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So, Karl Marx predicted that the capitalism will eat itself because capitalists will value creating money itself (and money-making enterprises, such as asset bu

by js8 1y ago

So, Karl Marx predicted that the capitalism will eat itself because capitalists will value creating money itself (and money-making enterprises, such as asset bubbles) more than the actual production of goods. This was later elaborated by many people, but since I am not an expert in this, I'll just mention Hyman Minsky and Thomas Piketty. The OP is essentially a (white collar) labor version of this. What is evidently valued is an appearance of expertise, rather than expertise itself. Just like the capitalists who want to make money, and skipping production of actual goods in order to accomplish that, "professionals" are going to skip actual learning in order to appear knowledgeable. For 200 years, people have hoped that the "free market" will sort out the problem that Marx saw. It didn't happen - we still get financial bubbles that cause trouble for many people. So, I suspect it's a mistake to assume the learning problem will fix itself either. I suspect people (society at large) will have to consciously value the hard work of learning for this to be fixed.

MarkusQ 1y ago
Yeah, that's why we haven't created any new goods since we embraced capitalism—the whole thing is just parasitic on the labor of the masses, and doesn't really add anything. </sarcasm> Seriously, you might want to actually do a sniff check before taking Marx's word for anything.
- js8 1y ago
  Speaking of sniff checks, you might want to do that first, because that's not actually the prediction that Marx was making. In my understanding, Marx was actually appreciative of free market building stuff. The question he asked was this: If the workers pay for the goods produced with increasingly bigger share of private property of capitalist class, what happens once there is no more property to give away to capitalists? (And he was actually the first to ask this question, and treat capitalism as a dynamical system, which makes him into one of the greatest economists of all time.) Of course, it didn't fail completely, for two reasons. One is people actually instituted social democratic and keynesian reforms that prevented the collapse. (Marx was an optimist in that people will learn and eventually reject capital ownership completely, but they didn't.) The other reason is that we continuously invent new forms capital (private property) to inject into flailing capitalism. In other words, we find more and more public goods that can be privatized - things such as mortgages and other consumer debt, intellectual property, new financial instruments, health care insurance, private and behavioral personal information ("big data"), new forms of money such as Bitcoin, openly available information sucked up by generative AI etc. But that doesn't mean capitalism (especially its financial arm) isn't parasitic - it just didn't manage to kill the host yet.
  - MarkusQ 1y ago
    Bollocks. The first point is nonsensical ("sure, the free market system keeps making new stuff, but what happens when we run out of stuff to pay for it with?"); it's like a bad Yogi Berra pastiche, expecting that we as a society will become so wealthy that we can't afford to do it anymore. He tries to paper over this with a lot of hand-waving about classes, but fundamentally he's trying to use a zero-sum model to explain wealth creation. If it weren't for this "parasitic" system you wouldn't even have been able to post this drivel, for several dozen reasons, including the fact that you likely would never have been born or would have died in your youth.
    - js8 1y ago
      Of course I would have been born, I was born in a communist country (Czechoslovakia). You think they couldn't make a fertilizer back then or something? Our country is capable of producing less today than it used to during that era. We were destroyed by capitalist financialization, the same problem that had the West lost to China economically. The thing that Marx has warned about..

by js8 1y ago

MarkusQ 1y ago

Yeah, that's why we haven't created any new goods since we embraced capitalism—the whole thing is just parasitic on the labor of the masses, and doesn't really add anything. </sarcasm> Seriously, you might want to actually do a sniff check before taking Marx's word for anything.

js8 1y ago
Speaking of sniff checks, you might want to do that first, because that's not actually the prediction that Marx was making. In my understanding, Marx was actually appreciative of free market building stuff. The question he asked was this: If the workers pay for the goods produced with increasingly bigger share of private property of capitalist class, what happens once there is no more property to give away to capitalists? (And he was actually the first to ask this question, and treat capitalism as a dynamical system, which makes him into one of the greatest economists of all time.) Of course, it didn't fail completely, for two reasons. One is people actually instituted social democratic and keynesian reforms that prevented the collapse. (Marx was an optimist in that people will learn and eventually reject capital ownership completely, but they didn't.) The other reason is that we continuously invent new forms capital (private property) to inject into flailing capitalism. In other words, we find more and more public goods that can be privatized - things such as mortgages and other consumer debt, intellectual property, new financial instruments, health care insurance, private and behavioral personal information ("big data"), new forms of money such as Bitcoin, openly available information sucked up by generative AI etc. But that doesn't mean capitalism (especially its financial arm) isn't parasitic - it just didn't manage to kill the host yet.
- MarkusQ 1y ago
  Bollocks. The first point is nonsensical ("sure, the free market system keeps making new stuff, but what happens when we run out of stuff to pay for it with?"); it's like a bad Yogi Berra pastiche, expecting that we as a society will become so wealthy that we can't afford to do it anymore. He tries to paper over this with a lot of hand-waving about classes, but fundamentally he's trying to use a zero-sum model to explain wealth creation. If it weren't for this "parasitic" system you wouldn't even have been able to post this drivel, for several dozen reasons, including the fact that you likely would never have been born or would have died in your youth.
  - js8 1y ago
    Of course I would have been born, I was born in a communist country (Czechoslovakia). You think they couldn't make a fertilizer back then or something? Our country is capable of producing less today than it used to during that era. We were destroyed by capitalist financialization, the same problem that had the West lost to China economically. The thing that Marx has warned about..