what's wrong with economics

[ska invita]

You're arguing with Marx not me.

no, im talking to you. what do you think of the term Marxist Economics, and all the thousands of marxists who use it?

 

[brogdale]

You're arguing with Marx not me.

You called?

here

e2a...on reflection, could be Darwin though.

 

[fredfelt]

Economists are not analysing the world around them, they are directly shaping it

Yes, economists sometimes leave their mark. However I think that their influence on our world can be overstated. One way of looking at it is that economists create a language which attempts to describe the relationship between an individual, societies and its resources. In the short term this relationship may well be open to control and manipulation.

However underpinning the language economists use to describe and attempt to manipulate this relationship is the reality of finite wealth. Any attempt by economists to shape the world are constrained by water, oil, technologies and natural resources. Human nature endures through the ages despite efforts to influence it. Economists simply occupy a temporary space in an attempt to understand and shape these relationships as they are currently understood. There's a certain inevitability in the rise and fall of civilisations despite the best or worst efforts of economists.

 

[toblerone3]

Marx was a great economic thinker who offered a critique of classical economics. OK.

 

[toblerone3]

What is wrong with classical economics is
1. undervaluing of externalities both positive and negative
2. flawed assumption that "free" markets are at all common and even less so that they are able to be a proxy model for all markets.
3. too much emphasis on currency and other promissary notes
4. Not enough emphasis on happiness, quality of life and health.

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Ethics.

What would you call the study of non-market processes/structures of production and distribution?

 

[ska invita]

1. undervaluing of externalities both positive and negative

the inclusion of externalities [such as the cost to the environment] on the balance sheet is something critical economists are trying to introduce into the discipline - ive seen it crop up in a couple of places recently. Good luck to them.

 

[toblerone3]

In Britain If you earn £10,000 a year and your income increases to £30,000 a year the likelihood is that your happiness will increase more than if your income increases from £100,000 a year to £120,000 a year. If you have £20,000 and you wish to increase the sum of human happiness by the greatest amount you would get better value for money by allocating it to the person earning £10,000 per year.

 

[toblerone3]

the inclusion of externalities [such as the cost to the environment] on the balance sheet is something critical economists are trying to introduce into the discipline - ive seen it crop up in a couple of places recently. Good luck to them.

pollution taxes are one way of government attempting to correct the market underpricing of a negative externality.

 

[Humberto]

What's wrong with private wealth or property?

 

[Frances Lengel]

What's wrong with private wealth or property?

Nothing if it's mine.

 

[gamerunknown]

Economics pre-dates bourgeois economics, though in a disguised form. The prescriptions Aristotle and Socrates make for society are essentially economic and both were influenced by the prevailing material conditions (namely, herile form of government). In fact, the stalwart defenders of the bourgeois order object to the term "economics", implying as it does a house-keeper, preferring "catallactics".

I've read the four volumes of Capital, but I don't recall Marx enunciating the principle of lack of engagement in economics there . Marx in fact wrote that he sought to explain society through economics... Each of the texts is primarily concerned with explaining capitalist economics from various vantages and refuting various claims of particular economists. It's in the Poverty of Philosophy that he writes that economics is the science of the bourgeois order:

Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class.

Incidentally, in the same chapter he decries Proudhon's tortuous use of dialectics...

Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery... What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.

The 'problem with economics', imo, is a problem that relates to our basic natures...

So, most recent economics have been about the best way to distribute the goodies[the surplus]. Capitalism at its essence, is about the strongest getting the most goodies. Communism/socialism are just mirror philosophies to capitalism in the same way that Satanism is a mirror to Christianity - it claims to be so different, but its deity is one of the Christian pantheon; and its tenets are usually just an antithesis to those of Christianity.

But both systems are in agreement that the highest good is the production and consumption of more goodies. They just differ about who should get what.

Actually, to the extent that we do have "basic natures" (and many socialists enthusiastically adopted the tenets of Darwin because they contradicted the notion that bourgeois relations are based on our immutable natures), Communism as interpreted by Marx most definitely has a stance on it. The primary concern of Communism in fact is the condition under which the goods are produced. Once production is carried out by free association, individuals acting in concert will decide the necessary labour to satisfy human needs.

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

They can't be beaten via unionisation, demand for more wages etc: all that those things speak to is a desire for more wherewithal to get ahold of more goodies - and in the end, the bosses control the production of the goodies. Working within the system is a sign of acquiescence to, and a co - opting by, the system.

The system - these systems - can only be beaten via personal self control, in the form of a rejection of the desire for constantly more and constantly new things. The system can only be beaten when people refuse to purchase the products of the system. And that is achieved by learning to control the desire for constant goodies. Systems predicated on acquisition falter when the populace turns its back on acquisition. Also, by training ourselves to want less, we stand a better chance of not overtaxing the ecosystem to the breaking point.

The former paragraph is the conclusion alighted at by Marx in 1865. The latter Ha-Joon Chang discusses, claiming that voluntary austerity is no more absurd than cuts imposed at the behest of the IMF. Keep in mind that setting a new social minimum will depress conditions for workers, not alleviate them.

How are workers being exploited? The employee offers them a wage in return for work, and they accept. Where's the exploitation? Its completely voluntary.

It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him.

 

[BigTom]

What discipline does the study of markets (say) fall into, economics naysayers.

It depends what way you are looking at it, it can be economics or politics or sociology or ethics or probably lots of other disciplines.

Not liking economics because of it's applications is like not liking nucleur physics because of the atom bomb and radioactive waste. Science including social sciences should strive to be value neutral. Which denying the validity of economics is not.

Economics isn't science, it cannot use the scientific method.

Value neutrality is itself an issue, the idea of being a dispassionate observer makes it easier to ignore power relationships, and because economics is fundamentally concerned with peoples' lives. Being value neutral in these situations usually means you end up siding with the people who have power.

 

[phildwyer]

The Greeks made a distinction between "economics" and "chrematistics."

The former was the study of use-value, the latter was the study of exchange-value.

The Greeks' "chrematistics" was what we call "economics." They considered it a servile form of knowledge.

 

[phildwyer]

Marx's concept of "species character" does not refer to the" production of goods."

It refers to any subjective interaction with the environment.

 

[phildwyer]

And finally, bourgeois economics rests upon the Calvinist notion of "total depravity."

The idea being that avarice is natural, thus ineradicable, and best cordoned off into a separate sphere of life called "the economy."

 

[Humberto]

And finally, bourgeois economics rests upon the Calvinist notion of "total depravity."

The idea being that avarice is natural, thus ineradicable, and best cordoned off into a separate sphere of life called "the economy."

'Non-conformst' wisdom is overlooked?

 

[phildwyer]

'Non-conformst' wisdom is overlooked?

Pretty much. Fable of the Bees innit.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

The primary concern of Communism in fact is the condition under which the goods are produced.

Yes. The creation of goodies/the surplus. A different method, but the same goal. And a goal that ultimately must fail, because unlimited growth is impossible in a finite system.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

edit

 

[phildwyer]

no, im talking to you. what do you think of the term Marxist Economics, and all the thousands of marxists who use it?

I think it's a mistake to base any kind of positive economic prescription on Marx.

Marxism is a critical analysis of capitalism, not a blueprint for a new system.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

Not liking economics because of it's applications is like not liking nucleur physics because of the atom bomb and radioactive waste. Science including social sciences should strive to be value neutral. Which denying the validity of economics is not.

Given that they are social and not sciences - and I say this as a 'social scientist' by training and employment - how is this value neutrality meant to work? I can see why social sciences might want to claim it. What is much less apparent is how it might actually be achieved.


Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[Idris2002]

The gift economy of tribal Papua New Guinea is an economy. The study of it is economics.

No, it's economic anthropology. Back in the 50s there was a school of economic anthropologists who believed (or hoped) that study of economic behaviour in non-western societies could ultimately be reduced to the same set of principles putatively identified by mainstream (marginalist) economists working on western economies.

Let's just say that their hopes were not realised.

 

[ska invita]

No, it's economic anthropology. Back in the 50s there was a school of economic anthropologists who believed (or hoped) that study of economic behaviour in non-western societies could ultimately be reduced to the same set of principles putatively identified by mainstream (marginalist) economists working on western economies.

yes those classic anthropological studies can be filed under anthropology, in part due to their methodology of participant observation etc, but you can study the mechanisms of exchange and production from a purely economic view if you so wish.

 

[Idris2002]

but you can study the mechanisms of exchange and production from a purely economic view if you so wish.

You could, but that's where the element of 'bourgeois ideology' creeps in. "Inside each of these Papua New Guinean hill people, a 19th Manchester mill owner is trying to get out".

 

[ska invita]

Marxism is a critical analysis of capitalism, not a blueprint for a new system.

lets looks at a blueprint for a new system then, Micahel Alberts Parecon. A book about a proposed, and in some small cases enacted, anarchist economics. Is that also not about economics to you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

 

[ViolentPanda]

Not liking economics because of it's applications is like not liking nucleur physics because of the atom bomb and radioactive waste.

Nuclear physics wasn't created as a discipline in justification for anything, as I recall.

Science including social sciences should strive to be value neutral.

Why?
Value-neutrality as a goal depends on the epistemological and ideological predicates inherent in ones' work, at least with regard to social sciences, and yet not being value-neutral hasn't stopped the production of an awful lot of worthwhile knowledge.

Which denying the validity of economics is not.

Value-neutrality is something one attempts (if it's your thing) when producing knowledge, something modern economics hasn't bothered with, given the acceptance of neoliberal predicates common to most modern economic teachings.

 

[ViolentPanda]

no, im talking to you. what do you think of the term Marxist Economics, and all the thousands of marxists who use it?

You're talking about two different things. You're conflating the writings of Marx, which were a critique of economics, with later attempts by people who appreciated Marx's work, to use Marx's critiques to inform economic reasoning.

 

[ViolentPanda]

the inclusion of externalities [such as the cost to the environment] on the balance sheet is something critical economists are trying to introduce into the discipline - ive seen it crop up in a couple of places recently. Good luck to them.

Critical economists have been trying to punt the issue of externalities for 5 or 6 decades now, and yet here we are, still waiting...

what does that tell us?

 

[ska invita]

You're talking about two different things. You're conflating the writings of Marx, which were a critique of economics,

they are a critique of capitalism, not of all possible economic models.

Critical economists have been trying to punt the issue of externalities for 5 or 6 decades now, and yet here we are, still waiting...

what does that tell us?

like i said, good luck