Let's have a general discussion on economics.
Now, I want this thread to encourage people to bring up their own subjects to discuss instead of just what I start the thread with, but here is my "starting subject":
What aspects of neoclassical economics are worth studying and salvaging for a planned socialist economy? Obviously things like "supply and demand" is pure ideology (as proven by cockshott) but some concepts which I think are valuable for socialism are:
Do you mean Keynesian or something else?
i was going to save this, but it lacks a citation [sigh]
I think everyone should read a neoclassical textbook at least once before getting deep into Marxian economics because many Marxists specifically address the points of bourgeois economists. Remember how Marx himself read virtually all of the classical economists that came before him.
I read "A Science in its Youth: Pre-Marxian Political Economy," before reading Marx. Is that enough?
I have been brainstorming feasible exchange systems in a socialist economy. here is one that i like:
I had another thing to add to this but i forgot. what are your thoughts
Have you read "Towards a New Socialism" by Paul Cockshott? It is probably the most comprehensive and coherent vision of a socialist system ever made in the modern age.
I'll check it out. Thanks
the minimum wage violations are from mexicans coming to california and working for less.
That looks good, but I was talking about modern neoclassical textbooks, like Economics: Principles and Policy, the one I'm currently reading.
fug off nick land
Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.
marxists.org
Adam Smith already dealt with division of labor. Engineers have a better grasp of technical scale effects than economists.
Students of economics are trained to assume them away and then slowly crawl back to recognizing them. I think they have a worse grasp of that than random people, or at least are good at pretending to have a worse grasp when they act as a mouthpiece of vested interests.
They may have a better grasp compared to English Majors, but not compared to engineering folks.
And how would one measure where the current balance is and where the optimal balance would be?
This sums up a great deal of economics. You abstract a million things away while you're reminded that they do exist. If you'd actually take them into account the whole model falls apart.
keynes was a neoliberal market libertarian who wants to enslave the poor with capitalism though
Is wealth = value? i thought these were different terms
for those interested, a few orthodox / mainstream books , semi-recent, I think 2014 and 2016 or so>>2576055
Yeah, so basically Marx uses wealth to refer to use values. Use values are "independent of the amount of labor required to appropriate its useful qualities". That is why Marx repudiates the idea labor is the source of all wealth. On the other hand, the exchange value of an object does depend on the abstract labor used to create it. This exchange value does not refer to the price of a single object, but rather is the average price of the commodity (of course, excluding things like monopoly prices).
how much do you need to know to understand these?
You mean physics ;D