Economic neoliberal consensus?

I was just on /r/neoliberal and the thing I noticed, besides the ridiculous level of smugness, was the overwhelming claim of economist support for neoliberalism.

How true is this? In my Basic Economics class in freshman year, the material alternated between mostly neutral online homework, and "child labor helps kids and don't worry if their head gets crushed on the job safety regulations hurt them more" pure ideology written by the professor.

Basically, what is the overall ideology of the economics field, and how do they view socialism/Marx? I know that Richard Wolff said that he could get his PhD without reading a page of socialist theory; is that still true today?

Other urls found in this thread:

thenation.com/article/paul-krugman-raises-the-white-flag-on-trade/
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/a-protectionist-moment/
nytimes.com/2016/03/11/opinion/trade-and-tribulation.html?_r=0
hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
theguardian.com/business/2016/may/27/austerity-policies-do-more-harm-than-good-imf-study-concludes
youtube.com/user/ProfSteveKeen/videos
nakedkeynesianism.blogspot.co.uk/
thecharnelhouse.org/
thirdworldtraveler.com/NAFTA_FTAA/Mexico_NAFTA_TenYears.html
youtube.com/watch?v=FLse54Eobk4
bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/fdb484c8-99a1-32a3-83be-20108374b985
rdwolff.com/economic_theorists_the_high_priests_of_capitalism
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Economics is a fucking pseudo field on par with Alchemy.
I just summarized all of Economics after Marx.

there is a bunch of economist who are paid shill or just plain idiot, but the one that are honest outta here are neokeynesian. (My eco college teacher who's been to Harvard is, at least)

wolff still hasn't read a page of marx. he comes across as reading more lassalle than marx.

kill yourself

Can we just nuke reddit and line up every user for the firing squad? This cancer is on a whole new level.

Very true, but it has more to do with political and economic interest rather than knowledge. Just look at that hack Krugman for example and how shitty and mealy-mouthed he was when he admitted that the policies he advocated turned out not to work.

Economists are mostly failed mathematicians and physicists, it's ironic to see them creating frog memes about math ability.

I mean, imagine you had a bunch of economists in the 19th century that all owned or had shares in plantations, or worked in departments funded by rich plantation owners, or relied on them for research grants etc. I imagine they'd have a pretty solid consensus on the ethical and economic validity of slavery.

tbf, the way I found it was by digging in a suspicious account in /r/latestagecapitalism. Lots of posts in /r/neoliberal, as well as some suspicious activity such as posting in multiple local subreddits such as UKpolitics, CanadaPolitics, etc. whenever "free trade is mentioned.

wow I just went there. the smugness is hilarious. it's exactly what you'd expect from kiddies who are too dumb for pure mathematics or theoretical physics but still want to feel superior to everyone else. of course your success in the field is founded entirely on having the right name on your Econ PhD, so you can't expect much from such people.

Economics is the "science" of justifying why Porky's actions are all perfect and why we cannot have a better system which does not feature him. The field was established as an independent concept by Adam Smith and has been Liberal to the core from the start. This is why Marx's Capital has the subtitle "A Critique of Political Economy". One of its intended goals was to expose economics as self-contradictory pseudoscience which only serves to justify liberal capitalism.

Sauce on the Krugman confession?

Tbf Adam Smith was much more to the left than people tend to think…. Look it up if you don't believe me.

Mainstream economics is essentially neoliberal apologism and has been since the late 70s.

There are still Keynesians (actual Keynesians, go fuck yourself Krugman.) kicking about on the margins in token positions, token marxians and what have you, but as a discipline it's basically apologism for neoliberalism even though it's plainly obvious that it simply doesn't work for us.
(Even if you accept the "child labour helps China!" argument, that's not an argument for why the US should embrace it even though things were plainly better under the postwar Keynesian* consensus.)

*okay so it was a bastardization and Breton Woods was a disaster where American self-interest trumped Keynes' pragmatism every time, but whatever. It worked and it would've worked more if Keynes was listened to.

And I mean even Keynes was an apologist for capitalism, really. He just actually had some fucking results to his name to justify it.

After marxian economics almost all economists abandoned the value-form to replace it with 'all value is subjective' based theories and entered the realm of pseudoscience to conform to the regime of porky.

"law of value is wrong, all value is subjective, therefore all of marx is wrong."
"capitalism is the most efficient possible system"

Maybe "confession" was too strong a word, but
Commentary and links to Krugman's past articles
thenation.com/article/paul-krugman-raises-the-white-flag-on-trade/
The column
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/a-protectionist-moment/

The blog post
nytimes.com/2016/03/11/opinion/trade-and-tribulation.html?_r=0

So is there any actual refutation on neoliberalism being good for the growth of developing countries?
Partially for obvious reasons (being a first worlder) it's always been the awkward gap in my broad hate for the thing.

My only possible consideration based on current knowledge is that maybe import-substitution-industrialization would be preferable if rich countries had a fair trading relationship with the global poor, squaring the circle and letting everyone benefit.

My recollection is that even /r/economics pushes the general narrative that global free trade is on the long-scale a force for good (as you could say industrialization in general was, even if you had to march through the proletarians mangled in unsafe machinery to get here.) but it's something that causes a fundamental unease while I don't have an answer to "well, what would you do instead?" beyond "err… ISI?"

I mean on the whole, I can admit that being in the first world it's a very simplistic game to play, because I can be intellectually disingenuous and throw the global poor under the bus, but I'd really rather not. (Partially because I'll never be a policy advisor, but someone might call me out…)

Krugman's a dishonest piece of shit that just noticed which way the wind was blowing re:globalisation and adjusted his politics accordingly ("Well actually the globalisation critics might have been onto something, and weren't the 'intellectually-challenged morons' that I previously described them as")

Modern economics is divided between neoliberals, keynseians, chicagofags, and some austrians who are considered a joke. What unites them is the insistance that outsourcing is good and that capitalism is the best system there is.

Damn that sub has some fresh memes tbh

i want to believe it's ironic but the evidence suggests otherwise.
it's made me realize the one thing i hate more than anything else is someone who'll apologise for the status quo. I mean at least fucking nazis will admit things are fucking shit, even if they then sperg about how it's DA JOOZ.

I'd joke that I understand why Pol Pot killed intellectuals and imply my own position was irrational, but there's plenty of data to suggest it isn't. (Partially since an unemployment-rate chart showing we're still not below Nixon-Shock levels in my country alone would justify my anger.)

Yet people will defend it. Christ, they'll defend Tony Blair. These people actually exist. I'm half impressed, I can actually apparently still be roused to genuine anger. I'd honestly come to view the status quo as a sort of force of nature imposed from above, not something people will actually defend.

I haven't read enough to give a proper answer, but here's what I remember Rosa Luxemburg saying on the issue in her two works I've read, The National Question and The Junius Pamphlet:

The National Question


The Junius Pamphlet:

Search "expansionist imperialism of capitalism" and read two paragraphs from there, I don't know formatting on Holla Forums

So if you want to be as basic as possible, free trade = good, capitalism = bad. What concrete policies to we pursue from there? I haven't read enough to tell you. What I can tell you is that capitalist industrialization is not the pure force for good that neoliberal graphs would have you believe. Japanese occupied Korea, the same one with mass institutionalized forced labor and forced sex slavery, technically saw improvements in living conditions thanks to Japanese capital and industrialization. Embracing industrialization is not the same as letting Porky have his way with you.

The expansionist imperialism of capitalism, the expression of its highest stage of development and its last phase of existence, produces the [following] economic tendencies: it transforms the entire world into the capitalist mode of production; all outmoded, pre-capitalist forms of production and society are swept away; it converts all the world’s riches and means of production into capital, the working masses of all zones into wage slaves. In Africa and Asia, from the northernmost shores to the tip of South America and the South Seas, the remnant of ancient primitive communist associations, feudal systems of domination, patriarchal peasant economies, traditional forms of craftsmanship are annihilated, crushed by capital; whole peoples are destroyed and ancient cultures flattened. All are supplanted by profit mongering in its most modern form.

This brutal victory parade of capital through the world, its way prepared by every means of violence, robbery, and infamy, has its light side. It creates the preconditions for its own final destruction. It put into place the capitalist system of world domination, the indispensable precondition for the socialist world revolution. This alone constitutes the cultural, progressive side of its reputed “great work of civilization” in the primitive lands. For bourgeois-liberal economists and politicians, railroads, Swedish matches, sewer systems, and department stores are “progress” and “civilization.” In themselves these works grafted onto primitive conditions are neither civilization nor progress, for they are bought with the rapid economic and cultural ruin of peoples who must experience simultaneously the full misery and horror of two eras: the traditional natural economic system and the most modern and rapacious capitalist system of exploitation. Thus, the capitalist victory parade and all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense only because they create the material preconditions for the abolition of capitalist domination and class society in general. And in this sense imperialism ultimately works for us.

Junius Pamphlet word dump from above

Fuck, I accidentally deleted a huge part of my answer. Here's what I remember:

Basically her theory is that capitalism and heavy industry were made possible by the centralization of the state and trade laws, replacing the autonomy and "particularism" of the old feudal provinces. The central event in this centralization was the French Revolution of 1793. International trade is a continuation of this centralization, allowing for essentially the division of labor on a global scale.

The problem with this is while international trade increases production, it does not distribute this production to the workers who actually produce it and need it. Therefore, the next step for international capitalism is international socialism.

when i become commissar i will decide who gets the bullet based on their web browsing history

in my defense, I wanna be the 2nd Marx

We will have to go though capitalism, it is more efficient in some important material ways than whatever preceded it. But the contradictions will kill us if we don't curb it soon. Efforts to curb it so far have either failed to curb it, or failed to provide commodities as efficiently. But curbed it must eventually be, or it will be a bleak future.

Neoclassicals*

Do people actually self identify as neoliberal? That's fucking cancerous

If you take a poll among economists, you would probably get that result.

But, don't be deceived. Its popularity comes from its entrenchment in the university system, not because of how rigorous it is. Almost all of the basic tenets of neoliberal policy (free markets, privatization of welfare state, free trade etc) have come under scrutiny in the last two decades. and none of them fares well.

WRONG
Because of the consequences of the Arrow-Debreu model
hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand

Because of information asymmetry (which is literally everywhere and unavoidable)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

WRONG
Austerity programs do more harm than good
theguardian.com/business/2016/may/27/austerity-policies-do-more-harm-than-good-imf-study-concludes


If you want to develop some sensitivity to the bollocks that is modern economics, I suggest this youtube channel.

youtube.com/user/ProfSteveKeen/videos

Back in the USSR, there were those social scientists whose sole job was cranking out written propaganda of how in capitalism man is wolf to man but communism has completely solved that. Back in the Middle Ages, there were monks who handwrote entire books about how an absolute monarchy is God's will and thus the natural social order for mankind.

Today, that role falls to economists. Subscribing to neoliberalism isn't a simple pre-requisite, it's an act-of-faith.

Yeah like others said, Economics has utterly degenerated from a science into apologia and post facto rationalizations for whatever policy Porky wanted that moment. Be wary of anyone called "economist" after circa the Austrian School. "Political economy" might be a better label to search in for newer material.


A pro-post if there ever was one.

But… you could get all that by reading stuff from Naked Keynesianism. Wasn't everyone here a social democrat who realized that conventional economics were bullshit and that the new social democracy advocated by Bernie and Corbyn is ridiculous when you read the history of old social democracy?

Well then good thing I saw these posts because I never even heard of Naked Keynesianism.

Great taste in blogs, friend.

I don't strictly believe a new social democracy is impossible, though. Personally I think if we'd had Keynes' Bancor, the postwar consensus could have endured.

Sadly this is where we run into the primary problem of all politics today: That of actually implementing policies. Even Bernie, if he wanted to and was magically elected, could no longer use the might of the US to impose such a system on the world. The power dynamic has changed too much in favour of international capital. Even though the policy itself might be brilliant, and doesn't just "work on paper", you've still got to get the policy from paper to practice, and that transition is where all social democracy, perhaps all attempts at improving the world, will die or lay the groundwork for their death.


nakedkeynesianism.blogspot.co.uk/
Wonderful site to kick about on. (Oh, and what a convenient first post!)
Also gave me this cool image.

As long as we're talking great blogs, I can't recommend thecharnelhouse.org/ enough. I'd think it would be extremely popular with Holla Forums.

he's a trot or a leftcom or something. goes fullretard on occasion

He has been pretty consistent with his blog posts, and they are well researched.

Occasionally spergs on twitter though. Overall I would still recommend.

Who doesn't, eh?

What does user think about this "modern monetary theory" meme going around in progressive circles lately?

meme
and here I thought we wanted to get rid of the state, wage labor, etc. eventually

NAFTA sure as hell wasn't good for Mexico at least. It allowed the US to flood its market with its own cheap subsidized crops and ruined the occupation of millions of farm workers (which sparked the next big wave of immigration to the US).

Utterly irrelevant. His thoughts form the basis of liberalism and the idea that economics are a hard science to this day. What delusions he had about the potential for market capitalism to be ethical were proven utterly wrong. I have no doubt he meant well and might have been a socialist in a different age, but his role in history remains what it is.

Pretty good, actually, in showing how baseless the claims of the libertarians and austrians are.

Still, quite inadequate from a communist perspective.

This. The far right annoys me because of how often they point out very real problems which remain unaddressed by the ruling class, and then start screaming about Jews and Muslims instead of blaming the actual people who caused these problems. But these fucking centrists who see nothing wrong with living in a oligarchical surveillance state ruled by an economic system which is literally rendering the planet more and more unsuitable for human life with every passing second just make me want to kill someone.

Economics are tought by universities that are funded by institutions that promote certain economic views.

I wonder why said institutes would only include stuff that serves them…

I wonder…

Economics is a combination of truisms and bullshit.
the neoliberalism is the bullshit part

Now that you mention it, there is something… weird about status quo apologia, isn't there? I mean, beyond the economists and other professional propaganda churners, they get paid for it even if they believe their own bullshit. I mean the useful idiots, who sincerely believe it without monetary gain. It's kind of that best-of-all-possible-worlds self-assurance, with some just-world fallacy thrown in. So it does have something vaguely religious about it, tho "cargo cultish" is probably a better term.

have you read the battle of breton woods?

They're not centrists, they're extremists complicit in keep the scam going.
At this point massive redistribution of wealth is an entirely rational, moderate and commonly held position.

It's probably a valid theory, a more demystified version of hydraulic keynesianism. It would put a lot of power that is now with the banks back into state control, and would be more humane if the idea of a guaranteed job is included. But doesn't do anything to fundamentally change capitalism beyond utterly cucking the financial sector.

Adam Smith was a Christian philosopher and I don't believe he claimed economics to be very similar to physics, as economists in the past 100 years have done. Perhaps you will find a few sentences about markets gravitating towards this or that in econ books that are older than that, but that's about it.

I have not, though I really ought to. (I know only the general outline of events.)

I'm not sure why but I hate these people far more than I do conservatives or right wingers. Something about the combination of smugness, worship of shit-tier maths, and a complete fucking lack of any sense of style about the whole thing really causes my jimmies to be thoroughly rustled.

I can't find enough firsthand data to confirm my suspicions, let alone any secondhand expert analyses that aren't contaminated with neolib shilling (or painfully amateurish), but IMHO the two strongest theoretical objections to neoliberalization's claims of 3rd-world enrichment are as follows:
1) A great deal of "income" and "wealth" gains in economic figures consists of forcing people more fully into the capitalist economy, as opposed to prior non-economic activities of equal or greater value to individuals, the uncertainty of which is excacerbated by shoddy census activities of 3rd world governments. The classic example is forcing subsistence farmers to grow cash crops or perform wage labor, in return for money, so they can buy the things (or at least substitutes thereof) they used to themselves make.

This could probably best be confirmed or rebuked by looking for rate of change mismatches between standard of life measurements and economic/commodity stats.

2) Sheer glowing overattribution to the "wonders" of neoliberalism. Numerous forces of modernity, such as industrialization, education, secularism, democracy, and the sheer decrease in war during the atomic age would have left their mark on the 3rd world even without neoliberalism.

This even extends to things that actually are subsets of neoliberalism, but only in part. For instance, in any but the most isolationist international regime imaginable, things like tropical fruit and Mideastern oil would obviously still be global commodities.


A classic piece on the subject:
thirdworldtraveler.com/NAFTA_FTAA/Mexico_NAFTA_TenYears.html

Economics is literally voodoo. Varoufakis wrote an entire book on why it's bullshit. Pic related basically examines every major economist from Adam Smith to Marx to Keynes to Hayek and tells you how all of their theories have glaring holes and how market economics are effectively unpredictable.

youtube.com/watch?v=FLse54Eobk4


Keynes' opinion was also that no one really knows, the human element makes it unpredictable, like psychology. Varoufakis say's that himself.
Hayek was a malignant cunt who talked about liberty but really thought the freedom of capital was more important than the freedom of people.

No half.
bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/fdb484c8-99a1-32a3-83be-20108374b985

Le TF2 Hat Commie Man wrote a book debunking the entire canon of economics then?

To be fair, like every Post-Keynesian has written a book debunking economics since 2008.

is there a more based school of economics within capitalism?

Neo-Malthusians?

Seriously tho, is there a difference between Neo-Keynesians and Post-Keynesians?

I think it comes down to arguments over how money works, but I don't really know what I'm talking about enough to elaborate on that.
(Still half tempted to joke that the only difference is what side of 1979 the economist is on.)

Holy shit, your professor was an Austrian school ancap.

The first thing to keep in mind about economists is that almost all of them are bullshitters, so the way they name concepts is completely asinine and you shouldn't try to squeeze any meaning out of the names themselves. Neo-Keynesianism might as well be named pigtits, it doesn't mean shit.

Neo-Keynesianism is basically neoclassical economics with some adhoc assumptions thrown in about people not being perfectly informed and prices being sticky. Keynes is often presented (by right-wingers and lazy Marxists who copy what the right-wingers said instead of reading Keynes) as somebody who assumed neoclassical economics with friction, so mass unemployment happens in that mind set because prices, and the price of labor power in particular, don't adjust quickly enough - when Keynes himself mocked that view. Keynes moved quite a bit away from neoclassical economics, and Neo-Keynesianism isn't neo at all, on the contrary, it is a regression getting closer to neoclassical economics again.

Post-Keynesianism is a similar irritating term (and it has to be, as Neo-Keynesianism had been coined earlier), being closer to Keynes than so-called Keynesians and Neo-Keynesians are. It's all about Abba Lerner's Functional Finance (AKA Modern Monetary Theory) and muh uncertainty.

NKs talk about government spending like this: We need to act in a counter-cyclical way, spend when in a recession and then tax when in a boom to avoid overheating the economy (nonsensical metaphor) and to re-fill our financial reserves (single-household thinking wrongly applied to sovereign issuers of their own currency). The FF position is to spend and tax with an eye towards high employment and low inflation, and that the goal of balancing the budget when you issue your own currency is utterly pointless. The position of Keynes himself is a bit more cryptic, in some remarks he appears to be close to FF, but he makes some concessions to the balanced-budget folks by having the anything-goes attitude only for some investment categories like infrastructure IIRC.

Centrism is merely the upholding of the current consensus. It just so happens that the consensus is immensely damaging and exploitative.

So here's a thought: If Neo-Keynesians are/were just bullshitters, why was the post-ww2 period so good compared to what came next?
Did they keep just enough Keynes to be vaguely worthwhile, or was it just the capital controls working their magic until 1971, or what?

Do I switch majors, comrades?

Because every other major industrial economy on the planet had been bombed into rubble.

The US was the only country left standing at the time, and they wanted to help rebuild the European countries to make sure they didn't go Communist.

undermine the consensus from within

But everyone grew faster if I'm interpreting "average global growth" correctly. Indeed, the US came off the worst in unemployment on average and growth was faster in the 60s than the 50s despite there surely being more to rebuild in the 50s.

It seems too perfect that things would collapse nearly immediately after the Nixon shock if it was the end of postwar rebuilding instead of the end of vaguely Keynesian-inspired policy that ruined things. (The same seems true if we just accept that it's diminishing returns from constant growth or whatever.) particularly given my ad-hoc understanding is that most of Europe was doing pretty well by the late 50s/early 60s.

Read Pasinetti

Marx wrote one like 150 years earlier, too. It's called Capital, volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy.

Economics, political economy and all other bourgeois disciplines that attempt to analyze how economic activities are determined without a wholly encompassing view that factors in the history of human activity and a dialectical method of analysis will always be blindly myopic and inadvertently reductionist.

Today, these fields have been completely relegated to predicting and detecting trends on the market, which should tell you a lot. In Marx's time at least political economy was still somewhat vibrant and varied.

Modern Monetary Theory is basically the same as Functional Finance, which Abba Lerner described in the 1940s.


UBI is not a fundamental part of MMT. There are some MMT followers who are for UBI, just like their are some followers of other schools of thought who are for UBI.

bump

OP here. Ever since I went to that sub and its counterparts (/r/badeconomics, /r/enoughcommiespam etc) I've had some degree of doubt about leftism. It mostly manifests as "why are you reading these idealistic 100 year old authors, smarter people than you that use empirical statistics and complex math have scoffed at them for decades". I had to give up my dream of mechanical engineering after repeatedly failing the math required so you could say I'm a little insecure about the math part. I also read on wikipedia that key Marxist theorems like LTV, TRPF are not accepted by today's economists - theorems that are at the core of Leftist thought.

Can someone, preferably an econ major, counsel me on this? Socialism is clearly a concept worth consideration - why do so many economists reject it? Why is practically every socialist theorist's photo in black and white, with no recognizable names besides Bookchin in the last 50 years?

Sorry for bringing back a dead thread.

because they have a vested interest in doing so

Neoliberals took over economics as a field in the 1970s. Not just socialism, keynesianism got purged as well.

why do so many people whose livelihood depends on their status within a given system discredit proposed alternatives to that system? what do you think the answer is user?

And given that neoclassical (the dominant school of economics in the west) economists have a successful prediction rate roughly on par with a coin toss, why treat them and their followers as scientific experts rather than the clergy they effectively are?


Who is Wolff.
Who is Zizek.
Who is Varoufakis.
Who Kliman
Who is Steedman

Not to mention whatever China is spewing out (questionable socialist cred or not.) I mean, yeah, socialist theorists and economists are pretty fringe. But socialist thought in general is pretty fringe since the end of the cold war.

Are all the jobs you can get with an econ degree just delegated to right wing think tanks and shill farms, though? Why do tenured professors still seem to follow the same trend?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that for most people / normies, the aversion to socialism comes from lack of exposure + lingering cold war propaganda. As a history major, where dealing with socialism is a requirement, you see a lot of leftist sympathy, or at least a lot more than the general population. Econ on the other hand would also require dealing with socialism, but economists all seem to reject it. Or am I making this up? Does economics ignore or completely brush past socialism, as Richard Wolff said?

...

Not at all, the finance industry (banks, investment firms, etc) also likes economics degrees.

Thing is, economics, as it broadly understood outside of certain strata of academia, is a field that exists to examine the system we have (in largely positive terms - if you've acquired a load of student debt, spent much of your life, and invested your identity in a profession that exists as a result of capitalism while giving you social status, are you really going to rock the boat?), rather than propose or examine alternatives. It's largely considered an "apolitical" field by virtue of our modern cultural conception of economy and politics as largely disconnected spheres.


I'd mostly agree with that, yes.

rdwolff.com/economic_theorists_the_high_priests_of_capitalism

Don't forget the most celebrated economist of our time, Thomas Piketty, plus his collaborators Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. Though otherwise just generic Keynesians, they're spearheading a revolt against neoliberalism in economics and elsewhere.

The majority of economics PhD students do not research macroeconomics. their research areas are subfields of microeconomics which means they are really good at predicting trends in certain markets and creating pricing algorithms (think housing, health, commodities, etc.)

The people who do study macro mostly just assume certain things about the system, abstract away significant parts of the complexities of our economic system, and try to get at a certain individual problem or phenomena. They then go work in government, private industry, or academia (or a mixture of the three throughout their career).

As far as your point on
most economics people do not work at think tanks. It's just a select few who do end up there. The vast majority get positions in academia, government, or private industry.

Marx didn't use the LTV in the way critiqued by most modern economists iirc. He made a distinction between different forms of value where most microeconomists go "value is wot it sells for innit?"

Fundamentally, I cannot convince you marx was right - I have not read marx. Indeed, I have read no socialist economist. (Though I really ought to read Kalecki, who I've heard had some leanings that way) However I strongly suggest you reject everything spouted by mainstream economists of our present time-period. My understanding is that a lot of the mathematics is an abstraction to hide models that would be plainly ridiculous if you spelled them out verbally. Not that all of it is like that, but still. You give me free reign on the components, and I can build you a mathematical model that'll tell you anything you want.

If any capitalist economist was ever right about anything, it was Keynes. That he lay on the scrapheap of history until 2008 when neoliberals desperately had to puppet his corpse in the laziest, stupidest way possible to prevent total global economic collapse (err… Actually, why do I like Keynes again? Collapse already!) is a testament to what useless bullshitters modern economists are. (I would almost suggest they're like bankers - the trick isn't to be right it's to be wrong in the same way as everyone else - then when 2008-style events hit, nobody can blame you because everyone was wrong.)

nakedkeynesianism.blogspot.co.uk/
Fun blog to kick about with for looking at some analysis of economics as a whole (though fundamentally still capitalist, I have - as mentioned - a soft spot for actual Keynesians, and hopefully it should still help disavow you of the notion that mainstream economics is worth anything.)

Finally, remember that these Subreddits are almost entirely garbage populated by redditors, with all the implications that carries. (Suddenly that seemingly coherent economic argument in favour of using a neutron bomb on detroit starts to seem a bit more dubious when you realize it's a 22 year old wannabe-STEMlord regurgitating what their professor said, same with /r/itscommunismsfaultmarsisntinhabitableanymoretheydontcallittheredplanetfornothing, and this post when you realize it's written by a 23 year old NEET with a drinking problem and a maoist cap - kidding!)

By no means am I saying reject all critique of leftist (or even, *gasp*, Keynesian!) thought. I'm just saying that when someone sets out to defend neoliberalism (or the status-quo in general) it's a starting point that should immediately trigger scepticism even from capitalists. (Hell, even proper Lolbertartans ought to object to the use of state power to impose it from above.) Though perhaps as a token fig-leaf to mainstream economists as a whole, even a few of them have apparently caught on to the fact that growing wealth inequality from rent-seeking isn't actually a good thing. (Fortunately, we have politicians to defend us from this temporary apostasy on their part leading to any policy change. Don't want to incur the wrath of the invisible hand, hallowed by thy name…)

Varoufakis would say yes, but I suppose you could copy his quest of subjecting yourself to liberal ideology for decades and learning a whole bunch of useless junk mathematics so as to attempt to be a moderately subversive element from within the system. Which he would argue is not worth the effort, and I imagine most people here would agree.

refute this.
protip: you can't

NUCLEAR
P O W E R
(I just solved the waste problem: We feed it to neoliberals.)

...

You do realize capitalism literally cannot exist in a fully automated world, right?

never change Holla Forums

as someone who has an econ degree
Absolutely, it's pretty shit job wise

Can you run me down what your econ department thought of socialism, and what material was assigned?

...

Even "Economic History" didn't touch it

Pretty generic stuff until junior/senior year during which you could branch off into more specific stuff, such as health care, game theory, history, and so on

don'tgetthejoke.jpeg

Economists don't even acknowledge "capitalism" as actually existing.

bumping good thread

Leftism does not begin or end with Marx you know. Even if Marx is wrong it means nothing for socialism as a whole.

Also automation and capitalism are incompatible with each other.

10/10