Any decent criticism of Thomas Sowell you can recommend? I've been reading his Economics, which I think is decent, some parts concerning Marx are interesting:
"Socialists have long regarded profits as simply “overcharge,” as Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw called it, or a “surplus value” as Karl Marx called it. … Only after socialism went from being a theory to being an actual economic system in various countries around the world did the fact become painfully apparent that people in socialist countries had a harder time trying to afford things that most people in capitalist countries could afford with ease and took for granted. With profits eliminated, prices should have been lower in socialist countries, according to theory, and the standard of living of the masses correspondingly higher."
"The hope for profits and the threat of losses is what forces a business owner in a capitalist economy to produce at the lowest cost and sell what the customers are most willing to pay for. In the absence of these pressures, those who manage enterprises under socialism have far less incentive to be as efficient as possible under given conditions, much less to keep up with changing conditions and respond to them quickly, as capitalist enterprises must do if they expect to survive. "
"While capitalism has a visible cost—profit—that does not exist under socialism, socialism has an invisible cost—inefficiency—that gets weeded out by losses and bankruptcy under capitalism. The fact that most goods are more widely affordable in a capitalist economy implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency. Put differently, profit is a price paid for efficiency. Clearly the greater efficiency must outweigh the profit or else socialism would in fact have had the more affordable prices and greater prosperity that its theorists expected, but which failed to materialize in the real world. Moreover, if in fact the cost of profits exceeded the value of the efficiency they promote, then non-profit organizations or government agencies could get the same work done cheaper or better than profit-making enterprises and could therefore displace them in the competition of the marketplace. Yet that seldom, if ever, happens, while the opposite happens increasingly—that is, private profit-making companies taking over various functions formerly performed by government agencies or by non-profit organizations like colleges and universities."
"It is not just ignorant people, but also highly educated and highly intellectual people like George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, Jawaharlal Nehru and John Dewey who have misconceived profits as arbitrary charges added on to the costs of producing goods and services. To many people, even today, high profits are often attributed to high prices charged by those motivated by “greed.” In reality, most of the great fortunes in American history have resulted from someone’s figuring out how to reduce costs, so as to be able to charge lower prices and therefore gain a mass market for the product. Henry Ford did this with automobiles, Rockefeller with oil, Carnegie with steel, and Sears, Penney, Walton and other department store chain founders with a variety of products."
Also, please no dumb joke answers, haughtiness etc.
Any decent criticism of Thomas Sowell you can recommend? I've been reading his Economics, which I think is decent...
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Well, there is nothing else to say about other than what he writes about Marxism is a strawman. This is not what Marx believed. It's funny how he has to mix in some Fabian socialists to muddy the waters because he probably very well knows he makes that shit up.
We aren't obliged to defend something we don't proclaim.
I mean, look at the very beginning, he makes the assumption that surplus value equals profit. Reading the fucking Wikipedia about Marxism probably tells you that it isn't.
Thanks for posting these liberal takes though, it's always good to realize how much of a fraud these writers are.
I didn't say you have to defend yourselves, I don't really care about people's minute ideological details, I asked you to explain it to me and criticise it, because I don't know much about the subject, but feel like there’s more to it than meets the eye. I think it's more about me than you.
He's a nigger.
Jk. I haven't read him, but he apparently thinks black dysfunction in America comes from the "redneck" influence on them, which is immediately suspect if you've seen anything of what Africa is like when Africans are allowed to rule themselves (despotism, corruption, poverty). It's blown out of the water by studies on I..Q, though, which correlates strongly with success. If you want blacks to succeed, you need to build up an environment where intelligence doesn't give a person a leg up - although the ultimate result of that would be the race getting even worse without some type of eugenic breeding in place to stop the newly economically successful/secure idiots of the black race to be more successful at propagating their genes.
This too. Read Jared Taylor's "White Identity".
pls delete yourselves, I'm not concerned with these questions at all
I quoted my topics of interest in the OPpost, for the blind
I'm criticizing the only things I've heard about him. His economics are probably just generic capitalism with smart guy rhetorical attacks on the left.
Once again, the communist dodges the race question.
Sowell and Marx are referring to different concepts with this word; be careful with conflation.
this is really interesting, can you tell me more about the value concept of Marx? And what is Sowell's misreading here?
I'm not a communist, or socialist, in fact I'm far from politics, and don't frequent 8ch, but I became very interested in Marx after reading mainstream books, and finding out by my experience that the economy I live in is for whatever reasons not quite like it
if you are lazy, idiotic "user" culture fools with a pretence at "radicalism" and with no intellectual merit or will to help, please ignore my thread
Nope, bitch, you are not fooling anyone.
Sowell is using dictionary definitions: value determined by what people are willing to pay. Marx is using marxist definitions: value is measured by what went into producing it. I've found that when conversing with marxists, they will often take a statement made in the dictionary-definition context and inject marxist definitions into them. Keep an eye out for that.
t. capitalist
why are these approaches separate in the first place? wouldn't it be logical to consider both?
No, you can't just make up a definition and ask people to follow it.
Because value changes over time according to market information, and marxist value i.e. labor unit cost, is a constant. I'm not arguing that marxist value is not relevant. I'm saying that a conflation of terms can lead to confusion. See the post I originally responded to for an example.
Copernicus couldn't just make up a definition and ask people to follow it.
Who?
Coppernicus, the inventor of copper. Look him up.
Why the fuck?
Was Marx true name Valueticus or something?
Is this guy literally retarded
But that's what Marx believed. Marx didn't believe that capital exploits labor because of "greed", but because wages need to be depressed so that profit can be maximized.
It's not like he's actually read Marx.
So you're saying he didn't actually get Marx's notions?
What's with all the posts trying to debunk socialism? Are we popular now?
It's hard to tell where exactly to start.
Aside from being wrong about people in capitalist countries having a higher standard of living, he also attributes this higher standard of living to "profit," and socialist living conditions to "lack of profit." It completely fails to explain how Western/Capitalist countries are able to afford these things "with ease," how the cheap prices that Western consumers rely on are subsidized by the exploitation of the Third World, and ignores that the standards of living in Communist countries appears so low because of the history they were coming from. Feudal, agrarian, poor countries that got flattened by the German war machine and had to be built up practically from scratch, and despite the absence of hunger and joblessness, the guarantees of housing, education, and healthcare, and the rapid strides they made in modernization, they're marked as inferior because Communist citizens can't buy all the stupid bullshit that westerners do.
marxists.org
Sowell never read Marx, doesn't understand him or deliberately talks bullshit about his works. With regard to him being a Hoover institute fellow it's most likely a combination of all three. In any case, it's best to ignore him, unless you want to increase your blood pressure. I once read some of his crap because a liberturd wannabe economist blasted me with Sowell quotes. I ended up raging all the time, since Sowell apparently lacked basic economic knowledge.
Wait, is this for real?
You believe eastern bloc people have higher standard of living?
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Jesus, I wonder.
If he uses a different concept, then why the fuck does he criticize Marx with it?
Alright, I'll bite.
Marx doesn't interpret profit as surplus value. I don't know what else to add to this than just saying he's wrong.
Socialism was never a theory, it evolves out of its own conditions. Marx never laid out a groundwork for socialism, the way socialist countries constituted themselves was a direct reaction to their own conditions. Economic planning for example was an innovation from the Bolsheviks.
Does he give any numbers to support that? The state heavily subsidized housing, consumer items, cars, etc. - I'm pretty fucking sure the amount you'd have to pay in comparison to your income would be much lower for these things than in capitalist countries. Unless he's talking about the availability of goods, which is a different argument, but it looks to me he criticizes the distribution so he should give numbers.
Again, compare any country with the same GDP (although GDP is a bad measurement for socialist states) to a corresponding socialist country and compare the living standard.
That's a fairly simplified argument and a non-sequitur. A child could come up with this.
He's confusing profitability and productivity. Socialist enterprises are not profitable, that's the whole point. Sowell can not break free from capitalist logic here and equates profit with "success", and by success he means the maximum revenue for the shareholders. So, does he claim socialist enterprises are not productive? Then we need evidence, but I don't think he's looked into that because the GDR for example had a higher growth than West Germany. This isn't possibly with a largely unproductive economy.
I can easily look to the USSR and compare it with Sudan and then conclude socialism works better than capitalism. Russia and most socialist countries were dirt poor before the revolution and many western countries were already rich. So I disagree with his reductionist view of the world. As for the quote, if he thinks of profit as a price for efficiency, then that is only true for small/medium businesses, because large corporations are led by CEOs, not by their owners or shareholders, they practically contribute nothing to the whole enterprise.
I've already addressed this.
The point is to abolish the marketplace. He's talking about state capitalism.
BECAUSE LIBERALS PRIVATIZE THEM. Also, I love the fact that privatized colleges and privatized healthcare completely fail to properly educate and treat people, whereas poor Cuba manages to do that.
He basically thinks Karl Marx was Richard Wolff and complained over surplus extraction by the capitalist. There is even a passage by Marx where he says along the lines that a proletarian has no right to not be exploited under capitalism, this is not good or bad, it's just a thing that happens under capitalism.
I'm sure poor Cuba manage to properly educate and treat people, that's why rich cubans just go to America when they actually catch something.
That's bait for geniuses like you
> The World Bank was the principal source of statistical data for 123 countries (97 percent of the world's population).
So prove that they can't, faggot
thanks for advice!
To be frank, people on /lit/ recommended me some books among which was Sowell, when I asked for good and clear books on economics.
Products are sold for their (Marxist) value on average. Price - the cost paid for a product - fluctuates around the value per supply & demand, but the base value is the starting point. Gold and diamonds are as expensive as they are because of the labor invested in finding, mining, and processing them. Diamonds have plummeted in value since artificial diamonds became viable. Not because they're more common (that's a red herring) but because they require much less input of labor. Of course diamond prices remain high because the market is controlled by a few companies who artificially restrict the supply. This is reflected in the meager price of reselling diamonds to them (bringing the average price back toward the Marxist value).
Man, it's great reading this shit, now I wish every refugees would go to Cuba to experience that grand healthcare and education system instead of worthless Europe and America.
So we are supposed to trust the World Bank, while leaving the high-income capitalist countries out, hurray.
[Citation needed]
You should do it more often. It might make you less of a stupid asshole.
I dunno, are you supposed to try and change the subject when you get told the fuck out?
He hasn't read Marx and doesn't know what surplus value is. It's not just "overcharge".
Profits weren't eliminated in the Soviet Union. A surplus was still extracted by the state and reinvested in the military, industry, and public services. Relative higher prices for consumer goods were a result of inefficiencies in calculation and distribution stemming from the material limitations faced by the Soviets.
The problem here is that he is conflating the efficiency of the capitalist to extract a profit when facing the realities of the falling rate of profit with the ability of a socialist economy to efficiently calculate and distribute goods in the absence of market signals.
Who is going bankrupt? And what were they inefficient at? Competing with virtual monopolies and megacorps? Lobbying the state? Donating to politicians? Avoiding predatory VC firms? Exploiting the global labor market?
Did the financial managers who oversaw the creation of the '08 collapse go bankrupt? Nah they got huge bonuses and managed to repeal the paltry regulations created in response to their inefficient management of the economy. Were the credit default swap wielding parasites who bet against the subprime mortgage market efficient? Well they made a huge profit so they must have been. But is it really efficient to reward the manufactured destruction of concrete social wealth?
Capitalist economies can't be inefficient? I guess Greece, Italy, Spain, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti didn't get the memo.
Neoliberal privatization isn't the organic response to inefficiencies in public institutions that he's making it out to be. It's a political project informed by market oriented dogma. His own example of private efficiency is absurd. The US's higher education system functions as a mechanism for debt peonage. I'm not sure how that's an efficient way to provide an education to your future workforce.
This. Capitalists are going to need an increasingly educated workforce as technology progresses and low-skilled occupations start to disappear. It's an instance of capitalists shooting themselves in the foot by adhering to dogmatic free markets economics.
It isn't "people". I'm pretty sure it's a SINGLE person who shills Sowell across Zig Forums /lit/ and /his/ because the pseud wants to show people how smart he is. He has a consistent writing style that marks him out.
See, this is why I refused to argue with you at first. It takes two posts before revealing that you're just a dishonest fucktard not willing to learn anything and just here for bait. Fuck off.
Thank you for providing this. The problem with this study, however, is that it does not account for the changes in preferences of the consumer which may occur in the delay between production and consumption. The data selected for statistical analysis is conspicuously missing such cases.