(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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BillsPhoenix posted:Reply to the P/I thread, which felt like the a derail there as it's burgers. paraphrasing a quote from some imperialist: empire cost us more than it gained us, but it was a burden that we took on because of our virtue and nobility. i think it's Parenti that points out that's only true for the nation as a whole. the wealthy get immeasurably richer from empire. but, that doesn't mean that the american people would automatically be better off if the US neo-empire collapsed. imo, the more likely scenario is that the rich would squeeze the working class even harder to extract more wealth from them in an attempt to maintain the level of profit growth that they used to get from their overseas ventures. edit: also, we can't forget that the US dollar is the current reserve currency of the world. the US's tools of dominance are financial and cost it very little compared to the ye olde form of military imperialism. crepeface has issued a correction as of 04:29 on Dec 21, 2023 |
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Dec 21, 2023 04:23
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Well sure, but given they aren't exactly having much luck producing more even now while they still have many of those holdings to help multiply the value of local production, I don't see that doing anything but hastening the decline in the rate of profit. Danann posted:It's always been acknowledged even in liberal circles that the behavior of the European (and Imperial Japanese) empires of the 19th and 20th century to hold on to their colonies even in prosecuting actual wars produced poor or even negative benefits when seen from the viewpoint of a Paradox gamer looking to maximize their nation power level score. I always feel like financial capital is just an abstraction of where they get their wealth from (in fact I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is + a casino), and not an actual change in where it originates. Financialization seems to me like it just sort of lets capitalists switch their production holdings on the fly, occasionally getting lower level suckers to bargain theirs away so they individually have a larger slice of the pie. This doesn't let them just magic stuff out of mid air, just let's them borrow each other's strength, but that is still expressed in terms of how much labor is commanded. Because of all the hairbrained schemes/counter-schemes they've come up with to get their slice that themselves cost part of the slice to do so, the amount they receive only decreases. Short of finding a way to discipline itself, capital seems unable to avoid either isolating itself from the growing world and reducing itself to irrelevancy or becoming domesticated by Chinese wealth and essentially doing the equivalent of my grand uncle selling the house he lived in/inherited from his mother to the church in front of it provided he could live there until he died.
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Dec 21, 2023 04:48
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thechosenone posted:Well sure, but given they aren't exactly having much luck producing more even now while they still have many of those holdings to help multiply the value of local production, I don't see that doing anything but hastening the decline in the rate of profit. they currently print dollar bills out of thin air that they trade for goods.
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Dec 21, 2023 05:58
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thechosenone posted:I always feel like financial capital is just an abstraction of where they get their wealth from (in fact I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it is + a casino), and not an actual change in where it originates. Financialization seems to me like it just sort of lets capitalists switch their production holdings on the fly, occasionally getting lower level suckers to bargain theirs away so they individually have a larger slice of the pie. This doesn't let them just magic stuff out of mid air, just let's them borrow each other's strength, but that is still expressed in terms of how much labor is commanded. Yeah, fictitious capital is a much more accurate name than financial capital since a lot of it is people and institutions selling stuff such as derivatives of mortgages backed by one unit of capital (a house in this case). It will trip people up though because the profits made by it and the soldiers and cops who enforce it are very much real.
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Dec 21, 2023 06:17
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Something interesting about the value of exploitation is that the recursive competition makes it deteriorate over time. United Fruit Co was able to successfully make huge profits, with minimal supply chain impacts because they were one of the first. Today McDonalds is so much later that the additional costs impact many, many other industries. I think the US economy largely reflects this - the 50s and 60s saw insane wealth growth for most Americans, an unstainably rich and large "middle class" As exploitation continued, returns diminished and household wealth decreased. Setting aside math, the consolidation of wealth can't really explain this - a few hundred yachts and private jets is not nearly enough physical goods to offset the missing housing, cars, and other stuff that's now lacking in the US. Using dananns post - the consolidated wealth is almost all purely fictional money - not based on goods or even services.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:09
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BillsPhoenix posted:Using dananns post - the consolidated wealth is almost all purely fictional money - not based on goods or even services.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:20
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I would caution against seeing financial capital (and finance institutions) as an abstraction. One of capitalism's greatest defeats was suffered in the late 90s in a battle which spilled bank notes instead of blood - finance capital of the international bourgeoise facing down the financial institutions (and, indeed, financial capital) of a socialist country on an even playing field, and being forced to back down. Had the battle gone the other way, the consequences would have been very real.
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Dec 21, 2023 21:59
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my dad posted:I would caution against seeing financial capital (and finance institutions) as an abstraction. What was this now?
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Dec 21, 2023 22:05
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mycomancy posted:What was this now? Loosely speaking, the 1997 Asian financial crisis. China, with a lot of difficulty, stopped a series of escalating speculative attacks that severely harmed the economies of several other Asian countries and were targeting Hong Kong next (the affected countries were hurt a lot more than a surface glance of the numbers would tell you, given how deeply the IMF wormed itself into them afterwards in order to "save" them)
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Dec 21, 2023 22:12
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my dad posted:Loosely speaking, the 1997 Asian financial crisis. China, with a lot of difficulty, stopped a series of escalating speculative attacks that severely harmed the economies of several other Asian countries and were targeting Hong Kong next (the affected countries were hurt a lot more than a surface glance of the numbers would tell you, given how deeply the IMF wormed itself into them afterwards in order to "save" them) I think in retrospect this was the end of reform and opening up as it had going so far
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Dec 21, 2023 22:30
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my dad posted:I would caution against seeing financial capital (and finance institutions) as an abstraction. I tried to break it into parts, the fabricated fin capital is growing in size and importance, but is relatively new. Both the recursive increased costs of exploitation and the fabrication of fincap (as opposed to fincap theft like the US did with Bretton woods in nam) seem like attributes of end stage capitalism - they're not sustainable. I know most anti capitalist theory is that it's inevitable and a core problem with capitalism, I'm not sure I agree. I'll point to the collapse of UK as an example. A huge imperialist, titan of capitalism collapsed, but as a whole capitalism kept crushing it - in a capitalism continues to grow as a practice. I suspect if the US collapses China will end up being the next champion. They've already started to move into some of the practices.
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Dec 21, 2023 23:21
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That would indeed be a concern of mine. If China's leadership decides to cash in it will then become a matter of time. If the next leader after Xi Xingping doesn't sell out I'll probably have a good enough chance of not seeing China fall on its rear end though. As for the Asian financial crisis, I'd say that was an attempt to basically use the capital they had in those countries to engulf them and integrate them as parts of the financial capital system. Using it to shatter opponents who enter into the system with financial plays is indeed another emergent effect of the system. having failed to integrate and discipline China however it is now much more difficult if not impossible to use, and the abuse of it resulting in more and more nations being cut off and trading with each other has culminated in the opposite effect in Russia: attempting to yank the chain has simply broken it, and taken much physical capital with it that is now Russian owned, often at much lower cost than it would have been to otherwise appropriate it if it was even for sale otherwise. crepeface posted:they currently print dollar bills out of thin air that they trade for goods. As for the use of printed money to buy things, that is part of the redistribution. It doesn't change that the cost of the product is the cost to reproduce the labor that made it, regardless of when or where it was made. The cost of a widget is the cost to reproduce the labor to make it. 'But what if you simply force people to make it at gunpoint until they die' a person could ask? If you think about it, the fat reserves, muscles, minds ex cetera of the worker also represent capital of a sorts, one which is built/sustained by the cost of the labor to reproduce that, which I believe is what Marx refers to as the means of subsistence. Accounting for this and the labor it takes to reproduce the labor required to force this death march of production shows that they still do not make money from nothing, just from the existing capital in their control (and at an extremely large and rapidly unsustainable premium. Doubt you're gonna get many immigrant laborers if you're just funneling people into death camps). Edit: Given the pie is gonna shrink and people are already at subsistence level and there isn't enough excess labor to meaningfully increase profits for even a quarter even if you death marched all of it (and this would only shrink the pie further not keep it the same or bigger) rich people are gonna either have to thunder dome the weaker of their members or have such done for them as their power collapses after being spread to theoretical maximum and then farther. Ergo I believe there will be rich person thunder dome, with the proportion of rich people to poor people decreasing. thechosenone has issued a correction as of 01:54 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 01:34
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BillsPhoenix posted:It's very difficult to ascertain how much these extra costs end up being vs producing the beef locally, but the economic benefit to the imperialist nation's population is questionable. Globally it's catastrophically dumb, evil, and inefficient. It's a collateral effect that happens structurally, not intentionally. No British worker has directly received benefits from Cecil Rhodes loving around in Africa, but their job in a factory in Birmingham, Newcastle or Manchester had a greater guarantee by those activities (and all others). The imperial dividend isn't for the country, but for its capitalist class. The consequent gains are tangential: with imperialism, the goods affected are indeed offered at lower prices to the domestic market than otherwise they would -- the capitalists effectively offshore their surplus value extraction elsewhere instead of pressing down the domestic workers. Likewise, imperial prices force other countries to be more competitive to have commerce; the American South cotton production and participation in slave trading had direct correlation with British textile industry, and when prices weren't favorable enough, their colonies picked up the slack accordingly. Things are very different with the American model and subsequently with neoliberalism later. By leveraging financial capital from their very strong currency and purchasing power parity, companies earn far more through cracking the whip in labor extraction rather than the supply. Paying cents on the hour for a Bangladeshi in a sweatshop to sell clothing for a price available to the average consumer is what gives the brand their yield, not the sale per se. Without gains in average income, those goods become relatively more expensive just by inflation alone, and thus it becomes explicit for the worker that there's no great advantage to be had there -- the benefits diminish in comparison to the previous period because the neoliberal colony doesn't allow for push harder on the necks directly, that outsourcing of control means it is a matter for the local capitalists to handle. But it is still there.
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Dec 22, 2023 03:02
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thechosenone posted:As for the use of printed money to buy things, that is part of the redistribution. It doesn't change that the cost of the product is the cost to reproduce the labor that made it, regardless of when or where it was made. The cost of a widget is the cost to reproduce the labor to make it. 'But what if you simply force people to make it at gunpoint until they die' a person could ask? If you think about it, the fat reserves, muscles, minds ex cetera of the worker also represent capital of a sorts, one which is built/sustained by the cost of the labor to reproduce that, which I believe is what Marx refers to as the means of subsistence. Accounting for this and the labor it takes to reproduce the labor required to force this death march of production shows that they still do not make money from nothing, just from the existing capital in their control (and at an extremely large and rapidly unsustainable premium. Doubt you're gonna get many immigrant laborers if you're just funneling people into death camps). huh? we're talking about fictitious/financial capital in the context of imperialism. the dollar being the global reserve currency of the world means the US gets to print dollars out of nowhere and trade them for real goods from other countries. it gets to give out loans in dollars and make make more dollars off the interest. it can buy up big parts of the global pie for effectively nothing. the average american people get things like walmart goods and cars, the wealthy get yachts and private jets, US corporations get nickel mines and water rights and the US state gets military bases. this is dependent on the dollar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr_swuerrto this is why, as danann said, US attempts to build a rival BRI will fail. financialised capital returns too much profit and exerts too much control in their system for agriculture (and infrastructure) to be worth doing outside supporting their global domination (like telling countries to grow cash crops instead of wheat so they're beholden to wheat markets for food). this is also where china will likely be different (at least in the near future). their big banks are still under state control and they're an production/export economy the way the US used to be so their prosperity depends on material production and having customers that can afford their increasingly sophisticated goods (aka goods with more labour value).
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Dec 22, 2023 03:33
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Going back to that discussion, do Americans actually benefit in any real way from buying goods at Walmart? The dollar allows the retailer to access labor and goods cheaper, but I think you can make a very strong argument that doesn't actually benefit those buying at Walmart, it just is used to soften the decline the rate of profitability. The reserve dollar is the tool of the empire, but in material terms, the population of the US is as much of a slave to it as anyone else. To be honest, average quality of life of Americans in many ways is closer to many developing countries than a developed one at this point after you abstract out currency differences. The US economy is not only much smaller than it seems in terms of GDP (or even GDP (PPP)) but just what type of prices people for goods and services is ridiculous in international terms. The only real argument at play is that the American elite will last out at the public as it rapidly declines in power, but even then, this will be temporary. ---------- Also, the US government bringing money out of thin air and it being consequence-free and limitless is also incorrect; you can clearly see it in terms of the US holding on to higher interest rates much long than anyone thought and how spend-thrift the US government has suddenly become. Even military spending to the DoD wasn't much higher than the previous year despite massive improvements needing to be done. The US dollar is based ultimately on the influence of the American Empire, and as that influence fades so does the ability of the US to rely on it. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 12:57 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 12:29
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Ardennes posted:
What they said. Sorry I'm kinda wracked a bit by waking up to remembering my mother and father will die one day. Goddamn that loving sucks. Probably some people who wish their old man and lady would try to demand to see the manager of a wolverine though am I right!? *Nervously texting as my bowtie violently spins and drags me off the stage* Goddamn I loving hate capitalism. Makes the time I have left with loved ones all that much worse. And goddamn do I love Marxism and Marxists, warts and all. At least everyone here knows the frustration that there's a better way, and I hope we all get to benefit from this sooner rather than later.
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Dec 23, 2023 12:40
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Ardennes posted:Going back to that discussion, do Americans actually benefit in any real way from buying goods at Walmart? The dollar allows the retailer to access labor and goods cheaper, but I think you can make a very strong argument that doesn't actually benefit those buying at Walmart, it just is used to soften the decline the rate of profitability. wat?  this is the US's trade balance. they collectively get to pay that difference with made up paper and numbers in a spreadsheet. what is this very strong argument that US people don't benefit from imperialism and dollar hegemony? quote:The reserve dollar is the tool of the empire, but in material terms, the population of the US is as much of a slave to it as anyone else. To be honest, average quality of life of Americans in many ways is closer to many developing countries than a developed one at this point after you abstract out currency differences. dude, we keep going over this. yes, if you also changed the economic system of the US when you removed dollar hegemony it would be different. but that's a separate thing that most people don't accept as a given. quote:The US economy is not only much smaller than it seems in terms of GDP (or even GDP (PPP)) but just what type of prices people for goods and services is ridiculous in international terms. no one said the US having a money printer is consequence-free wtf are you talking about.
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Dec 23, 2023 14:48
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Okay but if it isn't consequence free then it isn't cost free (and like hell did anyone but the working class take that hit, and I'd say pushing it onto the workers of other nations just kicks the can down the road before it hits us in the shin, probably harder than earlier). If like 99 percent of the printed cash just goes into the dragon hordes of the rich and they use it to just make it easier to ignore the working man then there are many who may not benefit at all. As it is I'm sure it helped some but ultimately whatever gains we got were taken back or otherwise squandered. We don't have a hypothetical non capitalist America to compare to, though now that I use the word 'non capitalist ' I'm absolutely certain we'd have been better off that way. Edit2: Not that this was an option but even less powerful capital would have been an improvement. Edit: come to think i'd take less powerful capitalists and less alienation than whatever scraps finance capital threw at my parents/grandparents to betray the international workers. We clearly adapt to the bread and circuses we have, so even if I'd been born poorer I may have been happier for it. thechosenone has issued a correction as of 15:09 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 15:02
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you're abusing the word 'cost' as badly as an neoliberal economist. let me put it this way: the US people are currently able to afford a far higher standard of living than they otherwise would without the current system of imperial financial dominance. i don't think that's a controversial take in cspam. sure, you could say that imperialism is a poison pill and it would be better for the US people in the long term if/when the US hegemon collapses and if they build a more equitable society. but you're yadda yadda yaddaing a lot of intermediate steps there
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Dec 23, 2023 15:14
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crepeface posted:wat? You just said "effectively for nothing." It really isn't the case at least, especially nowadays. Beyond just the mechanics of a fiat currency, the US has to take action in such as higher interests order to support continual monetary expansion. It isn't for free, and it isn't for nothing, even it seems like it initially. Long-term high trade deficits are not to the benefit of the American people, the US didn't always have those deficits. They were created. Neoliberalism isn't a permanent feature of American life or really necessary for its standard of living in any significant time frame. Even if you wanted to boil it down to "no other solutions are possible or worth talking about," the conditions of American society are dramatically declining in real time despite those consistent deficits. At a certain point is someone living out of their car in Arizona truly exploiting the third world or the public of the first world and the third world just on either end of a monolithic system? (It wouldn't even be the end of American capitalism or America as a country, it would literally just returning the US to the state it was in the 1970s; well within living memory.)
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Dec 23, 2023 15:22
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Ardennes posted:You just said "effectively for nothing." It really isn't the case at least, especially nowadays. Beyond just the mechanics of a fiat currency, the US has to take action in such as higher interests order to support continual monetary expansion. It isn't for free, and it isn't for nothing, even it seems like it initially. what is the US inflation rate? like 3%? australia's is 5% and we are like one of the only countries to have a trade surplus with china. other countries have to hold US dollars because it's the reserve currency. when the US prints dollars, those dollars buy less and they actually have to produce poo poo to get dollars rather than printing them. that's partly why everyone that's in their economic gravity is more hosed than they are. you're talking about long-term detriments while that's the reality that other countries are dealing with today
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Dec 23, 2023 15:39
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crepeface posted:what is the US inflation rate? like 3%? australia's is 5% and we are like one of the only countries to have a trade surplus with china. The average Australian probably has a better quality of life (or almost certainly) than an American, you are assuming a reserve currency brings some type of intrinsic benefit to come people in the US, when it clearly doesn't. Also, inflation isn't a good metric for a comparison, because so many factors go into it. The Russians have high inflation right now but it isn't from the ruble collapsing (it has actually been doing better) but far higher wages are just pushing up prices altogether. So one hand, you could say life is "worse" because inflation...but it reality average Russians are going the best they have, maybe ever, at this point. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 15:59 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 15:54
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jesus christ
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Dec 23, 2023 15:55
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do Black and indigenous workers in the US benefit from imperialism what about the millions of workers that have migrated to the US from Latin America in the last few decades.
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Dec 23, 2023 15:56
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Ardennes posted:The average Australian probably has a better quality of life (or almost certainly) than an American, you are assuming a reserve currency brings some type of intrinsic benefit to come people in the US, when it clearly doesn't. lol you're the one that brought up inflation as a negative consequence of dollar hegemony! but russia having having it higher is the best they've ever had it??? lol???
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Dec 23, 2023 16:00
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I'd still rather live in a stinky rear end America that was never able to do finance capital and/or never got to live off the suffering of other nations workers even if it meant I was dirt poor. The more money capitalists have the more they can turn the thumbscrews. To me that means it'd have been a drat better value than the hogfeed we get now. Don't care about whatever my definitions sound like, because the poo poo I ain't good at saying from my head, whether it's just misspoken or mis thought still makes more sense than the words of a non Marxist economist.
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Dec 23, 2023 16:06
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Atrocious Joe posted:do Black and indigenous workers in the US benefit from imperialism is the average black person in the US better off than the average black person in another country that's not the metropole of the EU/5 eyes? probably??? why are we breaking it up into demographics?
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Dec 23, 2023 16:07
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crepeface posted:lol you're the one that brought up inflation as a negative consequence of dollar hegemony! but russia having having it higher is the best they've ever had it??? In a relative sense in to the dollar, the point is that it is often difficult to do cross country comparisons of inflation without taking other factors into account. That said, inflation in the US specifically is noteworthy due to the relatively low levels of inflation it has experienced since the mid-00s. Also, high inflation in the US, is a negative consequences of the decline of dollar hegemony, so the other way around In Russia, because wage increases are significantly (7-8%) higher than inflation, people are making more money, prices are being raised, and their quality of life is getting better because of it. This isn't happening in the US, far from it. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 16:10 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 16:07
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crepeface posted:is the average black person in the US better off than the average black person in another country that's not the metropole of the EU/5 eyes? probably??? Black and indigenous people in the US belong to oppressed nations within the borders of the imperialist core, and how they relate to liberation movements globally has been a big part of US history. I don't have a gotcha here, it's a question that's existed for like over a century. With regards to Latin American migration there is the phenomenon of how victims of US imperialism can then become beneficiaries of it once actually living in US borders. For some nations, a large fraction of the population now lives in the US. For example there are almost 2.5 million Salvadorans in the US and 6.5 million in El Salvador. That's one of the more extreme examples, but it's a pattern repeated across parts of Latin America. How simply residing in the US influences workers has an impact across the Americas, because people in the US are going to in contact with their friends and relatives back home.
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Dec 23, 2023 16:31
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Ardennes posted:you are assuming a reserve currency brings some type of intrinsic benefit to come people in the US, when it clearly doesn't. how is this clear? i think it clearly does bring a benefit to american people the comparison is what life would be like for average people in the us if dollar hegemony suddenly disappeared, not whether or not the average american has the highest standard of living in the world or not
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Dec 23, 2023 16:34
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fart simpson posted:how is this clear? i think it clearly does bring a benefit to american people It it really when it is trapping them in a continually worse quality of life? The fact that things will get worse before they get better isn't saying much besides it is a process. ------ Also, I wouldn't split the suffering of the American people based on race or ethnicity really either. It is clear there is suffering across the board, even if they are mean correlations. There are plenty of poor whites in America, probably more than ever.
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Dec 23, 2023 16:47
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Ardennes posted:It it really when it is trapping them in a continually worse quality of life? The fact that things will get worse before they get better isn't saying much besides it is a process. yes? those things aren’t directly related. you can be benefiting from something while also on a general downward trend
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Dec 23, 2023 16:49
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i swear we already did this one at least once. maybe twice. this is an insanely stupid argument to make ardennes. you're on argument autopilot. snap out of it. go reread https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ and do 20 comrade lenins
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Dec 23, 2023 17:15
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fart simpson posted:yes? those things aren’t directly related. you can be benefiting from something while also on a general downward trend Abusive relationships aren't of true benefit
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Dec 23, 2023 17:20
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fart simpson posted:the comparison is what life would be like for average people in the us if dollar hegemony suddenly disappeared, not whether or not the average american has the highest standard of living in the world or not Yeah, I mean, this is a statistic factual. But to take in terms that matter to people, the benefits of imperialism are always tangential and incidental wrt the working class. It's benefits happen in spillovers - if the class holds global control a significant market share of oil production and distribution, cheaper domestic prices happen also because other capitalists want the advantages, etc I chose that example because, imho, neoliberalism hosed up even that basic logic through its leap to financial capitalism as the dominant form. I have this "guess" (I haven't read anything specifically about this idea so I think that "hypothesis" would be way too much lmao) that once neoliberalism rolled in, the benefits of imperialism in the aggregate started to diminish accordingly and had an expiry date stamped on them. Like, without material demand to make use of the material spoil, those tangential and incidental benefits start to evaporate pretty quickly - the dictators and juntas don't put the minerals into the cargo ships to be processed in the USA. The ship was built in South Korea by a LLC that handles its main business address in the Cayman and flies a flag of Panama; this ship will deliver the minerals to metalworks in Latin America and Asia, which will process them. These sheets of various metals will be worked in the General Motors plants of San Luís de Potosí in Mexico and Qingdao in China; the latter sends vehicles under the all-American brands of Chevrolet and Buick to be consumed in the USA. Think of all material economic activity that doesn't happen in the United States as a consequence of that. Imperialism follows the form; under industrial capitalism, verticalization and integration are critical to amplify benefits of scale (and thus produce more value). It wants to centralize the activity domestically - it oppresses others to acquire raw materials in a brutal systematic manner that provides a bonus domestic surplus gain that allows for both profits and wages to increase. Under financial capitalism, the domestic surplus gain is reverted to financial form: credit. Like wages in industrial capitalism also helped form a base of consumption of its own activity, credit in finance works similarly, but far more negatively to the working class because credit is debt, after all. This is where it all comes together for the USA: there are material effects that still exist (especially in terms of power established in things such as the dollar and the exorbitant privilege) and provides with much greater purchasing power parity than almost every other case around the world, but at the same time, the historical collapse in the lack of gains of real income, loss of productive activity and financialization meant an American working class bound to be poorer in income and catastrophically far more in debt in its average to the point that there's no imperial dividend able to compensate for that in its spillover
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Dec 23, 2023 17:59
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thread, let's come together and shake our heads at this utter buffoon, happy holidays Robert M. Solow, groundbreaking economist and Nobelist, dies at 99 www.seattletimes.com posted:Robert M. Solow, who won a Nobel in economic science in 1987 for his theory that advances in technology, rather than increases in capital and labor, have been the primary drivers of economic growth in the United States, died on Thursday at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was 99.
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Dec 23, 2023 19:11
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I had to read some Solow, wasn't much though (lol). Solow wasn't a pioneer at all, that's typical MIT bullshit in econ. Kondratieff in Russia was talking about the economical supercycle in the beginning of the 20th century, based on the transformation of technological standards of the mode of production (steam engine, combustion, etc). The idea of seasonal supercycles based on technological progress tied very neatly with Marx's observation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, because while the productive leap of every subsequent technological shift was massive, it produced diminishing returns of capital accumulation - eventually we would reach the "Kondratieff winter", an economic supercycle where technological advance pushes not nearly enough of the tendency back. Solow argues in terms of technological change in itself, forget social use or context or anything. And, of course, growth doesn't mean social development, improvement of the quality of living for everybody in a society, etc. It isn't an inherently positive thing. MIT people in econ are very often forgetful of such details and they really could use a couple of days of labor in a third world export plantation to have a broadening of horizons, so to speak
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Dec 23, 2023 19:35
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crepeface posted:is the average black person in the US better off than the average black person in another country that's not the metropole of the EU/5 eyes? probably??? because those are two groups most affected by the u.s. being a colonial state both at home and abroad. atrocious joe hit the crux of the biscuit in one sentence
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Dec 23, 2023 20:00
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas if you're asking whether the village benefits from the child being tortured, the child is a part of the village. it's a question on how your hedonistic calculus is performed
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Dec 23, 2023 20:16
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| # ? May 27, 2024 23:40 |
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The Voice of Labor posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas omelas is a story about how liberals cannot conceive of a perfect society without there having to be some kind of insidious hidden evil driving it, the narrator literally makes up the child torture on the spot to make a point about the readers' inability to believe in a utopia without a hidden cost and ends the story with a smug "now do you believe me?" i'm so goddamn tired of people just taking the surface level reading of that story, star trek strange new worlds season 1 did this without irony and it was one of the worst episodes in that season
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Dec 23, 2023 20:35
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