Economic

Do you believe rising supply curves are a good rule-of-thumb assumption about how pricing decisions happen?

If you think capitalism and socialism can be mixed you don't know what either are

What did he mean by this?

"Basic economics" includes inelastic demand too as an apologetic to students who rightly point out and ask why the price of petrol/gas doesn't come down as the price of crude does.

Do you believe rising supply curves are a good rule-of-thumb assumption about how pricing decisions happen?

Or how about that lovely assumption that income is distributed according to efficiency, when that efficiency measure is based on the demand pattern which depends on the income distribution?

Mainstream economics is about as scientific as astrology.

Rejecting marginalism is extremely stupid.

You learned a bunch of memes

post-keynes, marx, neo-marx

Marginalism only explains exchange values tho

The value of something is not intersubjectively independent, nor does a universal calculation exist to create one.

Cost-of-production theory of value

doesn't change what he said. an explanation of how prices form doesn't explain much

To date the best work on socialist economics is probably Capital. If you have a basic grasp of economics you should be able to get through it without too much trouble.

Also socialism and capitalism are mutually exclusive, you can't have a mix of the two unless you implement a hybrid of the two systems like mutualism (if you want to read up on mutualism then Prouhdon's "What is Property" is the best source). Nationalizing some industries and strong social spending doesn't constitute socialism.

And those variables are themselves dependent on exchange values.

Summing the cost of production into a formula requires multivariate equilibrium calculations that do not have constant bases because those variables are exchange values.

That is, a mathematical model which produces a summed-cost of production requires exchange values as inputs.

A theory of independent values is inconsistent with industrial economies. It did make sense in pre-modern Europe because the factors and processes involved in the production of all goods were standardized and well-known.

It depends on the model of value. The Labour Theory of Value for example isn't so much a measure of the value of a commodity to an individual, but more of a model of a pricing system (at least that's my understanding of it). The basic argument is that use value is totally subjective, but by its nature it can't really be quantified, so in a market economy the price of an object does not represent it's use value. However the reasoning behind using the market as a pricing mechanism is that because use value is subjective, price ought to be too, in the assumption that the price will reflect its use value. However because use value can't be quantified this is not the case. LTV on the other hand holds that because labour is the source of all objects that have value, the amount of labour put into an object ought to be the basis of its price.

So the socialist argument is that the basis of market pricing is invalid since its justification is based on the idea that market prices reflect subjective use values, a premise that is untrue. This means that LTV which uses a different justification based on labour as the source of value is the superior model.

However even if you don't accept this argument, or use a different justification for market pricing you still have to arrive at the conclusion that LTV and market pricing are simply just different models of pricing without one being inherently superior to the other, since they both rest on different justifications (both of which make sense imo).

The value of an object doesn't increase linearly with the value expended on it, clearly.

And? The value of that commodity is easy to find out because you know the expenses of the raw materials, labour, energy and other costs before engaging in a production cycle in order to produce commodities

Sure, they exhcange values of these can change, but thats irrelevant because those will modify the next production cycle

The ecuation for each commodity doesnt change, just the value of each digit

It clearly does, as an increase of labour in a production cycle increases the cost of prodiction, increasing the value of a commodity, forcing the seller to increase the price to be able to pay the extra cost

Those values always change and do so through a cycle and in response to the allocation of resources for different purposes.

The next marginal unit of labour or resources applied to a task increases the value of those things because resources are scarce.

There are more and less valuable applications of labour though, so value cannot increase linearly with labour.

Let see, you buy raw materials, an at the middle of the production cycle the cost of said raw material increases, you now have to send more money to your supplier because the cost increased, despite the fact that you already acquired the raw materials?

lol

The aggregated cost of paying the labourer is independent to the demand

Cost of labour increases linearly with the amount of labour utilized by the capitalist to manufacture commodities, meaning that the exchange value will increase accordingly

You should demand a refund from whatever college claims to have educated you.

No, the price you can get them at is itself subject to scarcity.

Try to wrap your mind around this.

We can build a second Suez Canal in a week, but the cost would be to transport, shelter, and feed hundreds of thousands of construction workers, express-ship the capital and resources to the location and have them work 12 hour shifts.

If you were to try to pay to do that on the market, it would cost trillions of dollars. If you wait for a year, it costs exponentially less. What you're paying for is time.

Time is a variable which is a factor of production, but which you cannot objectively quantify.

for the most part, pro-lefty economics focusses on criticizing capitalism. it seems like a kind of futile exercise to work through the details of a system that has not been realized yet. Marx is very intentional in stating that communism is not a program to be established so much as something that comes out of the natural collapse of capitalism.

*build it over a year

But that is irrelevant because those are two different production cycles

The fact that the prices are subject to scarcity does not mean the prices aren't determined once you acquire them on the market

If we compare the same production cycle, building a suez canal over a year, it is obvious that according to the COPTV if we can reduce the amount of labourers, machinery or materials, the cost of the Suez canal is going to be lower

This even applies to the one week scenario, as you will increase the production cost by hiring more workere and machines, not time

Now lets pretend you are buying "time"
What exactly are you buying, labour power? Your cost comes from the extra labour, manutacturing? Comes from energy and so on

The only argument for "time" is that you will deliver it in a week instead of delivering in a year, which might give you a leg to stand on to make an argument for it, however, this is still an exchange value, as it will be the price of the canal, not its value

I studied agricultural economics,
So for the price for bushels of corn it does.

Got any good alternatives to Mainstream economics that won't get me laughed at if I go to a policy conference?

A rising supply curve means that the production cost per unit is higher when you produce more. As a rule of thumb, that's not how industry works. You ask somebody involved with producing a product how producing on a larger scale would change the costs, they are usually expecting them to either stay the same or fall. The issue is rather whether the stuff would sell.

How does a neoclassical economist argue for a rising supply curve? By saying that it's a short-term thing. Short term doesn't refer to some particular amount of time, but is something constructed in a way based on the very industry to get the result the economist wishes for. The usual neoclassical assumption is that the current input mix is optimal for the current amount produced, the optimal input mix for producing a higher amount would have the same proportions, and there is some short-term issue with increasing all inputs to get the same proportions again, so the input mix gets sub-optimal, meaning higher cost per unit. The mix is sub-optimal because the higher amount to be produced was not anticipated, which stands in contradiction with the usual claim coming from the same mouth that everybody has perfect foresight in the model.

Said abstractly, suppose you have a widget machine that has various modes from very slow to slow to medium to fast to very fast production. Cost per unit is a U-curve, the energy used per widget produced is lowest at the medium setting. Neoclassical econ argues like everybody is at that bottom of the U-curve or to the right of it, producing more leading to higher costs per unit. Suppose you have ten such widget machines. According to the neoclassical economist, they all together have a U-curve with exactly the same shape, except the numbers you attach to the axis for absolute number of widgets produced in an hour gets multiplied by ten. But this shape is wrong. It would be the case only if you had one big lever that simultaneously puts all machines into very slow mode or slow or medium and so on. What you do instead if you aren't insane is that you try to run some of the machines at their ideal point and the other machines are off.

In the real world, there is redundancy in industrial production, there is a buffer and within that buffer cost per unit stays roughly the same. By making the absurd assumption that intensity of usage has to be the same across all units of something that the same firm owns, the neoclassical dorks even constructed a silly theory of optimal firm size.

What's that? Resource based economy?

Read up on economics that uses input-output tables for analysis, like the stuff by Wassily Leontief.