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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > economics chat spillover: Economics in this Zoo of Civilization
 
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SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

icantfindaname posted:

Standard neoclassical microeconomics from Walras onwards basically assumes perfect information and knowable, quantifiable utility preferences for all agents and is thus 100% as subject to the Austrian critique as central planning. If you assume all the stuff that the Greg Mankiw 101 textbook assumes central planning works fine. More than fine, it was basically invented by neoclassical micro guys, Kuznets and Leontief. It’s just linear algebra
Even more fundamentally, even comparatively rigorously derived economic theories (like Marxian labour theory of value) rely on the presumption that there's some fundamental "stuff" at the heart of economic behaviour (like socially necessary labour time) that can be expressed in discrete units which are universally interchangeable. Which has a certain amount of appeal in that this resembles how we currently like to derive formal theories, but even in e.g. Marx (who spends a lot of time on this sort of thing) it's more or less just something we have to accept as axiomatic. Same with other difficult questions, like how to even define synonymy.

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > economics chat spillover: Economics in this Zoo of Civilization