|
Eschat0n posted:
What you are describing is a social relationship. Without this social relationships the "value" of the capital that you amass is meaningless. We can see this by examining your claim that the value of a car is determined by the opportunity cost a hypothetical buyer faces if they build the car themselves. First of all, most people have neither the time, the skills, nor the facilities to build their own car. Even if you personally were capable of building your own car, this alone would not get you must of a price discount. As long as most other people still can't build their own car, it doesn't necessarily make sense for the car dealer to sell you the car for cheap when he knows that there are plenty of people out there who have no choice but to buy the car at the price he wants to sell it. The point here being that even if you were an extraordinarily productive individual who was capable of manufacturing your own motor vehicle, you'd probably still end up paying more or less full price if you do decide to buy a new car. That's because the prices of these items are determined by social averages, not individual one off trades. If most people on the market are judged likely to pay $30,000 for a new car then the dealership is unlikely to sell you the same car for $10,000 no matter how many times you insist you could build one yourself. So as this all implies, value emerges from the interactions of an entire marketplace, not the actions of a lone individual on a desert island. Perhaps we can argue that Robinson Crusoe has to invest his scarce time and effort in a range of different activities that give him the best return. It doesn't matter. His activity as a lone individual still doesn't bear much resemblance to society and doesn't tell us much about the creation of value as it occurs in a society. I would suggest a more fruitful exercise would be a historical / anthropological investigation of the origin of actually existing states and markets rather than reliance on an aged "Just-So" story. A further point; while the value of the car is set based on the need to sell it in a market this doesn't mean that the seller can set whatever price they want. The seller wants to achieve a market clearing price but to do so they need to cover their expenses such as plant and machinery and labour, hopefully while making a profit. While you may have instances of extraordinarily efficient workers the fact is that in a modern factory labour costs are once again set not by individual skill but by social dynamics - the size and skill of the labour force, the cost of living for workers, the cost of your materials, etc. And this is all without evening really getting into the finance side of things. By the time a hypothetical seller has assembled the necessary capital and labour to sell a car they're therefore already obliged to charge a certain amount for what they are selling. If they cannot achieve that price they'll go out of business. Perhaps they can sell at a loss for some period of time as part of a strategy to capture a new market, but they need to eventually find a way to sell their cars for less than what it costs to produce them. It doesn't matter if you can make your own car for $10,000 because for them to sell you that car to you at that price would be a loss. Your individual merit can't overcome the socially determined value of the car. Probably the best case scenario would be that you find a dealer who desperately needs to clear his inventory and you negotiate a price reduction because he needs to sell the car almost as badly as you want to buy it, but even in this scenario his willingness to sell is based on a calculation of many factors outside your individual ability to build your own car. So again, notice how the value of the car is to a large degree determined by the cost of its production, balanced against the supply and demand of the market, and the need to achieve a profit. This is a dynamic that emerges from the interaction of many different social actors - the buyers, the sellers, the workers, as well as all the people who in various ways provide the infrastructure to sustain this web of relationships - and it is this complicated set of interactions that produces value, not the heroic efforts of one individual.
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2019 18:19
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:01 |
|
|
If you need to invent such an elaborate and ridiculous scenario to justify your theory of value then why not start over, working from the actual historical record instead of something you invented?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2019 07:44
|
|
|
Typo posted:
The LTV,predicts that there will be a correspondence between the labour invested into an object and its exchange value on the market. Right or wrong it is a predictive theory. The OP is just building up rhetorical sandcastles to try and bolster a poorly thought out ethical argument.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2019 03:39
|
|
|
Spangly A posted:what? LTV post-marx is about the entire history of capitalism being built and maintained through surplus-value in the market, not the commodity. The exchange value and price both further separate from socially necessary labour time of the commodity as the complexity of an economy increases. The individual labour time of the individual commodity never has any direct interaction with the exchange value - only the wider implication of surplus value matters. Marxist LTV works just fine with discounting booze to make you buy crisps As I've heard it explained, according to Marx the socially necessary labour time does play a role in determining the exchange value of the commodity. An individual commodity might sell for more or less than its objective value based on local factors like supply and demand or marketing, but those fluctuations are still anchored around the socially necessary labour time taken to produce the commodity. In cases where one commodity consistently sells for more than its real value there has to be another commodity that is consistently selling for less than its real value, so that the economy as a whole balances out. So while the LTV allows that individual commodities can and often do sell for more or less than their labour content it still argues that there is an important relationship between socially necessary labour time and price.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2019 03:43
|
|
|
Moridin920 posted:If it costs more to produce then the price will be higher. Is that particularly Marxian though? If it takes more socially necessary labour time to produce a commodity then, ceterus paribus, that thing should cost more than a commodity that required less socially necessary labour time to produce. You're seriosuly asking me how this is a Marxian analysis? quote:e: Oh I see. I think the confusion lies here: value is not the same as price. The confusion here is yours. Saying there's a "relationship" between socially necessary labour time and price is not the same as saying that value = price because, as I stated pretty directly in my last post, prices fluctuate based on local circumstances. quote:Marx is talking about value, not price, though it quickly gets esoteric and complicated... I'm no Marx scholar but I think this is an almost direct inversion of Marx, who as I understand it was very much emphasizing that the sphere of production is crucial and that the market sphere is secondary and of less significance. quote:Either way it is clear that "value is separate from exchange value." From Capital Vol. III: Capital Vol. III Part II, Conversion of Profit into Average Profit posted:The capital invested in some spheres of production has a mean, or average, composition, that is, it has the same, or almost the same composition as the average social capital. Individual values do not directly translate into prices there is still an important economy wide relationship and therefore Marx does predict that socially necessary labour time plays an important role in determining prices, even though it's not a direct 1:1 correspondence that some people think it is.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2019 00:08
|
|
|
Moridin920 posted:Seems pretty obvious that if it costs more to produce x it will be worth more, I'd be amazed if Marx was the first one to point that out officially What are you even trying to say?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2019 00:27
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Unless I am much mistaken Marx is arguing that a thing's value does not determine the price but rather than the collective value of all things produced is equal to the collective price of all things in the economy. And subsequently individual things can fluctuate up and down but the economy as a whole must be zero sum. This is also my interpretation. This is relevant because as I was noting earlier this is still a predictive theory in which there is supposed to be a relationship between the amount of value produced in the economy and the prices in the economy, even though it's not a 1:1 correlation. OP's proposed theory has no such predictive content. It's a purely normative statement. So in that sense he's not even mucking around in the 19th century reinventing the labour theory of value, he's all the way back in the 17th century reinventing Locke's theory on the origin of property. quote:And whether or not Marx is the first to make the observation does not prevent it from being an important part of his comprehensive analysis of how capitalist society and economy works. Marx wasn't the first to invent the labour theory of value but I think his particular interpretation of it as being a society wide social construction that was particular to capitalism might have been quite different from the versions of the theory used by Smith and Ricardo.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2019 21:17
|
|
|
Eschat0n posted:It's not elaborate unless you're stupid; hence the joke about it being a spherical cow. Not sure how you got to this point. It's not hard to understand, it's just elaborate. You can lampshade this by making self aware jokes about spheres in a vacuum but that doesn't change the fact you're developing your arguments through references to a historically impossible situation. It's incumbent on you to justify why this sprawling desert island metaphor maps onto any real world closely enough that it can actually illuminate a real world situation. quote:If it's agreement it's escaping me. And yes, I can plainly see people are disagreeing with me. Which is, by the way, completely the point of the thread and why it's posted in a forum called Debate & Discussion. I think that the sentence I've bolded here is really crucial. You are assuming that the best way to understand a complicated real world situation is to begin with an intentionally simplified and abstracted situation. Then we check how our intuitions react to this highly abstract situation and, I guess, later attempt to map these intuitions onto a real world situation so that we can understand the real world situation more clearly. To some extent it's inevitable that we will abstract situations. I did the same thing in my first post in this thread when I described the process that determines the economic value of a car. However, you're operating on such a high level of abstraction that you've completely exiled the real world and any actual history. You've gone so far into the clouds that there just isn't much applicability to what you're describing. Everything you say is coherent on its own terms but has little to no connection to anything that has ever happened in the actually existing world. Let's really zero in on the following statements that you make: quote:The work to gather the coconuts was, in my mind, simply stacking them in a pile so you can say they're yours; without that work there is no basis to the claim or easy method of delineation. The alternative is to make the effort, also fairly trivial, to stake a claim on the land the ungathered coconuts lie on, but the land itself is not an RC's wealth unless and until they do that. The point is that no matter how simple I can make it, I can't come up with a situation in which the land itself, without any work, counts as wealth to anyone. Notice how whenever you try to discuss wealth it immediately turns into a discussion of how you stake a claim that other people will recognize. You see you keep trying to simplify this process down to the individual level but that is literally impossible because something like 'wealth' only makes sense in the context of a world inhabited by other people. Wealth necessarily involves your ability to control access to a resource. That control inevitably entails some relationship with other people. These relationships are the basis upon which we can seperate some random plot of land from something that counts as 'wealth'. Every historical society on earth involves this process of judging different claims to access of resources or of determining who gets to do what with society's available stock of wealth. You need to give us a really good reason why our understanding is somehow improved by ignoring all those real world examples and focusing on one that you invented. Why should we expect the moral intuitions generated by your thought experiment will be a useful guide for understanding a world that has no real resemblance to your metaphor? quote:It seems to me that when you buy unimproved land you're doing it through some kind of social organization which sanctions the act and is willing to back that up with law/violence. Furthermore, the land in and of itself is not wealth-providing to society as a whole unless it is eventually improved (through work). I realize that's a nuanced argument. Well, OP, it certainly provides wealth to the individual who buys it, you say. He can sell it to someone else who then improves it, but it certainly represented wealth to that middle man, didn't it? I agree that it did, in the same way that money represents wealth. The land represents the ability to get wealth out of it by work. I can go buy an asteroid made of solid gold tomorrow, but because no one can actually go improve that asteroid, no one in their right mind agrees it represents wealth. So having read what you've posted so far, my biggest question for you is what you're actually trying to accomplish with these musings. This is actually a really important question. Theories exist to help inform us or to guide us in reaching certain conclusions. The kind of understanding we want to achieve has an important influence on how we design our theories. I ask this because while you have stated that you don't want to talk about the morality of ownership that seems to be the entire point of your thought experiment. This is what I was getting at when I brought up Marx's Labour Theory of Value earlier in the thread. The purpose of Marx's labour theory of value was to help us understand how the capitalist economy works, to reveal the underlying 'laws of motion' that Marx believed would allow us to understand the system and predict some of its behaviours. For Marx, the fact that labour power was the only commodity that could add more value than it cost was a fundamental insight for understanding class conflict as well as the economic cycles of booms and busts. For Marx and his followers the labour theory of value can actually be used to predict future economic events. My issue with your wealth = work theory is that it doesn't seem to be designed to actually make any predictions or tell us anything novel. You just seem to be restating things we already know but giving them a new interpretation. Let's say we completely accept your definition of wealth = work, so what? What actually changes? How would this lead us to view the world different? What does this help us predict or understand? I ask this because it seems like the only real purpose of your theory would be to tell us whether someone's ownership of something is ethically justified. It's very much in the tradition of Locke arguing that the origin of property is when we "mix our labour" with the natural world. This is a normative theory about justifying uneven distributions of resources by arguing that those uneven distributions are the result of justified hard work by the haves and slothful indolence by the have nots. Other than that the theory doesn't really tell us anything - it doesn't seem to give us any way of understanding the world, it merely offers an interpretation of the world that happens to justify a particular distribution of resources. quote:That's a really stellar interpretation of my motives, since I've explicitly expressed a desire to remove ethics from the conversation entirely. And yeah, right now I think that if your formulation of the LTV is correct, then I essentially agree with the LTV. Correspondence is a great word to use, too, because obviously there's going to be fluctuation due to demand. What you're missing so far, though, is that I'm also trying to consider value and wealth separately. It seems plausible to me that something could have a lot of value on a market without a lot of wealth in it, given my theory of what constitutes wealth, and conversely you could have a lot of wealth that carries little value in the market. See above for why I think you're developing a fundamentally normative theory. Also, apologies if my initial reply was unduly hostile. As you may have realized by now you inadvertently had a lot of us thinking of a notorious previous poster who would start threads like this but who was, suffice it to say, somewhat less open minded or genuinely intellectual curious than you seem to be. I take issue with your attempt to separate wealth from value. Again I have to ask, what's the actual value of holding them as separate things? What's the objective of your theory of wealth? What is it going to help you do or understand better? It seems like for most of these questions it'd be more precise to examine "value" than "wealth", not least of all because value lends itself to objective measurement somewhat more easily than wealth does. "Wealth" in a very real sense doesn't exist. The word itself is a metaphor that covers an infinite variation of discrete phenomena that can't actually be compared to one another. Freedom from hunger is a form of wealth, prestige is a form of wealth, etc. In this sense I don't really know how you can compare the wealth of two people in any precise way. I don't know if Gates or Bezos has more 'weath' in terms of who has the most access to use value. What I can maybe try to actually learn about is how much value each one controls. I feel like you're not really engaging with how slippery and vague the term you're trying to use is. Similarly, your definition of 'work' seems to vague that it feels like the fact I have to breath to stay alive would count as "work" under your system, so as long as I'm breathing I'm working for any wealth I have because after all were I to stop oxygenating my brain I would die and then be unable to enjoy my wealth. quote:This is great, too. I mean, I'm going to take it or leave it as far as your opinions on capitalists go (you do you, I'm not there yet), but everything else you say makes a ton of sense. It really seems like I'm gonna want to read Wealth of Nations cover to cover... but also that's a pretty old book and stuff has been said in economics since then (understatement understood). Anything more recent which focus on stuff like the LTV and the meaning of "work" in economics and stuff like that? Yeah, don't start with the Wealth of Nations unless you've got all the time in the world. I think this thread can develop some more up to date recommendations. quote:Would Marx say the commodity consistently selling for less than its real value is human labor? Because I think I can get behind that; it makes sense to me. If work is wealth to me, then the situation in which I am willing to do work for someone else so that they will give me something in return for that work is one in which I am literally trading pure, unadulterated wealth (my work) for something else. The agent getting that work from me is going to profit most from that exchange only when they can get more work out of me than the work they put into getting whatever it is they're giving me in exchange. And this continues on down the line; the craftsman knows in his heart that the work he does for a company is always worth more than the company is willing to pay him, or the consumer is willing to spend. He is forced to make that bad trade because as a finite mortal being he cannot simply make the car, to use an earlier formulation, or print the fiat currency and enforce it with his own personal army. He must rely on others for these things, and is thus compelled to make a "bad" trade. Everyone in a society does this, I suppose. In theory any commodity can sell for more or less than its socially necessary labour time. Diamonds are a notorious example of a relatively common stone whose value has been inflated through artificial scarcity and clever marketing. The result is that you have a situation where diamonds consistently sell for a higher price than the objective amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce them. This implies that somewhere else in the economy there's an equivalent number of commodities that are selling for less than their objective value. The result being that at the economy wide level everything balances out and the value of everything produced is equivalent to the total prices of the economy. What you seem to be referring to is Marx's specific argument that labour power is specifically the only input that generates more value for the capitalist than its cost. This is an important teminological difference in Marxism. Strictly speaking Marx would say that you cannot sell labour, only "labour power". Marxist economist Richard Wolff explains the distinction as follows: Richard Wolf posted:Labor is not a commodity in the Marxian theoretical system, while labor power is. Labor is something humans have always done to produce the goods and services upon which life depends. Labor power is something very historically specific, is often absent in long periods of human history, and reaches its fullest presence in capitalism. Labor power is what a worker sells to an employer. The employer "consumes" the purchased labor power by setting its owner - the worker - to perform the laboring activity (to do labor) alongside/with tools, equipment, and raw materials. The worker is paid a wage in exchange for providing to the employer what he/she owns, namely his/her labor power for a set period of time. The goal of the employer in consuming the labor power he/she has purchased is the commodity emerging at the end of the process of production, a commodity whose value (socially neccesary labor time) exceeds the combined value of (1) the used up tools, equipment and raw materials, plus (2) the value of the wage paid for the purchased labor power. That excess, surplus value, is the driving objective of a capitalist employer. I think the rest of your characterization of Marx is broadly correct. Marx wasn't quite talking about this when he said it but I think his quote about how "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." quote:To be sure it's pretty general. I think it helps explain - to me, at least - how the overall wealth of human civilizations has increased over time. I think that's interesting. Looking at a finite planet, you'd think all the stuff there is, is already there - all the wealth is already present and cannot be diminished or improved upon. But manipulations to decrease entropy locally (work) do actually create wealth from the perspective of the folks who can use it. As others have said just ignore the haters. quote:This is actually a good point. I suppose I really can't avoid talking about property and ownership like I thought I could; it's really kind of central to what I'm talking about. That does make this discussion take on an ethical dimension as well, like you said earlier, doesn't it? I start to see where you're coming from... Again, my issue with your argument is that even if your definition of work is internally consistent I don't see what it matters. All you seem to be doing is offering a new way of defining existing phenomena. I don't understand what enhancement of understanding we gain if we decide to just label all wealth 'work'. How should this change our views? What insights does this reveal? As I've tried to point out, other work based theories of value (which I think is pretty close to what you mean by wealth even if its not the exact same) are supposed to actually help us understand questions like why does a car cost more than a bicycle or why capitalism has periodic economic crises of over production. What does your theory help us understand? Because - and apologies if I'm misunderstanding - it really seems like all it does is seek to shuffle around our ethical intuitions about ownership.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2019 21:19
|
|
|
Eschat0n posted:As a quick aside, and since my blog was already posted, if anyone is is mystifyingly obsessed with learning more about my preceding thoughts and beliefs, here's a blog post of mine from 2017, which is reasonably recent: Not to be overly pedantic, and I want to respect your request that we focus on what you've written here, but I do feel the need to point out that your argument that "if we accept that nature's food chains are free, it's not a great leap to suppose that the first markets were also quite free" is actually a gigantic leap. You really cannot derive economic history out of first principles about nature. I know it sucks but you've gotta put in the spadework to study history in detail and understand it.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2019 21:25
|
|
|
Eschat0n posted:Yeah, I'm glad you identified this. I think this is the crux of our misunderstanding. What am I really trying to do? What does it mean to say work = wealth? I fully agree it's a super-important question. Why even bother saying it at all, if it means nothing, entails nothing? Nothing in your post comes even close to hinting at an answer to this question. quote:People make a great deal out of value; but take away the market and replace it with a pure communist society run by angels; you'd still have wealth (equitably distributed). Value, however, would be absent, because there is no trade to be made; each and all have what they need, and if some inequality should arise, the balance will be restored by the benevolent bureaucratic class. But that wealth would still not be without its costs; to the world and the workers who produced it from the world; the system from which it was taken. The trick of sustainability would still haunt such a perfect society, even with value totally absent. That's why I think it's worth separating wealth and value. Do you really think it's never occurred to anyone that good things in life require human effort? Did you really need an elaborate thought experiment about coconuts to tell you this?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2019 07:31
|
|
|
Eschat0n posted:I hope it occurs to you that simple assertions aren't arguments, and nothing in the post above constitutes anything other than hostility and a lovely straw man. I've given you a lot of time and attention, have listened closely while you explained your case, and have offered specific criticisms of your ideas that you've failed to respond to. You also seem to have interpreted the criticisms of your specific thought experiment with a rejection of all abstract thinking. This is obviously not the case. Everyone relies on thought experiments to some degree in order to make sense of the world. The point is that not all thought experiments are made equal and you don't seem to even understand that you haven't done anything to justify why your specific thought experiment is valid or why any conclusions you reach would actually apply to a real world example. quote:When you equate wealth/use-value with work, then you can couple economics with physics and see how sustainable economies will never produce widespread prosperity because of systemic constraints. How? If you can actually do this then why haven't you done it already? Literally everything else you've typed is wasting our time. This is clearly the core of your theory. But again, you don't really have a 'theory' do you? Because theories make predictions. All you've done is redefined the word wealth to mean something really specific. Changing the definition of a word does not, on its own, generate any predictions about the world. So let me ask you again, what's the actually predictive power of your argument? In particular, how is it any different from the theories people are already using? You're clearly not ready to hear this but the biggest part of explaining a new theory of how things work is relating it to pre-existing theories. You need to say "look, I've really studied the alternative theory and I understand it well, it makes the following argument which I think is demonstrably wrong. Here is my demonstration of why that argument is wrong. Now, here is my own theory which explains the same thing better than the old theory." You haven't done that. And if you're not capable of that then it's pretty rude of you to demand other people spend a lot of time listening to your ideas and giving you feedback since you've explicitly refused to do that work yourself. quote:The coconuts were not necessary, strictly-speaking. We could have tried to discuss this in abstractions alone; sorry I didn't construct my argument according to your specifications... that doesn't make it wrong, however. Again, the burden of proof is on you to justify the thought experiment that you constructed. Nobody else is obliged to start from the assumption that its a good experiment and then disprove it. quote:Thus far it has been a pretty lovely experience, with most people mocking me, accusing me of false pretenses, making jabs at my background, or providing pretty poor critiques of my position that show they're not really paying attention to what's been said or are just as in the dark as I am. Save the self pity. You came into this thread and more or less announced that even though you had not done any previous research and would make no effort to demonstrate any familiarity with pre-existing theories that you nevertheless felt confident constructing an entire new theory of everything and demand people treat it seriously. Can you imagine doing this in literally any other domain of human knowledge and not facing hostile reactions? The fact you actually have multiple people genuinely responding to your ideas and criticizing them rather than just ignoring you is prettty impressive considering the fact you don't appear to have any formal background in economics, anthropology, sociology or philosophy. quote:However, there have been a few bright points - some things I've been forced to be more clear about, or even admit I'm wrong in: The problem is that you're not even wrong: Wikipedia posted:The phrase "not even wrong" describes an argument or explanation that purports to be scientific but is based on invalid reasoning or speculative premises that can neither be proven correct nor falsified. Hence, it refers to statements that cannot be discussed in a rigorous, scientific sense.[1] For a meaningful discussion on whether a certain statement is true or false, the statement must satisfy the criterion called "falsifiability”, the inherent possibility for the statement to be tested and found false. In this sense, the phrase "not even wrong" is synonymous to "nonfalsifiable".[1] On its own redefining a word to mean something new has no real world implications. The work you need to do to establish a new theory is to explain or predict things, not just redefine them. Of course part of explaining something involves learning what other people's explanations were and relating your own ideas to pre-existing theories, which you are just utterly refusing to do.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2019 21:11
|
|
|
Eschat0n posted:So what? So, wealth arises out of useful human effort, except when by chance the accessible natural world is also useful. Wealth creation is a physical process - people must do something (think, write, saw, mine, etc) to generate it, except when the natural world provides it. But the natural world itself is also a process; its entropy increases over time, system-wide. I think that you would really benefit from a deeper engagement with the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is the classic example here but there's also lots of up to date stuff on these debates. The point I would emphasize is that ultimately there are certain criteria that tend to get used to help use make sense of what a good theory looks like. One widely held value for a theory is the principle of parsimony - which is more or less just a formalized way of referring to Ocam's Razor - the idea that we should aim for the most simple and straightforward available explanation that still fits all the available data. Based on a first glance the wiki on this concept seems decent enough and gives a helpful overview of debates and grey areas where parsimony can be hard to apply. My point here is that your instinct to go for a grand universe scale theory of the economy sort of cuts against the grain of how most science and academic work is conducted. If you're going to bring in something as complex as physics and start musing about faster than light travel or the heat death of the universe then these concepts ought to be doing some crucial work in your theory. But so far as I can tell your references to entropy are largely just aesthetic. They give your theory as sciencey flavour but I can't for the life of me figure out what practical work they do in enhancing our understanding of anything. I'm still not clear on how your theory generates any novel predictions or ideas. It just seems to take things we already know and restate them in a slightly different way, without yielding any new insights. As another user already pointed out, economists are well acquainted with the idea of scarcity and the distribution of scarce resources. That isn't to say that there's no value to big picture thought exercises or to experimenting with borrowing theoretical concepts from one discipline and trying to fit them into another. It can be a good way to familiarize yourself with ideas and get used to playing around with them. But insofar as what you're doing here is more than just a playful exercise and is actually intended to be a serious attempt at constructing a new theory of wealth, I'm still struggling to see what genuinely new and important insights we get from your way of formulating things that we can't get out of existing theories. quote:The economy's primary concern - the reason it exists - is to make use-values accessible; attributes of an economy which restrict accessibility, like ownership, monopoly, unrealistic valuations, etc. reduce its efficiency and therefore its purpose. It should therefore be recognized that arguments in favor of anything that will reduce economic efficiency are ethical arguments, with the exception of arguments arising out of sustainability concerns. The unique position of arguments about reducing economic efficiency for the sake of sustainability comes from any kind of disagreement about how efficiency is measured over time. Arguments about sustainability are attempting to determine how to maximize wealth over time by minimizing entropy - sometimes at the expense of wealth generation within a subset of that time. Ethical beliefs may be the backing of such arguments, but they need not be. I can't tell if you're saying that this should be true or if you're saying it actually is true. If you're trying to say that this is how the actually existing world economy is actually designed then I'd have to disagree with you or at least say that this statement requires a book's worth of qualifying provisions. quote:Ethical concerns about the economy may well be valid, but are not strictly economical concerns; they would derive their importance from outside the discipline. It should be noted, however, that ethical concerns may impinge on the efficiency of the economy in unexpected ways; for example, if the economy makes people unhappy enough, it could result in economic collapse as participants refuse to cooperate, leading to widespread abandonment. This would lead to a much lower state of efficiency than if those people were kept to some minimum of happiness (assuming happiness were necessarily detrimental to efficiency, which is by no means part of the hypothesis). The "discipline" of economics is - as you're already implicitly acknowledging when you call it a discipline - a historically embedded set of ideas and discursive practices. The boundaries of what counts as economics (or political economy as it was once known) fluctuate across time and depending on location. I don't think you can just casually assert "this is one economics is, and anything else isn't really economics". That's a massive argument to be making quite aside from all the other arguments you've made in this thread. If you want to define economics you'd have to engage with its actual existence as a discipline over two centuries. The same is true of loaded terms like "efficiency" or even the concept of "the economy" as such. These terms need to be defined before they are used in this way. This is part of why I was so skeptical of your coconut thought experiment and why I was dubious of your claim that it was helpful to remove the "social fiction" from any analysis of wealth. Because the kind of argument you're seeking to make is fundamentally a social argument and that requires a deep engagement with the historical record. You can't derive laws about society from abstract first principles alone,. Eschat0n posted:Yes, I'm diverging from that understanding of history. Maybe this is because I've been arguing with ancaps over on 4chan for too long and it's messed with my head, but I'll hear people tell me all the time "capitalism is what happens when you get the government out of the market." They position capitalist markets as what would naturally obtain if only we'd get the gently caress out of the way. Well that's fine, I say to myself, but of course humans naturally create rules for markets; if you start with capitalism and "don't get in the way" you're still going to end up with something other than your ancap paradise. "Well not if there are rules in place to prevent that kind of abuse" they say, and it's like OK, but you had just done with saying rules are the devil, get the rules out of the market! Not to be glib but that seems to be exactly what happened. Ancaps are essentially a faith based religion masquerading as a political creed. Their approach to these questions is intentionally designed to support their pre-existing ethical commitments and to leave no room for dissenting approaches. And since their ridiculous ideas are contradicted by more or less the entire historical record they unsurprisingly have a lot of theoretical justifications for why instead of every looking at history we should derive all our ideas from first principles. Their lingering influence on your thinking is really not doing you any favours. Stop intentionally designing your ideas to be palatable to one of the dumbest ideological tendencies imaginable and you'll probably start getting a better reception to your ideas. Helsing fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 26, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2019 22:01
|
|
|
Sorry about your thread Eschaton.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2019 18:27
|
|
|
oliveoil posted:Nah The Marxian labour theory of value does not claim that the labour input of an individual commodity for sale on the market will be exactly equivalent to the labour embodied within it. Under Marx's framework price and value only even out when you look at the entire economy, individual transactions don't work that way. Individual commodities can and will sell for more or less than their labour costs due to local factors, including supply and demand or depreciation.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2019 18:14
|
|
|
Infinite Karma posted:It's weird to use the LTV to calculate the value of a bitcoin, because it's almost purely a capital investment. You spend the money on the electricity, and on the machine to mine the bitcoin, and it produces a bitcoin, but the labor involved is essentially "install bitcoin program and then wait," and is a trivial component of the ultimate product. As far as my education goes, you don't consider the labor involved in producing the tools (i.e. the computer and the software) you're utilizing when a third party produces them, you just consider them part of the capital portion. I think this is a pretty severe misunderstanding of Marx's theory. Money, including currency, is a commodity that is produced by socially necessary labour time just like all other commodities.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2019 18:17
|
|
|
Typo posted:But even if we were to, for a moment ignore the capital cost of extracting raw resources, different labor are still valued differently. Marx discusses this in Section 2 of the first first chapter of Capital. According to him skilled labour is indeed just an intensification of simple labour and skilled labour is paid at a higher rate according to a mixture of two things. 1) The received social conventions of a given society (which would reflect some mix of received social tradition, cultural values, class power, etc.) and 2) the socially necessary labour time that was required to educate the skilled worker. Marx writes: Capital, Chapter 1, Section 2, "THE TWO-FOLD CHARACTER OF THE LABOUR EMBODIED IN COMMODITIES" posted:Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the product of the most skilled labour, but its value, by equating it to the product of simple unskilled labour, represents a definite quantity of the latter labour alone.[15] The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom. For simplicity’s sake we shall henceforth account every kind of labour to be unskilled, simple labour; by this we do no more than save ourselves the trouble of making the reduction. Engels, in a discussion of this passage, adds: Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part II: Political Economy, VI. Simple and Compound Labour posted:But not all labour is a mere expenditure of simple human labour-power; very many sorts of labour involve the use of capabilities or knowledge acquired with the expenditure of greater or lesser effort, time and money. Do these kinds of compound labour produce, in the same interval of time, the same commodity values as simple labour, the expenditure of mere simple labour-power? Obviously not. The product of one hour of compound labour is a commodity of a higher value—perhaps double or treble — in comparison with the product of one hour of simple labour. The values of the products of compound labour are expressed by this comparison in definite quantities of simple labour; but this reduction of compound labour is established by a social process which goes on behind the backs of the producers, by a process which at this point, in the development of the theory of value, can only be stated but not as yet explained. Typo posted:I mean if your basic point is that LTV is a philosophical concept and not an analytics tool I agree with you. You're getting confused because in the example you're dealing with individual cars being produced by a single factory. The confusion should disappear if you understand that Marx is describing social averages that are true across an entire industry or economy. This is why it's crucial to emphasis that Marx says the value (which, remember, is distinct from its price) of a commodity is based on the socially necessary labour time expended to produce it. If the average socially necessary labour time required to produce a commodity falls then average worker output per hour will increase. That should increase the supply of the commodity, whether it is cars of microchips or shoes, and ceterus paribus this increase in supply will eventually bring down prices. Society is vastly more efficient at producing computers than it was thirty years ago but computers are individually much less valuable. What once was an extremely pricey object that could only be afforded by governments and research institutes is now an almost universally owned common household object. Firms will try to resist this downward pressure on prices by seeking to carve out a monopoly or by differentiating their products through branding. That aspect of capitalism wasn't of particular interest to Marx but the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (who coined the phrase "creative destruction"), whose own analysis owes a lot to Marx, makes some helpful contributions in this regard. In the short term an entrepreneur can extract additional surplus value from a rise in productivity but over time competition means that increasing productivity does tend to drive down prices. When Blackberry developed the first smartphones they initially enjoyed a commanding position in the industry and were able to exploit it accordingly. Over the years however the initial advantage faded as other firms entered the market and developed competing products. Today smart there are numerous brands of smart phone and their price has dropped a great deal. quote:It seems to me valuing something based on the process of production rather than end product doesn't fit real life very well. This depends on the industry and there are certainly many commodities whose exchange value isn't primarily based on their costs, but cost-plus pricing is extremely common in the real world, much more so than the kind of strict utility optimization that is predicted by standard neoclassical economics. Here's the Harvard Business Review on the topic of cost-plus pricing: Harvard Business Review posted:Cost-plus pricing is a lot like the romance novel genre, in that it’s widely ridiculed yet tremendously popular. Almost every manager I know will claim they hate pricing based only on costs. Yet cost-plus pricing remains the most widespread pricing method, used to price everything from a bottle of beer in a bar to multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2019 05:05
|
|
|
Marx's version of the labour theory of value is explicitly only applicable under a capitalist system of production.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2019 05:33
|
|
|
wateroverfire posted:What happens when the system collapses under the weight of bad investments and misallocated resources because the collective bank is run by people who don't know wtf they're doing or have an incentive to use resources wisely? The government initiates a Troubled Assets Relief Program and... Oh wait we were talking about socialism, my bad, these days it's hard to keep track of which decaying economic system we're discussing. Joking aside, actually existing socialist societies (i.e. the "Second World" or communist bloc) are mostly noteworthy for developing by forcing a much higher rate of savings and investment than would have been possible without substantial state coercion. Obviously these aren't precise comparisons but I would say that if you look at the 20th century development history of, say, India vs. China or Brazil vs. Russia then it's noteworthy that these regimes were vastly more efficient at forcing a higher rate of investment. Since the start of the 19th century the trend outside the OECD countries has been toward divergence - the gap between rich and poor countries has overall increased rather than decreased - and the USSR and China are two of the rare counter examples to that trend. The Soviet Union between 1928 and 1970 had the fastest growth rate in the world except for Japan. That growth was only possible because the USSR had soft budget constraints and an at-all-costs attitude toward raising the rate of investment. Also, contrary to some early western scholarship, consumption did rise in the USSR thanks to the investments in heavy industry. Hell, following World War II there was actually a brief period when the USSR achieved a higher living standard than America. Problems seem to have arose - speaking from an economic development perspective - from the 1970s onward. There are different arguments for why this happened. Some people blame Kruschev and his economic policies (which de-emphasized heavy industry and shifted toward producing more consumer goods), others argue that while central planning performed effectively as long as the main task was putting idle resources to use that the system wasn't very good at squeezing more efficiency out of existing plant and machinery. Other scholars (not just Marxists) have suggested that the principle problem was the size of the Soviet military budget dragging down the rest of the economy. I won't elaborate on those points I just thought they were worth noting in passing since they offer potential reasons for the growth slow down. MixMastaTJ posted:
This may describe your own views but it is directly contradictory of what Marx and Engels were arguing. The value of a doctor's labour power is greater than that of a janitor because of the huge amount of additional resources that were required to give the doctor his knowledge. Marx does say that in any given time and place there will be some received traditions that also influence how pay is determined (i.e. if doctors are highly esteemed they might be paid more than just what it objectively cost to educate them) but Marx is quite clear - and Engels even more so in Anti-Duhring, where he directly critiques the version of the theory you describe - that a doctor's labour has more value under the capitalist system than a janitors.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2019 17:48
|
|
|
Typo posted:so if the state investment fund gains returns on capital (so they have more money to invest into other industries etc), is that exploitation? Does ROI need to be 0 at all times for the investor. Shall I take by your total silence on my last post that you're conceding the argument?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2019 17:48
|
|
|
wateroverfire posted:Profit is an indicator that whatever enterprise you're involved in is running well enough to generate a surplus. If there's no profit then your enterprise has to pull resources generated from other enterprises to fund the thing it is doing. But then those enterprises have to be generating a surplus, and if they're not they have to pull from somewhere... and etc. Profit - or something analagous to profit - is going to exist as part of any successful economic system. If it doesn't, that system is ultimately going to collapse. Equating profit with social utility is quite a stretch, especially in an economy where profitability is typically achieved through market concentration and regulatory capture rather than free competition. In fact take away the elaborate system of contracts, subsidies and protections set up by the government and very little of the contemporary "capitalist" economy would survive in its current form. Let's use a typical suburban fast-food restaurant like McDonald's as an example: if you confine your analysis to a very narrow scope then you can argue that the fast-food franchise is an ultra-efficient operation that uses ruthless time management and automation to full effect. On the other hand this efficiency is entirely predicated on the maintenance of the heavily subsidized suburban lifestyle that emerged - thanks to massive government investments and conscious planning - after World War II. But the suburbs themselves are incredibly expensive to set up and maintain and often rely on very corrupt and inefficient relationships between local government and property developers. In essence the public purse gets raided to subsidize the construction of a highly inefficient and environmentally destructive form of land use. So within the most narrow of frameworks the McDonald's is highly efficient, but it is an efficiency predicated on the existence of a suburban mode of life that is highly environmentally destructive and requires substantial ongoing support from the government to remain sustainable. Supporting this lifestyle requires pulling a lot of resources from other parts of 'the system'. Indeed, American is more or less fighting an open ended global war and risking the ecosystem of the entire planet to maintain a world where McDonald's and other franchises like it can remain profitable. quote:How does one figure out what people need? The worst mechanism we have - except for all the others we´ve tried - is a market economy. It's imperfect and it results in a lot of bullshit but it works better than central planning by a lot. A successful economic system is going to have markets or market analogs as well. You can't really get around it. I guess you could posit a world in which people are allocated a defined package of goods and services that it has been decided satisfy their needs? The economy is hardly a level playing field as it is and our market outcomes are impossible to separate from the elaborate regulation of our economy by the government. Besides which, even within the private sphere the "market economy" is mostly composed of competing corporations that are themselves privately planned economies that can rival national governments in terms of scope and complexity. There have been some occasions when a large company actually tried to run itself internally along free market principles and the results have been disastrous. wateroverfire posted:Nothing actually stops you from working as little as necessary to satisfy a set of arbitrarily curtailed material needs then using your time for those things if that's what you want to do? Like not to be personal about it but it seems like the problem is internal not external? People are social animals whose sense of well being is based on their social existence and their role within a larger group. The idea that you're free to go masturbate and eat grubs in the forest all day if you don't want to participate in capitalism is an extremely specious argument.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2019 14:33
|
|
|
Volkerball posted:How exactly does the Stalin slush fund guarantee a society in which everyone gets better off and not just a few? It's going to be subject to the same forces at play in the current capitalist system. Greed will exist with or without capitalism, and power will corrupt with or without capitalism. The only way to bypass these things if you have a belief in a sort of benevolent governance that could manage a fund like that in a way that ensures that 100% of the proceeds go towards the benefit of society. And if your end goal is a government with that as its central principle, then such a government could accomplish the same exact benefits through tax reform, enhanced welfare, social security, funding for secondary education, etc etc, regardless of what label they use for their economic system. I'm an Occam's razor man myself. The basic assumption would be that democratizing the workplace, eliminating the current conceptual barrier between the economy and the rest of society and eliminating the current mode of ownership would change the incentive structure of the economy, thereby changing people's behaviour. A socialist would say that the current system creates different economic classes who come into conflict and that this conflict prevents the system from delivering those outcomes, necessitating the end of class conflict in order to truly solve those problems. You're free to disagree with that belief but you should at least understand what the argument is first.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2019 14:39
|
|
|
Eschat0n posted:
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2019 15:26
|
|
|
Eschat0n posted:
 Do you even realize that you're now using "efficiency" in a completely idiosyncratic way that is the literal opposite of how economists use it? Eschat0n posted:Wonderful. This has been very productive. I don't suppose you can show me where you think I lost you? Looking at this: Eschat0n posted:A union is an entity like a corporation owned by its employees, if you disregard the differences in the name. A union is therefore just as capable of being a monopoly and doing lovely monopoly things like rent-seeking and regulatory capture. Mandatory fees under the guise of protecting against free riders are this kind of regulatory capture; it would be better simply to handle this the way unions handled it prior to the existence of such laws. Basically every statement you have made here is arguable. Certainly none of it can be derived as true based on your long write ups about thermo-economics or entropy. If you wanted to convince people to get rid of collective bargaining - which would be a massive change, and on the face of it seems like a pretty massive strike against worker rights and economic security - then the expectation would be that you'd actually link your claims to real world evidence. This whole "oh I promise I will eventually get around to connecting my theory with my policy prescriptions" is loving ridiculous. Assuming you're going to carry forward with this increasingly ridiculous attempt to invent your own theory (which so far is mostly just a shallow retooling of classic neoliberalism with a vague ecological rhetorical flavour) then that is all you should be doing. Eschat0n posted:The burden of proof is on you. Unions preexist mandatory fees. How did that state of affairs come to pass? Nah, it really is on you to demonstrate that you know what you're talking about and to supply convincing explanations for your arguments.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2019 18:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:01 |
|
|
Typo posted:I think the more important questions is whether unions increase entropy or decrease it I was about to say, it sure seems like we've drifted quite a distance from the whole island coconut / entropy economy thought experiment. In fact, for a guy whose theory isn't even finished yet, Eschaton seems very confident in his conclusions. I mean, it's almost as though he has a bunch of policy ideas and is working backwards from them to find a theory to justify the things he already thinks we should do.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2019 18:20
|
|