Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics

Unfortunately. It's basically the Holla Forums version of DA JOOZ.

there, fixed it for you, faggot

The only positive aspect of capitalism is markets and freedom to start your own business which allows people with alternative solutions and ideas to present them to the public and allow natural selection for those ideas to determine what survives, that's it. The same could be done with market socialism or mutualism, with the added benefit of redistribution of any excess capital to other areas to ensure a stable system without exploitation. Capitalism needs markets, markets do not need capitalism.

Also, does no one remember the whole "holy shit I can't believe we didn't see that one coming" Mea culpa after 08?

If your job is justifying the status quo, of course you're not going to see flaws in it's essential character that lead to crisis.

Where did you retards get the idea that the job of the economists is to justify the status quo? Many economists disagree with the current government policies

Have you ever taken a university economics course?

...

Of course, unlike most people on this board

Great. Please - enlighten us with the diversity of opinion and counter hegemonic views you were exposed to in the notoriously heterodox econ dept.

lyl

easy to throw away branches of knowledge when they disagree with your worldview

Once again, I invite anyone to who has majored or minored in economics to to speak up - in specifics - about their time

why would any when they'd just get swarmed with marxists?

face it, if you wanted real arguments, you'd be Googling them right now. it's 2016

Wow. I hear so much about them but I've never actually experienced a genuine anfem shitpost.

I'm a graduate student in theoretical physics. Do you really think I can't understand an economics book that uses first year analysis and topology?

In real fields of study, we can at least agree on the foundations of the field and some basic results. What the fuck do mainstream economists agree on? For any given policy point, if you ask two different economists, you will get two different answers depending on who is paying them to find the answer, or what their ideology is. Minimum wages, income inequality, taxation, IP rights, I have seen papers coming to opposite conclusions about what is to be done on these issues.

The only things I've seen economists almost uniformly agree on are:

We all saw how that went.
And yet in this very year research has come out documenting the negative effects of a sudden shock in regions heavily exposed to Chinese manufacturing. It is thanks to these very regions that we now have President Donald J. Trump.
And yet in this very year research has shown what should be trivially obvious, that the "gains" in globalization largely have gone to the bourgeoisie and China to a lesser extent, mostly at the expense of workers in rich countries. I am sure you have seen the elephant graph of global inequality by now if you are an economist. It is thanks to this that we now have President Donald J. Trump.

Most economists think immigration is a net good for the economy, and yet in this very year I have read research pointing out that third world immigrants essentially compete with workers in rich countries without highschool degrees, driving down their wages. Another example of a transfer program to the bourgeoisie, who would have thought? This is another reason why we now have President Donald J. Trump.

Macroeconomic models are also complete garbage that have no predictive power. If they can't predict and prevent crises, what is the fucking point?

Given all this, why the fuck should I take modern economics seriously as a "science" or even a social science? All they can seem to agree on is that policies that benefit the bourgeoisie are good, especially when third-worlders get a few table scraps so that critiques said policies can be dismissed as racist? Psychology is currently imploding due to a replication crisis. Political Science should be dead and buried after this election. I am sure that modern economics will be next.

How does this compare to calculating the fine structure constant to one part in a trillion, modern computers, evolutionary biology, modern medicine, and so on? It is a fucking joke of a field.

you think mainstream economists aren't aware of things like exploitation? not only do they know about it, they think it's great; it's how things "ought to be." they are not emotionally detached from capitalism or look at it from a purely mathematical perspective

uh….

most economics classes are just neo-classical dick sucking

You don't say.

To be fair, he said most economists, not all economists.

What do you think about the "scientific" status of the labor theory of value?

Most economics takes private property as a given and then tries to study effects of it and come up with proposals. Virtually no one questions the legitimacy of the institution itself.

No it isn't. I don't see what's strange about academia justifying the current paradigm.

It depends, what are you trying to critique. Marx didn't say it was "le science" in the sense that you could make predictions about price, the empirical medium he gave for the LTV was the falling rate of profit. Of course, under his theory this can be offset by destruction of capital. However, the rate of profit has fallen since the Great Depression, and it would take another Great Depression to destroy the amount of capital needed to restore the rate of profit.

Good answer. I would only supplement it by saying that any destruction of existing capital, in order to facilitate the creation of new value, would still be only a temporary solution. Capitalism isn't just crisis-prone it's crisis-dependent; Marx's theory is scientific in the sense that is empirically provable.

Right, and if you can make it through the math (I can't, but I'm trying) there have been many studies that break down prices into labour times and find that labour times is a much more adequate explanation for prices than other contending theories, such as Physicalism or Marginalism. This is the one I have on my computer.

Keep in mind when reading Marx, Economics was completely different from today. Economist then were trying to discover how societies reproduced themselves and accumulated wealth, fundamental laws of production and distribution. Economics today is much about about what we "ought" to do under scarcity. Keep this in mind when reading Marx: Keynes, Hayek, Keen or whoever is talking about what we should do. Marx is talking about what does happen - these are laws built into the system of production. Labour does not need to be abstract, it should not be abstracted - it is abstracted in the market where "labour" is represented as labour on a spreadsheet - not as a particular type of labour. Marx's value theory isn't the same as Ricardo's LTV, it's completely different and focuses much more on aggregate value realized through exchange.

I agree; but if enough capital is destroyed the rate of profit will go back up. I'm not sure what you're arguing against here.

MSc in EE biatch.

I'm not certain of this since I haven't yet read long wave cycle theory, but due to the development of the forces of production since Marx's time, the time between crises is becoming shorter. It takes less time for new value to be created and circulate; less time for innovations to break down old production processes; and so on, barring artificial barriers like intellectual property and patents – which, in my opinion, is evidence that the bourgs know that haltering the spread of new ideas is key to keeping some control over how the economy is developed. There's also a great deal more constant capital needed proportional to labor thanks to automation in large-scale industry, which necessarily centralizes production in huge enterprises and industrial groups.

All of this means even with huge devaluations and destruction of capital, provided the crisis is not terminal somehow (eg. thermonuclear apocalypse), it will take less time for another crisis to emerge compared to earlier eras. I think the crisis we're in right now eerily reflects the long depression of the belle epoque before the first world war, only it's longer not because of the slower pace of capitalist economy, but because state management of the economy is now so highly developed.

The analogy I've read is that it used to be political economy, and today it's economicism, or worse yet, status quo apologism.

Pretty much. Popular economics steadfastly refuses to have a discussion except on its own terms, so people falsely take these terms for granted.