What should we make of "modern economics" critiques of Marx?

only if your job is the legitimization of the system of capitalism

No, his description and explanation of the workings of capitalism is useless because everything he says is accounted for in mainstream models and these even add stuff it ignores. What it ends up being is a roundabout way of saying the same things as a particular mainstream model. And it is roundabout because of its fixation in defining value to come from labour in a tautological way, for which the only purpose is to then say that workers are being exploited. So, the reason why Marxism is the way it is and the reason why it insists on not dying is merely ideological. Hence, it is useless.

Buddy, you're not going to mindfuck anyone with this shit.

Where did I say that? Marxism tries to explain capitalism and what I'm saying is that its explanations adds nothing relative to the one from mainstream economics.

This isn't true though. Neoclassical economics doesn't look at capitalist production at all, only markets for exchange.

Note that a factory is NOT a market. Every firm is a market imperfection.

What should we see if neoclassical economics holds?

a) a purely static economy. Neoclassicism only deals with a general equilibrium, and does not say anything about how an economy moves when it is not in equilibrium

b) no unemployment; the market always clears

c) NO PROFITS; marginal cost is equal to marginal income

d) following from a) because the economy doesn't change, no bubbles, crashes, gluts or shortages of any kind. Everyone has perfect information, including knowing what everyone else is thinking, so commodities exchange at their true value when bargaining takes place

Read Modern Political Economics by Varoufakis. A mathematician who went into economics and saw their misuse of math.

false

false.

false

false, and these points don't even imply each other

false

hahaha, Varoufakis is a joke

I'm starting to think you don't know what you're talking about and you are fighting 19th century ghosts.

Looks like there's a copy on libgen, might add it to my list.
Can you give me a brief synopsis of his thesis, style of arguments, and types of evidence?
For instance, does this mean that the actual results arrived at by mathematical economics involve an abuse of mathematical logic and are in that sense invalid mathematical proofs/reasoning? Does it allege the unsuitability of their hypotheses to describe real world phenomena, i.e. some survey of how statements like "assume a rationally self-interested player/profit-maximizing firm" make trivial predictions contravened by evidence, or can be shown sufficiently poor approximations under a priori arguments (the assumption that time and space effectively do not exist, or that perfect information is available instantly under perfect competition?) Does it criticize technically correct mathematical results' misadoption/misuse/misrepresentation on the policy level? For instance, observing that the conditions of Arrow's impossibility theorem can simultaneously hold if you omit unrestricted domain, or fiddle with numerous other alternative assumptions, one naturally wonders about motivation for the choice of hypotheses in the first place (I've had people tell me that Arrow's theorem "disproves" communism) and its seeming lack of generality for a mathematical result. Explaining the non-compatibility of a highly specific list of conditions on such a function, rather than characterizing anywhere near the breadth of possibly suitable functions according to the relative strength of their hypotheses (i.e. A is stronger than B if A implies B and not vice versa, this relation generates a partial ordering on the set of hypotheses) seems akin to doing a single, basic calculation, and not establishing any general method for doing them. Especially since you should want those hypotheses which are only sufficiently strong as to correspond to an aspect of reality you're modeling. Really it looks to me like an attempt to beg the question while hiding behind spooky-looking math formalism, but I don't have a great level of expertise here and would appreciate insight into these questions from a work on "skepticism of mathematical economics."
What I'm decidedly not looking for, however, is to commit to some smug solipsistic "in the end, human nature was far too complex than numbers could have ever hoped" don't-kno-nuffin popsci crap. It dawns on me I really should have a better handle than I do on contemporary critique of mainstream economics, especially as I do "visualize" dialectics as a kind of dynamical system, with equilibria and all that crap

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Marx has been proven right by history and if you're not a Marxist, then you're a faggot.

If continental philosophy is just bad analytical philosophy, surely communalists are just bad Marxists.

analytical marxism might be more up your alley

Perhaps. I'm as a rule skeptical of people who claim to have "developed" Marx's work, and it seems a rather recent, niche invention.
Maybe if somebody experienced in the field could make a reading list like the empirical marxism guys, or run a few threads, I'd get a better sense of this.

oy…

if anything that's exactly where he failed

That poster is right in that the description of neoclassical economics is wrong. (I don't know enough about the academic work of Varoufakis to comment on that.) The usual neoclassical crap that people learn first (and for most people, that's it) is PARTIAL equilibrium, that's what Marshall and later Samuelson dealt with. The less common stuff is general equilibrium and that was Walras, and later Arrow and Debreu.

Unemployment is usually "explained" with muh greedy unions, government intervention, friction, but it's there.

Marginal whatever relates to the last unit and marginal cost or m. revenue or m. profit or m. loss do not correspond to total revenue, total etc. The example from Ricardo is about putting land into use to produce something, and as the quantity demanded increases, worse and worse land is put into use, the price of the stuff sold has to be high enough so that the farmers on the worst land are still able to cover their costs. That's the farmer at the margin, the farmers with the better land aren't just covering their costs, they make a nice profit.

No. Because it's not an argument.

>>>Holla Forums

lol. which mainstream models are those again?

Could you answer before the thread dies? I'm genuinely curious about the book you recommended but I'm going to need some more info

Correct, marxism is a religion. You can't disprove a religion through science.

Bad post

Hi, Popper!

theres little evidence for Marxist "economics" in the first place. has it right, Marx was a hack who came up with his theories and then tried to justify them after the fact.

what is the difference between price and value, exactly? How else can we communicate value and scarcity in a complex economy but through prices?

Anyway the main problem with LTV is that it excludes the possibility that goods have inherit value without labor (if you find gold nuggets in a pond for example), and that labor itself is worthless without an actual demand for it.

says the one being ignorant and smug about the mainstream economic critique of the LTV.

t. completely ignorant about actual economics and only knows Marxist """economics"""

lol call everyone who doesn't blindly subscribe to your stupid relgion "porky", that'll win the argument

By that standard, economism is a religion. And so are all social sciences, all political convictions, all theories of aesthetics, all philosophy, etc.
"It's a religion" is an even more vague pejorative than "communist" and "fascist" in the mainstream discourse, and that's saying something.

One of the many problems with Marx's theory: says for money and goods to exchange hands there needs to be some equality of value between the goods and the money. Of course this is false; each party valued what he got MORE than what he exchanged for it, that's why he decided to sell it/buy it on the market. Marx can't into asymmetrical exchange.

Oh and the plebian classes have always invented all sorts of nonsense to try to justify their all consuming cognitive dissonance in the face of their utter inferiority and uselessness. Marxism is Christianity 2.0, which really just means jewish universalism 3.0. tldr kill yourself 🍀🍀🍀((marxist🍀🍀🍀)) faggots.

no, social sciences at least try to test their theories and justify them in a rigorous way, despite all the problems that follow. There are plenty of things we've leared as a result of economics that are not shaky at all in their justification and practicality–for example, the basic supply and demand graph, the effect of price floors/ceilings, and the coase theorem. Marx's exact beliefs were only that–beliefs, an ideology, a religion. He made no serious attempt to test or falsify his writings, and even Lenin realized half of his ideology was nonsense when he came to implement the NEP.

do you have the chart that shows how jewish the various rungs of government in the USSR were?

One is a numerical figure. The other is a comparison between commodities. Commodities have value in relation to other commodities. Prices are just numbers that reflect this value relation at a given time or place.

Okay, stop for a moment. Why would finding gold nuggets in a pond be valuable? What can you do with gold nuggets? Fuck all, except exchange them for other more actually practically useful goods or services. What would all of those goods and services require (unless they all just happened to be found in ponds too, but that's not how the reality of commodity production works)? Well, they'd all have required labour.

And yes, of course labour can become worthless if there is no demand for it. What do you think unemployment is, you muppet.

(checked)
nah

Yes, and they rely extensively on ad hoc hypotheses, and are unfalsifiable, impressionistic senses of the world.
There's a huge problem with studying macroeconomic phenomena through microeconomic methods, however. Saying that the minimum wage as a price floor will always increase unemployment ignores the increased consumption due to increased income, and subsequent shifting of the demand curve. Over which price ranges, given a certain initial market condition, will a minimum wage increase help or hurt employment and business? We have another MB=MC, but with undefined, vague hypotheses, because the "demand curve" in the first place is not well-defined. Certainly it has a stochastic component - "semi-regular smokers" will not deterministically want the same average quantity of cigarettes every day, and so on. The most sterile, useless approximations do indeed yield consistent results, but their suitability for the real world is another matter entirely.
Nigger please. I'm trying to take you seriously.

you're saying that commodities have an objective value, not dependent on the particular time and place?

harsh words

no, not to the extent implied here. There are a number of (flawed) ways to measure macro phenomenon, so it's certainly not "unfalsifiable" in the way Marxist """economics""" is.

pretty misinformed tbh. Most economists hold that the effect of minimum wage on employment is fairly weak (though still negative), though it does hurt poor people (whose labor isn't necessarily worth the increased wage) disproportionately.

Prices don't contain nearly enough information to do all the magic that market nutters ascribe to them. Some things I need else I die, some things not. Do you think I need a market process to inform people about that? Do I perhaps need a market process in order that I myself get that important information about me? You can get physical information about the nutrition humans need and physical information about the coal and other resources and an input-output table of the physical flows, how stuff is made physically, which cannot be reduced to price aggregates without loss of information.

That something can be useful without being the product of human labor isn't news to anybody here and Smith and Marx said as much.

But do I? How often do you think such a thing happens? Production processes that have some element of luck in them do not result in each piece getting sold according to its actual labor content. Again, not something Marx claimed. The LTV is about aggregates.

That people don't all want the same goods at the same time is, once again, not something Marx ever denied. Implicit in your claim is the view that history starts with a fixed finished pile of stuff that just exists with God-given owners who then exchange the stuff, which is the end of human history. But the real economy is one of PRODUCTION and exchange.

what is wrong exactly with the coase theorem? Are you going to strawman ECON again and say that the coase theorem holds even when transaction costs are high or something?

No, I'm saying that value is determined by socially necessary labour time. The fact that in English we use the words "value" and "price" so interchangeably is what is fucking us all up here. Value, in Marxist economics, is a technical term. It literally means "socially necessary labour time"; that is, the average amount of labour time required to reproduce that same item for the market today.

Price tends towards value, but obviously price is affected by hundreds of minor factors too; location, time, trends and fashions (demand), the shop owner's personal accounts, etc.

1. There are too many human factors in an economy for anyone to claim that they have a perfect model which represents everything in the economy. Marginalism implies that supply and demand determine prices. Yet this is also just another model, which fails under certain conditions. Some people claim inherent value. So that means that if you have a whole lot of something it loses its value. Yet the use value of the item is the same as before. Unless if the use value is the rarity itself. Meaning that it becomes useless. So suddenly you have use-values which depend on supply and one which does not. The difference is that Marx never claims that he wants to explain the autistic difference between these cases. Because he knew that it is pointless and obvious, to the point that even shitposters on Holla Forums could understand it.

2. Marx mentioned his model was specifically made to explain the process of creating capital in a factory. It explains the extraction of surplus value, which can be explained with the LTV. He used a theory which explained the relation of value to the people working in said factory, and the people who were going to buy the products created. These people don't feel the market forces of supply and demand. Because their wage will automatically adjust accordingly. If bread has a high supply and cheaper to buy. That means that the means of subsistence goes down, and thereby the wages go down as well. To these people the labour put into the product is indeed the value of the product. Especially if you assume that the worker could take it for himself. Here comes to use-value again. The worker can sell his labour below the labour value of what he creates. Or he can take the product of his labour and enjoy the full value. If these workers create whatever they need to survive, they don't need to compete with capitalist markets.

3. Since economics isn't a real science it is equally ridiculous to make proofs that are falsifiable in the sense of how Popper meant it. They are supposed to be predictive and explain what they intend to explain. Again, Marx explained exploitation. Marx went further to explain other market forces which would play in on exploitation. Yet this is not the heart of the socialist argument.

4. Even if the LTV is false it doesn't mean that exploitation doesn't happen at all. Exploitation can happen under any value model. Capitalists will claim that exploitation is nothing more than a capitalists motivation, and therefore necessary. While wages are a workers motivation. This argument is extremely relativistic and depends on who you ask. It isn't a scientific argument, but an opinion.

TL;DR: I claim that autistic screeching about value doesn't mean anything in praxis.

uhhh…. yes they do. If a price is very much above the cost of production, it indicates scarcity and incentivizes people to create more of it. On the other side of the coin, when prices are raised, the consumer is incentivized to find an alternative product or simply not buy, which would reduce scarcity. Prices communicate social need (taking into account ability to pay) and effect production.

people generally already know what they want and need to do what. Your example with coal proves my point even more: why would anyone produce (steel, for example) from coal unless they could make a profit doing so? You can calculate physical processes and manufacture processes easily, but the question of what to produce/buy is most efficiently answered by prices.

ok that's fine if value only means that then the LTV is self evident and true by definition, at least for Marxists.

However, for real economists, value is completely subjective and has almost the same definition of price.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

They may win a battle here or there, but overall they will always miss the point because they're economists instead of political economists.

At least that's my impression, having not actually read Kapital.

.
Why do you assume we do communicate it, Hayek? (or at least do so with any degree of accuracy.)

Then I've gone out to walk by a pond. Sounds pretty laborious to me.

Most economists also believe the supply curve slopes upwards, disregard anything they say.

Thanks for indirectly giving me a book suggestion that covers a topic I was looking for.

wow good job finding an exception that redistributes wealth from the uber wealthy to the producers and which only applies to probably less than 5% of the GDP, you sure showed me the evils of capitalism

also that doesn't actually change the fact that consumers are materialistically incentivized not to buy velben goods (but choose to anyway as a display of status) and that producers are incentivized to produce them because of their high price, idiot

it's not an assumption, it's a fact (excluding perhaps velbem goods) that prices communicate scarcity–how do you think people set prices?

…the supply curve doesn't slope upwards? feel free to provide any evidence whatsoever for that claim.

Accept that price tends to be fixed and people don't barter for prices. It's either take it or leave it.
The capitalists don't know what price the consumer wants. Why lower price when I could just lower the quantity of goods on the shelves? I'd make more money in the long run considering I know how many goods are being sold more than I do what prices the consumer wants.

yeah the problem with economics is that it's too objective and there's not enough disagreements on the philosophical level… this is what commies actually believe

glad I could help

prices are sticky but for fuck's sake they're not fixed. Have you ever driven a car?

yes they do: $0.

1. competition would lower it before you did and then you'd sell none
2. almost no consumer goods keep their value for very long
3. Often it's more profitable to lower the price so that the consumer will buy more of them

its not actually an exception, I was wrong in calling it that

degenerate weab

uhh… did the mods just delete all those posts because I called that commie a degenerate weab?

I'm pretty sure I'm still seeing them. What were they?

My point was that consumers don't dictate price because you don't barter for price. The information of knowing what the average price people want is non-existent. The capitalist only knows for sure the average quantity of goods being sold. It is a much safer to profit by reducing the quantity of goods not being sold. The whole point of supply and demand relies on goods and how many goods people want. Price is something that is actually created through accounting formulas.

Why lower prices by 25% when I can reduce the goods I am putting on the shelf by 25%?

Why not? You are obviously dishonest.

There are lots of methods. Like nigga, go study business instead of economics and realize you're learning party tricks.
I mean, that cost plus pricing is a thing alone should throw up red flags.

Or as Steve Keen notes:

SRAFFA
R
A
F
F
A

Sit and read this sometime:
digamo.free.fr/keen2011.pdf

Or since you'll take "any evidence whatsoever", I mean: unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/whichever-way-you-paint-it-the-supply-curve-is-flat/
(I didn't even read that one.)

did you even read my post? Idk why I'm even wasting my time with you, economic illiterate

Wrong. People want stuff cheaper, and producers know that for most consumer products the demand curve slopes downward. The price therefore tends to reflect the price that gives the producers the most profit.

What are you even trying to say "lowering the number of goods on the shelves"? Do you mean creating artificial scarcity like de Beers does? That's impossible unless you have a near monopoly, and as I said earlier most consumer goods (cars, bread, furniture, etc) don't keep their value for very long.

Read Capitalism by Anwar Shaikh. It identifies the problems with Marxian economics.

No they don't you fucking cuck, actual economists know the difference.

Yes, and you said $0 but that is impossible and the capitalist doesn't have any information beside $0.

No. If I have 30 milks on my shelf and I only sell 20. Why reduce the price when I know how many are being sold? If milk costs $3 and I reduce the supply by 10 then save money on production. Why lower prices when I don't know the actual wanted price nor demand when I know how many goods are being sold? I can reduce the price by 1/3 and have the production costs to think about and I will actually profit less than if I would just reduce the scope of my production while maintaining price. Again, I am also a customer. Why pay for goods that go to waste and I know is going to waste, which costs me money?

Once you factor in that you cannot increase consumption independent of income distribution this collapses.

Furthermore due to the ridiculously simple fact that infinitesimals aren't zero, "perfect competition" and monopoly run very close to one another indeed. (The only alternative would be irrational behaviour on the part of individual firms.)

How does non-classical economics explain how prices for mass produced goods are determined if it isn't by labour value? Even if you account for marginalisation, most of the price is determined by labour value. Where the value of materials used for the goods is also determined by labour value.

This doesn't refute or even relate to anything I said.

What? Not at all my dude. If you're going to say something's implicit you better show how. How is the fact that human beings exchange both symbolic value tokens (money) and goods, and that these exchanges are not necessarily symmetrical with regard to "market" value

(We might even argue that some some universal sense of equality of exchange is already a flawed intuition; there is no such pure "market value" because prices are always in flux as a result of the subjective preferences of human beings, which, this model assumes, are generally unpredictable, so there is no way to determine if ANY exchange is perfectly symmetrical)

but ARE symmetrical with regard to personal value, i.e. any voluntary exchange of goods/money must AT LEAST result in SOME increase of value for both the parties involved in the exchange, in any way reliant on the claim that "history" starts (don't even know what you mean by this) with a set amount of stuff?

You maybe just have a problem with the notion of how someone could acquire property in the first place? To which I would say that a gun in the face pretty much settles what is and is not my property, should we desire such clarity.

You'll probably ask where I got that gun; well, some laborers made it for me. Was it right for them to sell it to me? Who knows. Do I own the gun, or do they? Who cares; I get to USE it, and that's all that counts (as far as actual human affairs are concerned; I'm sympathetic to the idea of property as a useful fiction, but not convinced. I ground my notion of property in a claim that one's own body is one's property in an unqualified sense, but my argument above would still go through even if I didn't believe this).

Agree completely.

I'm going to need you to expand on your argument if you want to have discussion; I see no conflict of ideas. This is actually a common problem when I speak with leftists by the way, I've noticed. I think it's because you're all inherently less confrontational and are not really willing to put your real contentions on the table.

Spit it out faggot let's fight.

...

why would they need to be intelligent to pick the graph that reflects the data they work with daily?
it's certainly more empirical than "it's this ONE graph for all businesses, because that's the graph that makes my model work."

is not one-dimensional. Your view is upside-down. Because money is only a one-dimensional indicator of scarcity, you liberal lot "concludes" that the concept of scarcity is one-dimensional.

Here is how the market really works. Good A is a crappy and cheap substitute for good B. As your income rises slightly above subsistence, you take the chance to buy LESS of A, because of just how crappy it is. Good A could be horrendous food that meets caloric needs, for instance, but the issue here is rather general.

Suppose the income from your job then stays the same, the price of good B stays the same, and the price of good A rises, but per calorie it's still cheaper than B. What happens is that you now buy more of good A, because its price went up.

Producing at a higher scale usually means you can produce at lower cost per unit. The issue is being able to sell the stuff. Rising supply curves are sort of justified as short-run phenomena, if the production line is optimized for a specific quantity and then the business is surprised by some opportunity to sell stuff, so they make an ad-hoc decision to ramp up production. This is a very particular situation and it is not plausible that this has a huge influence on price formation. If you don't know everything in advance exactly, you may at least know that you do get surprised occasionally in one direction or the other, so you don't super-optimize everything. You produce with a buffer and within the buffer your costs per unit stay roughly the same.

???

It's not LTV, but Materialism that claims that there is no inherent value (or any abstract ideal qualities of things).

This is why LTV deals only with specific values for specific people in specific circumstances.

Also, you didn't even read LTV, if you use gold nuggets as an example of things having inherent value. There is no "inherent value" of gold - it exchange-value of gold that makes it valuable.

This is why actual Marxists use words like "use-value" and "exchange-value", not simply "value".

No, it does not. Exchange-value means value during exchange. That's it.

It is only then is it proved (not defined) that this exchange-value tends to gravitate towards the cost of socially necessary labour time.