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Arguing that creditors are parasitic is very different than your first claim which was that Marx referred to as anyone who provided an "immaterial" commodity or service as a parasite.
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Nov 14, 2014 01:08
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But creditors are parasitic. I thought this was supposed to be out of date ivory tower gibberish designed to confuse the working man?
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Nov 14, 2014 01:13
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Typo posted:Which one? Assad's "Socialist" regime or the PKK which has became a nationalist movement just like every other Communist party eventually did? This completely ignores what they're actually doing in autonomous zones. Just because they're also a nationalist movement doesn't mean they're suddenly in conflict with Marxism.
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Nov 14, 2014 01:47
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https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/quote:We are trying to break with the theological formulation of the question. For us, the question of the Jew’s capacity for emancipation becomes the question: What particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the present-day Jew’s capacity for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation necessarily results from the special position of Judaism in the contemporary enslaved world. quote:The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails. quote:Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity, but this application could only become general after Christianity as a developed religion had completed theoretically the estrangement of man from himself and from nature. quote:Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism – huckstering and its preconditions – the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished. Yeah Marx has some real awesome ideas about merchants and trade alright. It must have been tough to go through hundreds of pages of manuscript changing "jews" into "bourgeoisie" without find and replace.
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Nov 14, 2014 02:01
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icantfindaname posted:if you'd read ronya's posts he points out over and over that Marxism has been reframed in neo/classical terms many times now. under such a framing exploitation is just any time a worker is paid less than their marginal product of labor. this happens in real life but collapses to zero in a neoclassical perfect market I want to clarify that there are multiple neoclassically-flavoured definitions of exploitation, of which W/P<MRPL is only one. Roemer emphasizes the inequality in the initial distribution of the capital stock - he argued that the market system is efficient (so W/P=MRPL) but that effects of the distribution are replicated through the price system (which is correct, albeit a little subtle). Bowles' Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution invokes incomplete-contracting efficiency wages, that is, firms pay workers more than their marginal revenue product  which by Robinson's 1950s definition would imply negative exploitation!
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Nov 14, 2014 05:36
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Wait I'm not fully up to date on my anti-marxist rethoric, I thought the jewish bolshevik conspiracy was the enemy? Good job using something written by a jewish man as a critique of an anti-semitic text as proof that his economic theory is wrong I guess
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Nov 14, 2014 05:38
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I think it's important to be consistent in one's criticisms - if you jump and start cheering when post-Keynesians bang on about the problems of homogenous capital, you should realize that classical economists commit the sin far more egregiously than the post-Cowles-Commission thinkers do
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Nov 14, 2014 06:00
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Sup gang. Sorry I couldn't get back to yinz sooner.asdf32 posted:So the general question of "how do marx's definitions relate to the real world" is where you want to make your stand? It's the question where giving the answer has insufficient "returns"? How can we not consider it telling if the marxism debate drives to a halt here. It's not that the question; it's my past experience of trying to explain things to you. Maybe you missed that in my post. Maybe you caught it but you're spinning it to look like I'm deflecting. Either way, you're basically making my point. And considering how many definitions within the value theory relate to something either directly measurable or algebraically calculable from measurable phenomena, to answer you here would necessitate retreading a lot of ground that I know for sure I've covered. Your question amounts to "so what was that Marx guy saying, anyway?" You seem to want me to breathe this information into you. It's impossible. You've got to be willing to put in the effort to read and comprehend what others write. Against my better judgment, I started to write you out a summary of Marxist concepts and what they imply for reality on the ground. I stopped when I noticed a few things. For one, some people are already taking stabs at that. For another, I actually already gave you — that is, you specifically — a short document doing exactly that in this very thread (and now twice). Granted, mine was shaping up to be even shorter, but this one is still reasonably compact. So start with that. And if you have any questions about a specific point therein, or would like to criticize some aspect of the theory (AFTER you restate it correctly), I would be glad to answer. God help me, I actually would. --- JeffersonClay posted:Parasite is a word that Marx uses repeatedly to describe people who do not produce surplus value, but rather live upon the surplus value created by others. Can you show where he makes a distinction between classes of people who do not produce surplus value? Ok. Yes, you are correct in ferreting out the appearance of the word "parasite," but to ignore the way he's using it is preposterous. It's as sensible as taking his references to "our friend, Moneybags" to mean he liked the game Monopoly. But I see others have beaten me to this point. Still, I'm gonna drive this poo poo home: You're effectively arguing that Karl Marx, who spent his whole life agitating to make all work "public sector," and inspired countless others to do the same, was viscerally opposed to public sector work. That feeling tugging at the back of your mind, that is "cognitive dissonance." It's a warning siren worth heeding. JeffersonClay posted:These institutions are highly valuable for capitalists, though! Every one of these positions can improve profitability! Yeah, it's a wonder liberals ever need to make this argument to justify the existence of public services. JeffersonClay posted:Because they want to transform some of the broad social benefits of the institution into private profits. This implies they recognize that the value of these institutions is higher than their cost, otherwise they would agitate to abolish them rather than privatize them. Right. They want to privately appropriate public wealth. And, it is agreed, we all know capital would never permit something individually or socially hazardous to persist just because it could turn a quick buck (minus, let's say, marketing). JeffersonClay posted:The POV that use-value without surplus value is unproductive does not exist. Neoclassical economics has recognized the existence of market failure and positive externalities for more than a hundred years. I doubt it exists in the mind of your average joe human, and thus if your methodological orientation is eliminative individualism you might be led to doubt it exists, period. But it most certainly does exist to an entity that has no interest in use-values — i.e., it's structural, dude. The average joe human also doesn't usually operate as a functionary of the needs of an emergent social operation of self-valorization. Such a capitalist firm may do any number of things, but whether it produces penny whistles or pepper spray, its "needs" as pertain to a particular productive techniques or materials are all contingent, while the need for returns is necessary in the same way that food is necessary for us; a company losing all its capital withers away as though starving. That's the logic of capital, the infamous "grow or die," that you're trying to deny. This raises an important question: Why would we WANT to put such an alien perspective, completely divorced from the wants and needs of actual humans, in the driver's seat of the world? It's like electing a shoggoth to the presidency. (Also, your two sentences appear completely unrelated. Maybe I'm missing something.) --- Boner Slam posted:The right way to do it is to say "I have this problem here, and I don't think an equilibrium model could explain this or it would be appropriate. With my non-equilibrium approach, here's what I get differently". And that's interesting. Oh, sure, I don't disagree. I didn't mean any of those questions as "gotchas," for what it's worth; they were just things that I recall had been niggling me about NK models. The TSS stuff towards which I gravitate is a non-equilibrium approach, which sets it against the bulk of mainstream work, but also Sraffian and even quite a lot of past Marxist stuff. Even still, I think it's got its back to the wind right now. Boner Slam posted:Let me remind you that the original research program for general equilibrium and its assumptions is to look at how general and minimal assumptions we would need to have an equilibrium. Something else that's always kind of felt funny: If we're structuring our assumptions such that we will make sure equilibrium happens, then doesn't this presuppose that "making sure equilibrium happens" is a structuring principle of economic actors? But I thought the whole point is that equilibrium is supposed to be something that "just happens." Minor nitpick: I think you and I are using "positivistic" differently. I meant it more in the sense of the position in the philosophy of social sciences, not in the way that contrasts with "normative." But your meaning was clear, either way. Boner Slam posted:It might be frustrating, but economics today is exactly not the one true philosophy of the one true model. Yeah, the New-Keynesian paradigm is leading - but only really in certain macro questions. And that's even a mixture of what you are proposing. Not everything in NK DSGE model is really founded, it's just that they are Very good at predicting in situations where their foundations are not challenged, such as before and after the financial crisis. It's leading, but this lead also self-reinforces via superstar/network effects and the like. Sort of like how everyone learns Java because everyone uses Java because everyone learns Java, etc., while to this day I've never met what I'd consider a serious partisan of Java, and I've met people passionate about Haskell. Also, thanks for the paper. I'd seen others arguing that it's basically impossible to say whether DSGE or ABM are getting better results. I'll give it a peep when I have the chance. --- ronya posted:1) since you raise the point, I'm sure you're aware that full cost pricing is consistent with a realist and marginalist perspective, e.g., by simply asserting that firms are mistaken on why they do what they do (i.e., that they use simpler heuristics instead of fully optimal intertemporal behaviour - this is a common explanation for consumer behaviour - and instead adjust heuristics from time to time, as arranged by a mysterious entity that one might call the Calvo fairy). You mean incorrect in the survey answers, or incorrect in the actual method and practice of pricing decisions? In either case (though less equivocally so in the latter), this is an "as if" argument, which is basically the standard approach of positivism in the Friedmanian tradition, so I don't see how it could be realist. It's a case of correlation and simplicity trumping the actual mechanisms underpinning the relations. I've got other problems with it, too. For one thing, it kind of flies against the underlying individualist methodology if one starts with "the economy is actors using means to achieve ends according to their preferences" and then immediately assumes that an actor can't even accurately understand its own preferred ends and/or the means by which it pursues them. Which is not to say businesses don't reevaluate their heuristics from time to time, which I acknowledge both empirically and as a matter of common sense. I think I get what you're saying with the Calvo fairy thing: MC floats along its curve, so it sidesteps the behavioral question about when, why, and how the adjustments are made. Right? (Though we do have some ideas about those questions.) Blinder didn't seem too hot on constant MC as explanatory, going by how many firms surveyed billed marginal costs "Totally Unimportant," the large gap between MC and price change, the numbers suggesting constant or increasing returns to scale are the overwhelming majority, etc. That last point still bugs me, because I know it's well known by now, so it makes one wonder: "Why start off with an upward-sloping marginal cost curve and then build a whole literature of price rigidity around explaining why it doesn't apply to ~88% of cases?" ronya posted:incomplete exchange-rate pass through ... utterly contradicts post-Keynesian stylization of full cost pricing. I've not read anything on this relationship. Any recommendations? ronya posted:3) Well - the theoretical problem with historical time is special pleading. The empirical problem with historical time is overfitting. One problem is fine; having both problems is fatal. I don't see how it's special pleading at all, though. It can absolutely be applied as a consistent standard. ronya posted:4?) Bewley's famous survey Blinder and Bewley in the same post, nice. I've actually got both right at my desk.  ronya posted:I'm not sure what you are basing a rigid realism vs positivism distinction on. I guess the shortest answer I can possibly give (apart from where I mentioned a distinction or two in a recent post) is that scientific realism, especially within the social sciences, prioritizes identification of concrete causal mechanisms (which persist whether actualized or not) with an eye to explanation, while a positivist would prioritize prediction by whatever means. There's a tendency to view explanation and prediction as symmetrical, but that only holds when closed experiments are possible, and closure is impossible in the social sciences. A stark example of this asymmetry might be a field of study that is highly explanatory without ever reliably making a single prediction — generative grammar comes to mind. So when we have a case where everybody knows a theory is bunk — e.g., the money multiplier's total non-correspondence to the actual mechanisms by which financial institutions operate — and one guy insists on defending its continued use on predictive grounds, that's a positivist argument. And it follows that its single-minded pursuit of correspondence between guess and test brings us no closer to an actual explanation of the events in question. I regard that as a serious problem. ronya posted:I feel that there appears to be little interest to commit to particular definitions and more to confabulate a narrative that can be used to fight political battles. That might be a feature rather than a bug for someone committed to the anti-analytical perspective, of course. What's vague at this point? Can't speak for everyone, but I've yet to change a single definition I've used in this thread or the last. Ditto, as we've seen, with the folks on the other side of the table. The problem isn't moving goalposts; it's rampant equivocation, inconsistently using one or the other definition in an argument. --- Sakarja posted:Actually, it's extremely important that latter-day Marxists undertake the hereditary Sisyphean task of defending the LTV against the critiques of Conrad Schmidt and Böhm-Bawerk. If D&D has taught me anything about Marxism, it is that nothing could be more important to the success of the imminent Revolution than defending the LTV along with the good name of Joseph Stalin and the economic performance of the USSR. Nice solidarity. Plenty enough hate floating around without an anarchist deciding to punch left. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 08:56
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To answer the OP: Yes. Marxism is dead. Marxism is a dead ideology which will never resurface. Unlike Christianity, which is a timeless, undying philosophy -- the eternal, final truth of this world, and of our species -- Marxism is a flash in the pan worldview by an unemployed, carbunkled, patronized malcontent. It is no surprise that its main appeal seems to be with the same group. And that they, like him, see it as a vehicle to their greatness. Their "historical legacy." They have attached their wagon to this train, in the belief that it is "inevitable." But oh -- how wrong they are. Marxism not only will be crushed, it has already been crushed. And those who cling to it are, without a doubt, on the wrong side of history. Like another heresy of centuries gone by that we have all forgotten -- so, too, is Marxism, a footnote in the history books.
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Nov 14, 2014 09:27
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tbp posted:So basically there's nothing immoral about me agreeing to sell my labor to a capitalist or whatever for X period of time, accumulating capital of my own, living off of the returns from that capital, right? And the alternative would mean a lifestyle most likely worse than what I had during it? There's nothing immoral about living in the Capitalist system while it still exist, otherwise Marx would have shanked Engels rather than being buddies and accepting his handouts. You should still be aware of the harm it causes though, for instance the fact that there won't be enough jobs for everyone as there will always be a reserve army of labour or that even the people who do get jobs and work hard won't necessarily end up in the place you imagine yourself to get to with decent Capital and the ability to invest it appropriately. That latter one is both a warning to yourself and to point out that even if you do achieve your goal, the same won't necessarily be true of the workers employed using the capital you invest. Hopefully an egalitarian streak might see you want to create a fairer system where you can end up doing well based on the work you do rather than your ability to attain a position where you can exploit others. Boner Slam posted:I have to admit that I am actually aware of the concepts you alude to, my question was voiced this way as a reply of using money units as "value" of a worker: I think assumed it because you got dragged into the JeffersonClay/Rodatose arguement which was just a mess of people not understanding each other because everyone was using different definitions of value. quote:As a sidenode, I dislike your definition of value as for me the definition of who works on a product is arbitrary. A good definition would perhaps be: Those who are essential to the process. But then of course, this would apply to a lot more people. As you see yourself, the mechanic servicing the machine creates no value by your definition, and yet he is very necessary in the sense that without his work there would be no jeans. The same goes however for a project manager, a logistics dude and even the banker securing the funds for purchasing raw material. And if the capitalist wouldn't have taken his money to plop the machine there, well I understand here you will go back to how he got his money in the first place... well perhaps he earned it all by painting? Value includes all sources which provide labour towards creating a machine this includes the wear and tear on machinery used as that also represents labour and hence value. That labour is provided by the mechanic, so hence he does contribute labour towards the final product. Chapter 7 of Capital Volume 1 is a good one to read if you want to gain Marx's understanding on this. It's also a decent one as he gets pretty snarky in the second section. To my mind, the other job roles you mention do contribute to the product being used or created but they do not contribute labour to it although you could make an argument for the manager. If the manager is good then they will improve the productivity of staff which will drive the average SNLT down in comparison to unmanaged or poorly managed staff, but he has not provided any labour towards actually creating the good. The value of his labour, rather, is embodied in the service (a type of commodity) he provides for which the Capitalist pays him. If you want to you could consider him to provide value to the commodity being produced and I don't think it would cause any real challenges to how the theory worked. You'd just have to take into account that the value he provides per jean would be smaller per pair of jeans than that of the labourers due to it being split into more pairs of jeans (as he presumably manages more than one employee). For the logistics dude and the banker, I can't really see the arguement. The logistics guy will help realise the use-value and exchange value by taking the commodity to a place where someone who wants it can purchase it and use it, but the pair of jeans is exactly the same on either end of the journey and so cannot have ny more labour embodied in the commodity itself. In the case of the banker he is not providing labour at all, only capital which purchases labour, so he cannot add value. quote:I am not sure yet if use value corresponds to utility exactly, it seems to me you may see it as at least cardinal, if not aggregateable over society. But then you are saying that it is non-constant could correspond at least with the idea of preference based utility. Use-value is pretty much synonymous with utility, the only different being use-value is specific to commodities (goods and services). Neither of them are constant. Use value has an indirect but major role on price. Prices will roughly correlate with the amount of value embodied in a product (more labour intensive activities generally being more costly) and the value can only be realised if there is a use-value, although in some instances there will be other major factors such as the rent someone can extract from owning a particularly rare and sought after natural resource. The use-value will effect people's willingness to purchase products and will in turn effect the Capitalists decisions to create items (supply and demand). quote:He did ask a valid question though: There isn't a specific Marxist term co-ordination leading to more use-value, but that doesn't mean that it is rejected. There is just a limit to the amount of obtuse terminology we ask people to learn, for which we should all be glad! As for your example, not really. What you have to remember is that Marx is critiquing Capitalism and use-value, value, etc are all about explaining the commodity - the basic building block of Capitalism. So when you help an old lady across the street, for example, no value or use-value is created because Marx's critique and use of values was directed at Capitalism rather than basic human interaction. There is utility for the woman but strictly speaking not use-value. That's the difference between the two terms, although you could probably just say use-value anyway and Marxists would get your meaning. If you were employed to do this then all the various types of value would be created because they describe the various values of commodities within a Capitalist framework. JeffersonClay posted:Why is there an arbitrary distinction between "labor used to create a commodity" and "labor used to ensure the commodity is employed with maximum use-value"? Why is value, in the core marxist sense, determined solely by the former? Because creating something and moving something to somewhere it can be sold are two very distinct and separate things and it isn't arbitrary at all? It's not like there is any other form of economics that thinks production and logistics are interchangeable. All economic theories would distinguish between the two because they are completely different things. quote:And let's not be coy, Marx describes "unproductive laborers" as parasites. You have been given the context for these like 6 or 7 times in the last few days and are clearly taking them out of context. Kyrie eleison posted:To answer the OP: Yes. Marxism is dead. But Jesus was a Marxist.
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Nov 14, 2014 11:56
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Kyrie eleison posted:Marxism is a dead ideology which will never resurface. Unlike Christianity, which is a timeless, undying philosophy -- the eternal, final truth of this world, and of our species -- Marxism is a flash in the pan worldview by an unemployed, carbunkled, patronized malcontent. Eh, your religion isn't at all very timeless, it has certainly evolved over the centuries to accommodate changes in economics and politics. And aside from materialism I'm not so sure that the entirety of Marxism, specifically economics, is actually incompatible with Jesus' teachings.
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Nov 14, 2014 20:44
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Jacobeus posted:Eh, your religion isn't at all very timeless, it has certainly evolved over the centuries to accommodate changes in economics and politics. Catholicism--in the form of Liberation Theology--is one of the strongholds of Marxism in the practical world, and with Francis meeting with liberation priests it's back in the mainstream, as well. Anyway Kyrie is just a schtick poster, however sincere.
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Nov 14, 2014 21:57
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Aeolius posted:Oh, sure, I don't disagree. I didn't mean any of those questions as "gotchas," for what it's worth; they were just things that I recall had been niggling me about NK models. The TSS stuff towards which I gravitate is a non-equilibrium approach, which sets it against the bulk of mainstream work, but also Sraffian and even quite a lot of past Marxist stuff. Even still, I think it's got its back to the wind right now. Aeolius posted:Something else that's always kind of felt funny: If we're structuring our assumptions such that we will make sure equilibrium happens, then doesn't this presuppose that "making sure equilibrium happens" is a structuring principle of economic actors? But I thought the whole point is that equilibrium is supposed to be something that "just happens." There are, as I have said, a multitude of reasons to look at specific equilibrium concepts - wether as a scientific tool, as some sort of average and of course something which is plausible because it's the only thing which is consistent with axiomatic/consistent behaviour of the actors. Finally, you might not think that a GE actually shows the state of any given economy exactly - just that strong deviations seem to be very implausible in the converse to the above. In any case there are a lot of reasons and taking all of this together with the idea of simultaneous determination of all variables you reach the general equilibrium... not more, not less However the existence of equilibria is not really so demanding, it doesn't really place too many special assumptions on preferences. Mostly those we make to have some senseful analysis or, because we like to do this, so we can transform choices into a number (utility function). It places no demands on firms or technologies in that sense and very little in general on the topological objects. Another way to think about it: given this framework, we also know when there might be no equilibria. In the end we rather have too many equilibria as too few, as you know. I think its a good idea to take GE as either a good modelling tool or as a general hypothetic concepts. I don't know too many people who literally believe in the existence of GE at all times. Then again I wouldn't believe any other system trying to describe the economy exactly in the same way, maybe because I deal with it so much and it's a fickle mistress. Aeolius posted:Minor nitpick: I think you and I are using "positivistic" differently. I meant it more in the sense of the position in the philosophy of social sciences, not in the way that contrasts with "normative." But your meaning was clear, either way. Aeolius posted:It's leading, but this lead also self-reinforces via superstar/network effects and the like. Sort of like how everyone learns Java because everyone uses Java because everyone learns Java, etc., while to this day I've never met what I'd consider a serious partisan of Java, and I've met people passionate about Haskell. Also, thanks for the paper. I'd seen others arguing that it's basically impossible to say whether DSGE or ABM are getting better results. I'll give it a peep when I have the chance. My point is that DSGEs are ad hoc because they are practical things. Nobody believes in the Calvo fairy. There's no question that they will ultimately go away if they don't provide good performance. When it comes ABM you can ask ronya's opinion I think with all the pros he offers some very good things to think about. Boner Slam fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 22:20
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Jacobeus posted:Eh, your religion isn't at all very timeless, it has certainly evolved over the centuries to accommodate changes in economics and politics. The great thing about religion is that it's pretty difficult to prove it wrong and everything in there is vague enough that you can re-interpreate god's will into whatever the gently caress you want at the moment. However since Marx was writing something way more concrete than the bible and at least nominally scientifically verifiable it's pretty easy to tell when stuff in there is wrong. Not that it stops some people from trying to reinterpretate his predictions until they are the same level of ambiguity as prophecies in the bible anyway.
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Nov 14, 2014 22:24
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team overhead smash posted:But Jesus was a Marxist. Wow. Mods? 
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Nov 14, 2014 22:37
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team overhead smash posted:Value includes all sources which provide labour towards creating a machine this includes the wear and tear on machinery used as that also represents labour and hence value. That labour is provided by the mechanic, so hence he does contribute labour towards the final product. Chapter 7 of Capital Volume 1 is a good one to read if you want to gain Marx's understanding on this. It's also a decent one as he gets pretty snarky in the second section.  team overhead smash posted:To my mind, the other job roles you mention do contribute to the product being used or created but they do not contribute labour to it although you could make an argument for the manager. team overhead smash posted:If you want to you could consider him to provide value to the commodity being produced and I don't think it would cause any real challenges to how the theory worked. You'd just have to take into account that the value he provides per jean would be smaller per pair of jeans than that of the labourers due to it being split into more pairs of jeans (as he presumably manages more than one employee). team overhead smash posted:For the logistics dude and the banker, I can't really see the arguement. The logistics guy will help realise the use-value and exchange value by taking the commodity to a place where someone who wants it can purchase it and use it, but the pair of jeans is exactly the same on either end of the journey and so cannot have ny more labour embodied in the commodity itself. team overhead smash posted:In the case of the banker he is not providing labour at all, only capital which purchases labour, so he cannot add value. team overhead smash posted:Use-value is pretty much synonymous with utility, the only different being use-value is specific to commodities (goods and services). Neither of them are constant. team overhead smash posted:Use value has an indirect but major role on price. Prices will roughly correlate with the amount of value embodied in a product (more labour intensive activities generally being more costly) and the value can only be realised if there is a use-value, although in some instances there will be other major factors such as the rent someone can extract from owning a particularly rare and sought after natural resource. The use-value will effect people's willingness to purchase products and will in turn effect the Capitalists decisions to create items (supply and demand). team overhead smash posted:There isn't a specific Marxist term co-ordination leading to more use-value, but that doesn't mean that it is rejected. There is just a limit to the amount of obtuse terminology we ask people to learn, for which we should all be glad! In the end we don't really disagree much, I guess we just think mutually that our way of defining things is not really that helpful. I mean I understand your points and I can deal with how utility differs from use value, it's just that these things wouldn't really help me answer the questions I am interested in.
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Nov 14, 2014 22:44
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Boner Slam posted:Well without the logistics guy, there is no material arriving at the factory. Surely he is essential to the actual production of the good. To the selling too, but that maybe another guy. Check out Chapter 1, Section IV of Capital: Volume II for Marx on logistics/transportation/etc. Marx posted:In the general formula the product P is regarded as a material thing different from the elements of the productive capital, as an object existing apart from the process of production and having a use-form different from that of the elements of production. This is always the case when the result of the productive process assumes the form of a thing, even when a part of the product re-enters the resumed production as one of its elements. Grain for instance serves as seed for its own production, but the product consists only of grain and hence has a shape different from those of related elements such as labour-power, implements, fertiliser. But there are certain independent branches of industry in which the product of the productive process is not a new material product, is not a commodity. Among these only the communications industry, whether engaged in transportation proper, of goods and passengers, or in the mere transmission of communications, letters, telegrams, etc., is economically important...
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Nov 15, 2014 03:37
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Boner Slam posted:I find everything which is formulated to a concrete research question interesting. The usual way to proceed would be for me to ask you for a handbook article or a review article on temporary single systems, that is please post your fav lit I'll check it out thx This is probably a good starting point. It's far from a complete model of the economy, but it's an explicitly non-equilibrium TSS Marxist foundation, illustrative of a number of the source material's central claims. Boner Slam posted:However the nice thing is that the pref axioms etc are not based on the existence of the equilibrium, rather on the topological properties we need for individual choice determination. It's absolutely correct that they're created without any explicit presupposition of equilibrium. But at a meta-analytical level, it's also undeniable that these have passed through what amounts to a procedural sieve that "selects" for the emergence of equilibrium. This, I'd argue, owes to messy institutional, interpersonal and ideological factors in real life, including (but not limited to) the extensively documented publication bias against negative results. There's all manner of strange and perverse aspects to the development — such as it is — of science. Boner Slam posted:Hm this paper compares DSGE with DSGE, it just shows that incorporating financial markets and stuff and dynamically chosing the "best" model in a hypothetical forecasting situation based on real data, that the standard DSGEs are very good. But then again as you can guess in the standard situations DSGEs fare well if properly calibrated. This paper however also shows that the obvious issue in the crsis, ie not that SmetWouters was just bad, it broke apart. It's not a comparision paper of DSGE vs. X. I take issue only the final sentence. As kind of a continuation of my last remarks, the history of science tends to screw with the idea of science as a linear/rational/ideal process of accumulating facts and discarding what doesn't work. Theories, once struck, do not melt easily, and all who adhere to a given theory do so because they believe in its efficacy. This thread is a case in point on both counts, when you get right down to it. To my mind, Marxism has persisted against discriminatory tides of money from the ruling class because it's fundamentally right. In the eyes of many, I'm some crank who just can't let go of an antique theory, likely because of some personality flaw. Such cases are by no means exclusive to economics, or even the social sciences on the whole. Consider mathematics. It developed in jerks and starts (via a collection of jerks and upstarts), and 20th century debates on foundations got downright vicious. Its very development was often illogical, featuring false proofs and slips and errors, poorly understood concepts, etc., that persisted because, hey, still worked well enough. Criteria for deciding between theories are seldom if ever unequivocal, depending heavily on priors. As someone summarizing someone else summarizing Laruelle put it, "in spite of the competing claims to truth on display in the battlefield for ideas, it is nonetheless clear that many forms of thinking seem to function." Complicating matters further, abandoning a non-working system generally calls for something else to replace it. Only in the most extreme cases of nonfunctionality are people likely to just figure an alternative out as they go. If the alternatives are not well known, then they're that much less likely to subvert the dominant mode of thinking — which incentivizes anti-pluralistic behavior among adherents to the dominant mode. All in all, anything that makes the undertaking of science look tidy is suspicious. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Nov 15, 2014 |
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Nov 15, 2014 05:12
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Aeolius posted:This is probably a good starting point. It's far from a complete model of the economy, but it's an explicitly non-equilibrium TSS Marxist foundation, illustrative of a number of the source material's central claims. Thanks for posting this, it's probably the only econ paper I've ever read I actually could understand since I've read Capital and Kliman's stuff...mainstream economics is just moonspeak to me.
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Nov 15, 2014 15:12
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MaterialConceptual posted:Thanks for posting this, it's probably the only econ paper I've ever read I actually could understand since I've read Capital and Kliman's stuff...mainstream economics is just moonspeak to me. conversely I am struggling to follow the paper, which says something, I guess e: the style is especially annoying, although I cannot put my finger on exactly what e#2: am I being asked to consider a multi-generation economy with inventories and demand for money? Is that it? This seems like a lot of words just to haphazardly reproduce intertemporal substitution e#3: I cannot shake the feeling that I am being sold a disguised Solow model in pp 45-48, although I cannot summon the effort to dig through it to find out. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Nov 15, 2014 |
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Nov 15, 2014 16:38
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Aeolius posted:You mean incorrect in the survey answers, or incorrect in the actual method and practice of pricing decisions? In either case (though less equivocally so in the latter), this is an "as if" argument, which is basically the standard approach of positivism in the Friedmanian tradition, so I don't see how it could be realist. It's a case of correlation and simplicity trumping the actual mechanisms underpinning the relations. I've got other problems with it, too. For one thing, it kind of flies against the underlying individualist methodology if one starts with "the economy is actors using means to achieve ends according to their preferences" and then immediately assumes that an actor can't even accurately understand its own preferred ends and/or the means by which it pursues them. Aha! But the bolded is not true, and it has not been true since Paul Samuelson popularized revealed preference. The individualist methodology being invoked is that actors use means to achieve ends as if they had consistent, complete, and rational preferences over intertemporal consumption. This has manifold problems of its own (first, expected utility is straightforwardly problematic in capturing observed behaviour of risk, especially when there are smaller material sums at risk, and second, there's a lot of submerged ideology being smuggled under 'consistent' and 'complete' even though heterodox writers tend to attack 'rational', which is really much less problematic...!) so there's no need to invent contradictions that don't exist. It is indeed assumed that it is irrelevant whether the actor accurately understands its own ends and/or the means by which it pursues them. When self-reported motivations and revealed preferences seem to clash, you can reliably expect that the orthodoxy will assume that the latter holds sway. Like this guy:  (tangentially: if I had to remark upon the most dramatic demonstration of the impact of this ideology on modern outlooks, the embrace of patient autonomy in medical ethics would be my top pick: doesn't matter what goals the patient claims to want, only what informed choices they actuate over specific treatments. The positive assertion is that people make choices as if they had certain goals; the smuggled normative assertion is that the revealed goals hold ethical priority over the professed goals, that the 'actual person' we should care about is the one whose priorities are reflected in choices made when faced with biting material consequences, rather than expressive actions like a vote or a speech. See also: lasting power of attorney. Note that this is an observation, not a criticism). Bewley is primarily popular because the intra-orthodox dispute over why firms don't lower wages has proven so intractable. I really like your post, I think it captures a fundamental disagreement. I don't think orthodox macro is particularly devoted to prediction. DSGE is mediocre at prediction; Smets-Wouters is only marginally better than atheoretical forecasting models using just a few variables. Growth theory is a huge intractable mess. 'Expectations' is everyone's favourite black box variable in finance and trade stuff, and nobody bothers to unpack it. Friedman has an outsized influence on macroeconomists claiming that they are devoted to prediction (cough) but I don't think this is actually true. Conversely I do not think post-Keynesian macro is particularly devoted to realism: when one writes that the marginal propensity to consume is some calibrated constant (or whatnot), this matters, it is a assertion that the MPC has no causal interaction with explanatory variables. This is more than saying: there is an MPC, and it doesn't change very much. It is saying: it will be uncorrelated with the error term. That's a high bar for empirics to vault. When an economist says that a framework is "useful" there's quite a bit of subtlety there. On incomplete exchange-rate pass-through: I don't know that anyone has engaged the topic. The pass-through is the shift in import prices under a shift in the exchange rate, an incomplete pass-through implies that the distributor simply accepts substantive volatility in the real price, reacting by adjusting quantities and using inventories as a buffer stock/banking on monopolistic competition. This is straightforwardly inconsistent with a simple markup pricing model, since prices are generally less volatile than inventories. On historical time and the consistency thereof - no; if you can demonstrate a consistent and constant standard across different times then it's just logical time, you've proposed a reductionist framework that is now itself invariant over time! The claim of historical time is to that it is unreasonable to demand such a standard over different time periods. If you can explain an idiosyncrasy, it stops being idiosyncratic. Blinder and Bewley is pretty awesome, innit. You should add Bowles to that desk.  As noted, I think one should distinguish between causal mechanisms as implied by choices, causal mechanisms as claimed by actors, and causal mechanisms which would be good for forecasting. Boner Slam posted:My point is that DSGEs are ad hoc because they are practical things. Nobody believes in the Calvo fairy. There's no question that they will ultimately go away if they don't provide good performance. The Calvo fairy is straightforwardly false, to illustrate this point. The empirical frequency of price adjustment is not invariant across the business cycle, for starters. However, there's no agreement on how to model variable price adjustment and all methods appear to be quite mechanically difficult and not robust. Therefore: Calvo fairy. One could calibrate an exogenous price-adjustment-to-output-gap relationship but it would be quite reasonably asked why one is concerned about a change in the average frequency when there is, e.g, also evidence that the frequency is heterogenous across goods, that the heterogenous frequencies all change in different ways to the cycle, that the frequency is sensitive to market structure and market structure changes across the business cycle, etc., and then suddenly you are being asked to calibrate a exploding number of variables based on the same number of skimpy time series, such that your estimates in this supposed relationship have confidence intervals that span suns, and if your results supposedly depend so finely on this relationship that introducing it is necessary, then you're already in a hole you cannot dig yourself out of, can you? ABM does not evade this problem, needless to say. There is a great deal of talk about 'realism' but it is not terribly realistic to start with a grandiose list of relationships which are structural, usually for poorly-motivated reasons. It is even worse if the motivator is 'realism' but the stylization is straightforwardly false, for simplicity (competitive entry/exit into a market is of note - pay attention to how the author ensures that there are a nonzero but non-exploding number of firms in the market whilst permitting dynamic entry/exit, it is known problem within ABM simulation.). The usefulness of ABM stems from trading off generality for tractability, but unfortunately, situations where a model is both intuitive enough that the dynamics are comprehensible (to motivate believing in generality without having to prove it), yet mathematically intractable, tend to be limited to finance. The macroeconomy is too complex. ronya fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Nov 15, 2014 |
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Nov 15, 2014 20:08
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ronya posted:conversely I am struggling to follow the paper, which says something, I guess I don't think its a proper multi-generational economy at all, it's just a different way of calculating ex-post "values" based on arbitrary production levels then saying things like: "Simultaneous equations impose an immediate identity of supply and demand; if these do not match there is nowhere for the excess to go or the shortage to come from. Mismatches are relegated to an impenetrable subjective domain which by definition has no visible expression." (nobody has ever put inventories in their model before) "General Equilibrium theory deals with this problem by eliminating the passage of time altogether, assuming an immediate identity between production and consumption" (eh?) "Suppose I purchase 100 tons of steel for £100 on 1 January and do nothing with them; and all prices rise by 10 percent during the year. My steel is worth £110 on 31 December and my profit is therefore £10, in money terms. No-one, no matter how ideologically blinded or prejudiced against value theory, could possibly claim that this represents an increase in real wealth. There is thus a real problem in economics which has to be dealt with in any analytical framework, although most microeconomics evades or ignores it: how can we distinguish between profits which are the result of purely monetary phenomena, and profits which in some sense represent an increase in real wealth?" (tell the guy who made ten pounds on commodity price changes that he didn't make a profit)
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Nov 15, 2014 21:50
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ronya posted:conversely I am struggling to follow the paper, which says something, I guess It doesn't seem that way. This might be a case of trying to cram an odd peg into a more familiar hole, but then again I am not nearly as well versed in said hole, so... care to break it down? ronya posted:e#3: I cannot shake the feeling that I am being sold a disguised Solow model in pp 45-48, although I cannot summon the effort to dig through it to find out. Well, if you can later, I'd be interested to learn the answer. It seems pretty unlikely to me, given the different ways they're founded, that critiques of Solow would be applicable here. But aside from all the talk about what it does or does not resemble, the point remains that it is also the thing I originally said it was, and therefore can hopefully aid in communicating some of the key aspects of an orthodox Marxist economic perspective. ronya posted:Aha! But the bolded is not true, and it has not been true since Paul Samuelson popularized revealed preference. The individualist methodology being invoked is that actors use means to achieve ends as if they had consistent, complete, and rational preferences over intertemporal consumption. There's that as-if again. It's turtles all the way down. Admittedly, that last point there was really more against the sort of naive liberal notion of human action that persists in unalloyed form only in certain domains (Austrian School, right-wing think tanks, etc), and tends therein to exert as much a moral role as a methodological one. I should have recognized that it wouldn't indicate the same sort of inconsistency, here. ronya posted:(tangentially: if I had to remark upon the most dramatic demonstration of the impact of this ideology on modern outlooks, the embrace of patient autonomy in medical ethics would be my top pick: doesn't matter what goals the patient claims to want, only what informed choices they actuate over specific treatments. The positive assertion is that people make choices as if they had certain goals; the smuggled normative assertion is that the revealed goals hold ethical priority over the professed goals, that the 'actual person' we should care about is the one whose priorities are reflected in choices made when faced with biting material consequences, rather than expressive actions like a vote or a speech. See also: lasting power of attorney. Note that this is an observation, not a criticism). I def got that it was an observation straightaway. Also it's a really good and interesting one that hadn't even occurred to me. Doubly interesting once the "informed" criterion is interrogated, either epistemologically or in terms of efficient transmission. ronya posted:I really like your post, I think it captures a fundamental disagreement. I don't think orthodox macro is particularly devoted to prediction. DSGE is mediocre at prediction; Smets-Wouters is only marginally better than atheoretical forecasting models using just a few variables. Growth theory is a huge intractable mess. 'Expectations' is everyone's favourite black box variable in finance and trade stuff, and nobody bothers to unpack it. Friedman has an outsized influence on macroeconomists claiming that they are devoted to prediction (cough) but I don't think this is actually true. Well, obviously prediction is a sticky wicket in economics on the whole. On one end, we can't have tools that predict too well, because of paradox; on the other, we can have lovely tools that are really bad at prediction independently of this. The best we can hope for is to predict broad motion. On the side of explanation, economics can go much further — and more explanation-oriented theories can even result in precisely the indicated sort of broad predictive results, as with the LTRPF in Marxian econ. So I guess what's not clear to me is: If not prediction, how else can we justify a proclivity for "as if" stylizations? Isn't that the whole point of them? I mean, I can see how nothing prohibits some people from believing general equilibrium actually describes real mechanics, despite being a construct that "lives" in the long run. It just seems improbable on its face, and I'm not sure how they'd defend said belief. ronya posted:On incomplete exchange-rate pass-through: I don't know that anyone has engaged the topic. The pass-through is the shift in import prices under a shift in the exchange rate, an incomplete pass-through implies that the distributor simply accepts substantive volatility in the real price, reacting by adjusting quantities and using inventories as a buffer stock/banking on monopolistic competition. This is straightforwardly inconsistent with a simple markup pricing model, since prices are generally less volatile than inventories. I dunno if it's straightforward on first glance, though I may be missing something. My takeaway: Distributors will buy less of a product when its price spikes and try to ride on inventory from when the price was lower without quickly adjusting their own prices to reflect it. Is that right? It sounds reasonable, certainly, though it doesn't seem contradictory in and of itself. Most markup schemata I've seen tend to feature quantities that are more volatile than prices, but that has to do with the direction of causality, where most changes in demand amount to pushing on string vis-a-vis prices. If the actual real cost of producing/acquiring a good rises, then that, by contrast, would propagate. If the change in exchange rate is brief, then it makes sense that buffer stocks would mute it; that's what they're made to do. Unless, I guess, we accept "quantity fluctuates more than price" as an ex-post constraint on our system, but that seems to put the cart before the horse. Maybe in a really naive markup approach? ronya posted:On historical time and the consistency thereof - no; if you can demonstrate a consistent and constant standard across different times then it's just logical time, you've proposed a reductionist framework that is now itself invariant over time! The claim of historical time is to that it is unreasonable to demand such a standard over different time periods. If you can explain an idiosyncrasy, it stops being idiosyncratic. I'm confused by this. Obviously historical time treats different periods differently. Why would it become logical time if everybody starts using it, or if more models are evaluated by their ability to capture path dependency and so on? It's no clearer to me why that's special pleading, also. But I sense I may be severely misreading you. I apologize in advance. ronya posted:Blinder and Bewley is pretty awesome, innit. You should add Bowles to that desk. I've got some Bowles papers (& Gintis, natch) floating around my drive, though I take it you mean the micro book you mentioned earlier. I'll keep my eyes peeled. ronya posted:As noted, I think one should distinguish between causal mechanisms as implied by choices, causal mechanisms as claimed by actors, and causal mechanisms which would be good for forecasting. Agreed. I'd also bill structural mechanisms as the most suited to the last one. Soviet Space Dog posted:I don't think its a proper multi-generational economy at all, it's just a different way of calculating ex-post "values" based on arbitrary production levels then saying things like: Wynne Godley basically spent his whole career going "pay more attention to inventories, guys, c'mon, be more like Tobin" so he's far from a lone voice in the wilderness to complain about the long-run view abstracting away from critical short-run faculties. Also, on that third point: it's "profit" as a capital gain with a corresponding capital loss elsewhere, which is distinguished from net profits in the system (which are exactly equal to total surplus value). Aeolius fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 16, 2014 |
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Nov 15, 2014 23:12
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Heterodox economists behaving as if all of orthodox macro is what they see in undergraduate macro is normal - never mind non-reviewed personal papers, even Davidson or Boettke will regularly issue such pronouncements in their pet journals. Now that you mention it, though, I think I have a finger about what I found most weird. It is this: both sneering at the mainstream, and yet writing as if to an audience who can be assumed to be analytically Marxist by default. Not even heterodox, or even just Marxist, but a particular school of Marxism, with well-defined fellow Marxist opponents. It's very inside baseball: no explanation of the argument strategy, no concern for a literature review, no characterization of the positions that are being attacked. But if so you would think it would cut back on the back-patting and cheerleading. Does Freeman have any peer-reviewed versions of the model out (in heterodox journals)? I'd rather not dig through it for a few hours if I might find out later that there's actually some minor arithmetical error that is corrected in a Journal of Marxist Economic Perspectives, Special Conference Issue, 31st June. At least the writing might be less annoying. Aeolius posted:Admittedly, that last point there was really more against the sort of naive liberal notion of human action that persists in unalloyed form only in certain domains (Austrian School, right-wing think tanks, etc), and tends therein to exert as much a moral role as a methodological one. I should have recognized that it wouldn't indicate the same sort of inconsistency, here. That's a very strange perspective. As far as I know, the neo-Austrian microeconomists decorating GMU almost always reject revealed preference. It is difficult to pin down exactly why, but my sense of it is that they broadly reject the argument that any third party can reason from some set of revealed preferences and budget constraints into simply picking the consumer's optimal basket for her. The consumer methodologically reserves the right to revise her preferences without warning, through Human Reason or whatnot. But back to this: quote:There's that as-if again. It's turtles all the way down. ... no? I think I am not communicating this clearly enough. It is acknowledged that the consumer, or the firm, states a belief in some set of values, goals, priorities, etc. Likewise the consumer might have no conscious belief or awareness of the preferences she is claimed to reveal. I don't think any turtle denialism is going on here - it seems that the existence of the turtle is well-acknowledged, it is merely asserted that the Great Turtle follows a path that may have little resemblance to where it says it is intending to go. But the turtle moves, and all that. "Incorrect in the survey answers, or incorrect in the actual method and practice of pricing decisions" is flatly a false dichotomy. quote:So I guess what's not clear to me is: If not prediction, how else can we justify a proclivity for "as if" stylizations? Isn't that the whole point of them? In macro? I suppose one blames the zombie of Nicholas Kaldor for what stylized facts pass muster and what don't - ambitious analysis in presence of weakly-motivated stylizations. There's a combination of ideological inheritance and policy tools that are felt to be legitimate - e.g., it's obvious that governments can (somewhat) affect preferences via propaganda and advertising, so preferences are not really exogenous, but nonetheless it is tacitly felt that this isn't a legitimate role for economic policy. The return of the representative household has lots of complex reasons, but I personally would note the postwar triumph of consumer goods and the annoying tendency of people to choose things that the planners felt were unimportant, or to react in ways that resist the impact of policy. quote:If the actual real cost of producing/acquiring a good rises, then that, by contrast, would propagate. Yes, that is an actual real cost (of the imported intermediate) Whether inventories fluctuate more than price strikes me as an empirical question. quote:Agreed. I'd also bill structural mechanisms as the most suited to the last one. Really? This is surprising. The causal model which is often most suited to macro forecasting usually has non-obvious economic theory content. How would you interpret a pooled BVAR? This isn't a problem for the orthodox framework - merely embarrassing, I think - but post-Keynesians might worry, especially if VARs regularly beat a supposedly realistically microcalibrated model.
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Nov 16, 2014 12:58
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ronya posted:DSGE is mediocre at prediction; Smets-Wouters is only marginally better than atheoretical forecasting models using just a few variables. ronya posted:Really? This is surprising. The causal model which is often most suited to macro forecasting usually has non-obvious economic theory content. How would you interpret a pooled BVAR? This isn't a problem for the orthodox framework - merely embarrassing, I think - but post-Keynesians might worry, especially if VARs regularly beat a supposedly realistically microcalibrated model. Unless we would believe our microcalibration and theory assumptions to be 1:1 accurate, I don't see why the prior should be that theoretical models beat atheoretical models at forecasting. ronya posted:That's a very strange perspective. As far as I know, the neo-Austrian microeconomists decorating GMU almost always reject revealed preference. It is difficult to pin down exactly why, but my sense of it is that they broadly reject the argument that any third party can reason from some set of revealed preferences and budget constraints into simply picking the consumer's optimal basket for her. The consumer methodologically reserves the right to revise her preferences without warning, through Human Reason or whatnot. But back to this: But then there's this http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm As for the turtles: I think the only issue is that of consistently appearing choices which are incompatible with theory, such as Ellsberg. But then there's Schmeidler and all is well again. What's the point of following the turtles?
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Nov 16, 2014 14:14
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I'd say Austrians are pretty reactive. If an "enemy" (a socialist, Keynesian, person with a working brain) starts talking about using revealed preferences its impossible and always wrong. If a fellow Austrian starts talking about revealed preferences they would all nod along and agree on its insight and how its superior to Keynesian cardinal utility. edit: Also if I had a time machine one thing I'd put on the top of the list telling Von Neumann and Morgenstern not to call their individual optimization function "utility", the confusion with Benthamite utility has done the world far more harm than any poetic good. Soviet Space Dog fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Nov 16, 2014 |
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Nov 16, 2014 20:14
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Rothbard laid down the holy scripture:quote:Can praxeological economics, then, say nothing about social utility? Not quite. If we define an "increase in social utility" in the Paretian manner as a situation where one or more persons gain in utility while nobody loses, then praxeology finds a definite, but restricted, role for the concept. But it is a role where social utilities remain unmeasurable and incomparable between persons. Briefly, praxeology maintains that when a person acts, his utility, or at least his ex ante utility, increases; he expects to enjoy a psychic benefit from the act, otherwise he would not have done it. When, in a voluntary free-market exchange, for example, I buy a newspaper from a newsdealer for 15 cents, I demonstrate by my action that I prefer (at least ex ante) the newspaper to the 15 cents, while the newsdealer demonstrates by his action the reverse order of preference. Since each of us is better off by the exchange, both the newsdealer and I have demonstrably gained in utility, while nothing has demonstrably happened to anyone else. Elsewhere I have called this praxeological concept "demonstrated preference," in which action demonstrates preference, in contrast to various forms of psychologizing, which tries to measure other person's value scales apart from action, and to behaviorism, which assumes that such values or preferences do not exist. The compensation principle that I have been criticizing rests on the illegitimate psychologizing notion that a scientific economist-observer can know anything about someone else's value scale except as it is demonstrated through such action as the purchase or sale of a newspaper. And since the compensation principle is necessarily divorced from demonstrated preference, it cannot be employed by the scientific economist. Incidentally, I might note here that "demonstrated preference" is very different from Samuelson's famous concept of "revealed preference," for Samuelson, in illegitimate psychologizing fashion, assumed the existence of an underlying preference scale that forms the basis of a person's action and that remains constant in the course of his actions over time. There is, however, no warrant for the scientific economist to make any such assumption. All we can say is that an action, at a specific point of time, reveals some of a person's preferences at that time. There is no warrant for assuming that such preference orderings remain constant over time. I think you're right that they can be slippery depending on who they are arguing with, though. ronya fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 02:15
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Also Rothbardquote:One example that Mises liked to use in his class to demonstrate the difference between two fundamental ways of approaching human behavior was looking at Grand Central Station behavior during rush hour. The "objective" or "truly scientific" behaviorist, he pointed out, would observe the empirical events: e.g., people rushing back and forth, aimlessly at certain predictable times of day. And that is all he would know. But the true student of human action would start from the fact that all human behavior is purposive, and he would see the purpose is to get from home to the train to work in the morning, the opposite at night, etc. It is obvious which one would discover and know more about human behavior, and therefore which one would be the genuine 'scientist.'
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Nov 17, 2014 04:55
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That passage does continue:quote:One example that Mises liked to use inhis class to demonstrate the difference between two fundamental ways of approaching human behavior was in looking at Grand Central Station behavior during rush hour. The "objective" or "truly scientific" behaviorist, he pointed out, would observe the empirical events: e.g., people rushing back and forth, aimlessly at certain predictable times of day. And that is all he would know. But the true student of human action would start from the fact that all human behavior is purposive, and he would see the purpose is to get from home to the train to work in the morning, the opposite at night, etc. It is obvious which one would discover and know more about human behavior, and therefore which one would be the genuine "scientist". Purposeful but not predictable, as it were. The individual as methodologically sovereign, above the confines of positivist theoreticians attempting to reduce their mind to a model. In practice the YOU CAN'T PREDICT MEEEE only turns up when the dread Government is involved. (also: note the historical time-esque invocation. Nobody has a monopoly on special pleading, alas)
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Nov 17, 2014 05:12
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A bit I missed:Aeolius posted:
But I did not say that 'everybody starts using it', or 'models are evaluated by their ability to capture path dependency'. I said that logical time entails a reductionist framework that is invariant over time. That's the essence of logical-time reasoning, that the framework is static - path dependency, if any, is nonetheless generated by the same invariant underlying process (e.g., Krugman's gravity model which is nonetheless held to be invariant across time and space). But obviously, given your responses, I think you have a very different understanding of what 'historical time' is supposed to entail, so you should elaborate. Is the key difference between historical time and logical time really whether 'everyone' sits around agreeing that history matters, and then goes back to proposing invariant processes? Surely not...
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Nov 17, 2014 06:21
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Boner Slam posted:I realize this is not based on essentiality, but I have worked in situations where the manager turned out to be defacto essential, and also exclusive to that project. Hence, I still find that distinction to be rather arbitrary. Like, I have been literally in situations with a project manager assigned to one project, and workers assigned matrix wise to different projects... It's not really arbitrary. Does the manager contribute his labour to directly creating a commodity or does he influence things which will have an effect on how workers which will then have a knock-on effect on the labour the employees contribute to producing something? The former creates values, the latter just influences the people who do create labour. quote:It's important that the theory can deal with this, nowadays its rather unusual that anyone produces exactly one good for himself. I mean I understand that it's logically/mathematically nice to assume such, but just think of the internet and its associated products. Sorry, I'm not getting what you mean. quote:Well without the logistics guy, there is no material arriving at the factory. Surely he is essential to the actual production of the good. To the selling too, but that maybe another guy. Yes, he's essential to that product being sold, just like the capitalist owning and using the means of production is essential to products being sold and people loving so they can have babies who will grow up to be labourers is essential. However essential to the process =/= value. quote:But what about his labour, let's say filling out some excel sheets, such that the owner can get the capital or hell, even take his own money and buy the materials for the jeans? I mean not the concept of providing capital, but the actual labour the banker does. In some small sense it is surely also connected to a percentage of production? In our jeans factory analogy, creating a spreadsheet of profits/expenses or whatever does not contribute to the production of a pair of jeans. Those jeans are still made by some person with a sewing machine and raw materials. If you view the process taking place when the manager creates a spreadsheet or whatever and want to view it as the creation of value, then it would be value going into a service (both goods and services are commodities) that the Capitalist is purchasing and which would be offset as an expense against the surplus value created by the workers who create commodities for retail sale. quote:In the end we don't really disagree much, I guess we just think mutually that our way of defining things is not really that helpful. I mean I understand your points and I can deal with how utility differs from use value, it's just that these things wouldn't really help me answer the questions I am interested in. Here's my advice: Don't get hung up on the definitions. When it comes to what constitutes value, use-value, exchange value, etc Marx is basically just  They are defined in the first chapter and kind of rushed through because they are a priori assumptions. Marx was (with slight modifications) just putting forth definitions that had already been presented by Ricardo who furthered the definitions Smith had used. The really interesting bits is how these and other concepts are used in later chapters to analyse the Capitalist process. This is because you can define value as anything you want, but this happens to be the way Marx defined it. If you have your own separate definition of value, everyone still surely agrees that labourers exists and there is a distinction between them and managers. So even if you don't call it "value" you could just do a find and replace for "value" in Capital and change it for whatever you to call it it. So sure, you could create your own new definition of value, but then every time when you come across the world 'value' in Capital either in the text or as part of a formula you'll have to mentally change the meaning of the text to take into account you and it's difficult enough to read as it is.
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Nov 17, 2014 10:42
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team overhead smash posted:In our jeans factory analogy, creating a spreadsheet of profits/expenses or whatever does not contribute to the production of a pair of jeans. Those jeans are still made by some person with a sewing machine and raw materials. If you view the process taking place when the manager creates a spreadsheet or whatever and want to view it as the creation of value, then it would be value going into a service (both goods and services are commodities) that the Capitalist is purchasing and which would be offset as an expense against the surplus value created by the workers who create commodities for retail sale. this seems to presume no productivity added by the services onto the commodity creation process directly, which seems unlikely. The HR office that arranges schedules amongst workers so that workers can have days off without interrupting a just-in-time manufacturing flow - surely those are services that directly amplify the creation of said commodities? Do all services have to flow through the capitalist manager-owner?
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Nov 17, 2014 11:55
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ronya posted:this seems to presume no productivity added by the services onto the commodity creation process directly, which seems unlikely. The HR office that arranges schedules amongst workers so that workers can have days off without interrupting a just-in-time manufacturing flow - surely those are services that directly amplify the creation of said commodities? Do all services have to flow through the capitalist manager-owner? That was dealt with in the post before. "If the manager is good then they will improve the productivity of staff which will drive the average SNLT down in comparison to unmanaged or poorly managed staff, but he has not provided any labour towards actually creating the good. The value of his labour, rather, is embodied in the service (a type of commodity) he provides for which the Capitalist pays him." Managers can have roles which are valuable in terms of productivity and would be useful in Capitalist, Socialist, Feudal or Communist societies. This does not mean that they contribute labour to the product being sold any more than the Capitalist does and are really just an expense which has an effect on the exchange and surplus value. This role is valuable, but valuable is not the same as value. To paraphrase Marx, value is the only value-type which you can see with a microscope. You can't find the exchange value or surplus value or use-value of a pair of jeans or what have you by looking at it. You can however see the stitching and sewing that took place and you could then go and look at how long this takes to work out the value embodied in such work. You could even identify the individual component materials involved and the labour that went into them. At no point would the manager have actually sewn together a pair of jeans or fashioned the raw materials or what have you. He does not provide the value embodied in them.
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Nov 17, 2014 13:21
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But sewing that is inefficiently done and sewing that is efficiently done would sew jeans look exactly the same. The improvements are instead that (1) it costs less physical capital to create per unit commodity, and (2) it has greater appeal to the consumer despite being materially identical (because it is there on time, because it is made to order, etc). For a fixed amount of national physical capital (or dead labour, what have you), this is not a service which the capitalist class purchases in order to make his own task easier, but to enable more commodities to be made with the same labour input. Does the value not change? When one 'looks at' the pair of jeans to assess its value, does one use the efficient or the inefficient labour input? And what about assessing property #2? ronya fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 13:35
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ronya posted:But sewing that is inefficiently done and sewing that is efficiently done would sew jeans look exactly the same. The improvements are instead that (1) it costs less physical capital to create per unit commodity, and (2) it has greater appeal to the consumer despite being materially identical (because it is there on time, because it is made to order, etc). When one 'looks at' the pair of jeans to assess its value, does one use the efficient or the inefficient labour input? And what about assessing property #2? 2)This is the difference between Marxian Value, exchange value and use value.
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Nov 17, 2014 13:45
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ronya posted:But sewing that is inefficiently done and sewing that is efficiently done would sew jeans look exactly the same. The improvements are instead that (1) it costs less physical capital to create per unit commodity, and (2) it has greater appeal to the consumer despite being materially identical (because it is there on time, because it is made to order, etc). SNLT is based on the average rather than a particular individuals, so I wouldn't need to know exactly who did it and exactly how fast he was doing it just for that pair of jeans. I could go look at a variety of different workers and find the industry average. In that example I was looking just at a particular factory, but typically we would be looking at the entire industry (something that came up earlier in that discussion and which might cause some confusion here). The effects of one manager of one production line of one factory on jeans production across the world is negligible, so SNLT would stay the same (Or rather the change would be so small as to be negligible). This means each pair of jeans would be considered to have the same amount of value as they had before this brilliant manager came in and innovated everything , even if the actual amount of labour time for that particular pair was less. The change and the benefit to the business comes in that more jeans (each of which has the same value as they did previously) are produced, allowing a greater accumulation of surplus value. But again, the manger does not contribute his own labour into the creation of the jeans. It is a valuable task that will have an effect on the surplus value (and possibly the use-value) but he has not actually provided labour towards creating the item and thus does not contribute value towards it. As for property #2, you're talking about use-value rather than value.
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Nov 17, 2014 14:07
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tonberrytoby posted:One uses the efficient labor. Iirc Marx says this directly in the first chapter of Kapital. well - that invites an obvious question. Efficient according to what? Surely not neoclassical equilibrium.
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Nov 17, 2014 14:07
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team overhead smash posted:SNLT is based on the average rather than a particular individuals, so I wouldn't need to know exactly who did it and exactly how fast he was doing it just for that pair of jeans. I could go look at a variety of different workers and find the industry average. Yes, but would you look at the industrial average in the (possibly inefficient) status quo, or the industrial average in the efficient production schema? And by what sense of efficient - surely we cannot be defining it by the maximal possible number of jeans produced? I'm confused by your statement that the Marxian value of the jeans will remain constant even if its labour per unit is less. Does this measurement ever reset so that the relative Marxian values will correspond to relative labour inputs, or does it just steadily diverge with technological and capital change? Should I measure the value of a bag of rice by the amount of labour-input that the average farmer in 4,000 BCE would have needed to produce it?
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Nov 17, 2014 14:17
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ronya posted:well - that invites an obvious question. Efficient according to what? Surely not neoclassical equilibrium. team overhead smash posted:SNLT is based on the average rather than a particular individuals, so I wouldn't need to know exactly who did it and exactly how fast he was doing it just for that pair of jeans. I could go look at a variety of different workers and find the industry average. VictualSquid fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 14:23
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team overhead smash posted:
One of Marx's points is that these adjustments to efficiency do not directly attatch to the experience of the worker. For example, one of my personal favorite dudes is a guy named Percy Julian. He was a chemist, and he changed the process of creating sterols (so, medically, hydrocortisone and the pill) and made it much more efficient. After he was done with it, it took less resources in every way, from the precursor chemicals to the labour put in it. The amount of labor and raw materials to create amount X reduced by Y, permanently. If society needs nX amount of chemical, then we're able to do it while consuming fewer resources and less labor. What people are trying to get at, I think, is that Marx's valuation doesn't measure that particular interaction. But one of Marx's points is that you cannot possibly, under capitalism, separate (by looking at it economically) an actual improvement like Percy Julian vs. solely an economic improvement. For example, if Percy Julian had instead played hardball on wages with his staff and slashed them by 50%, and then sourced a different, cheaper precursor that meant he was creating a ton of toxic byproducts, and moved as much of the production he could to an even more depressed area where he could pay 1/3 of the wages and not cover healthcare and fire them if they tried to unionize, he could have gained the same economic efficiency. Furthermore, these sorts of advantages are open to any capitalist, whereas improving real efficiency takes skill and smarts. Regulations on businesses often are best understood as blocking these quick-buck paths, where by increasing a large societal harm the business profits. Another note is that reduction of labor isn't seen by the laborer, though. When someone says "Less labour is needed to make this" it's not true from the perspective of the worker. They might fire some (he didn't) because they're now unnecessary, but if you're still employed these sorts of things don't make your job easier, and in fact may it harder. The previous process was long and slow, with a lot of time where workers wait for the reaction to occur. The new process was much faster, and the workers actually had to work harder to keep up with it, even though the work was now less interesting. So although it took fewer labor hours, those labor hours were physically and mentally harder for the laborer--how do we capture that 'value', the value of a relaxed vs. a painful hour of work? Marx is not claiming to perfectly value everything in every way from this perspective, he's just saying that, especially considering that capitalism cannot distinguish between efficiency gained through real progress and efficiency gained by grinding down labor costs or taking advantage of a Commons and despoiling it. Whereas surplus value is actually something you can really, in the real, practical world, measure quite easily. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 14:23
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