y ago

> We've peaked out on literacy I mean, just look at actual literacy stats and you will find we have a ways to go on this. A frankly absurd number of people in the UK are functionally illiterate. Same in France.