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May 16, 2024 01:38
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- Cerebral Bore
- Apr 21, 2010
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Fun Shoe
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Its more of a social theory than an economic theory. As a social/philosophical theory, Heidegger and Lyotard, I would say.
One of the tenets of Marxism, as I understand it, is that economic production is the true structure of a society and ideologies come along to support that. The problem with that is it assumes that the things a society is producing are being produced "naturally". But the demand for them is created culturally and only makes sense in a certain cultural context, which is often obvious outside of that system but not inside that system. Marx, for example, didn't really know about Veblen goods.
Although both the author and the book have problems, Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" is very interesting in analyzing why societies continue to produce things that seem to have no objective value. For example, he writes about how Norse settlers in Greenland spent resources keeping cattle rather than sheep, even though it was counterproductive (they took way more resources than they produced). Cattle represented a source of prestige and a tie to their way of life in Scandinavia, but they probably didn't think of it that way, they probably just assumed that cattle had an "objective" value.
So I believe that many of the things that people think are goods with "objective" value only make sense in a context, and that context is often of how it allows that person to align themselves with the ruling institutions of their society.
In other words, when someone goes to a doctor to get a prescription for naproxen for minor aches and pains, they are doing what those ranchers in Greenland were doing: getting the prestige of institutional power, in a way that objectively doesn't really make sense.
It's kinda baffling that you simultaneously manage to claim that Marx was totally clueless while falling back on the authority of Jared loving Diamond.
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Jul 13, 2015 10:19
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Jul 11, 2015 23:02
