• Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Yeah but what if we imagine it’s real and convince everyone to believe it too. Surely nothing will go wrong!

      • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        I’m kind of joking, if you want legit economics check out Mike Hudson and other MMT authors or preferably become a communist. Mainstream economists live to justify rent seeking by the ruling class. They don’t distinguish between production and rents and debts etc

        • J Lou@mastodon.social
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          3 months ago

          I would recommend checking out David Ellerman. He shows that workers get 0% the property rights to what they produce positive and negative violating the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match @sciencememes

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      Economics just means studying how we distribute limited goods. It breaks down when goods aren’t limited (or rather, we have more of it than we can reasonably use), but we’re not quite at that level of post-scarcity for most things. Though we might be close enough to cover the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

      Economics as a practical discipline tends to assume capitalism. Economics can still be valid without assuming capitalism. There are tons of non-capitalist modes of distributing limited goods.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        The assumption of capitalist-like structures is for a good reason. Because there is literally zero practical evidence that scarcity can exist without them in scalable economies. If you require scalability in the presence of scarcity, you will have markets, you will have currency, you will have competition, you will have investment, and so forth. At best these things can be mediated by centrally planned state capitalism. But pretending like this is not just another brand of harm reduction capitalism is rhetorically counterproductive.

        The overwhelming consensus of the past century regarding Marxist economic theory is that it is incomplete at best because it takes a very naive view of scarcity. Where Marx requires revolution and then a bunch of hand waving, modern revisionism requires harm reduction and the gradual whittling down of scarcity over time. Historical materialism is certainly a pretty useful economic lens, but Marx really goes off the rails in the prescriptive conclusions he draws from that analytical framework.

        • J Lou@mastodon.social
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          3 months ago

          Marx ≠ anti-capitalism

          There are other modern anti-capitalist argument derived from the classical laborists such as Proudhon.

          Markets ≠ capitalism

          In postcapitalism, we can use markets where appropriate. We have practical examples of non-capitalist firms with worker coops and 100% ESOPs.

          There are theoretical mechanisms for collective ownership that can be shown to be efficient like COST.

          There are theoretical non-market democratic public goods funding mechanisms

          @science_memes

          • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            Yes of course there are syndicalist models as well but these things are still fundamentally different approaches to harm reduction. Capitalism is a boogie man bad word for a number of different economic forces which are inevitable in the face of scarcity. Don’t get caught up in linguistic pigeonholes. The point is that we seek to meditate and mitigate these forces, not that we worship some particular dogma which pretends they can be eliminated.

        • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online
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          3 months ago

          You’re confusing the study of economics with specific economic ideologies. Clearly you’ve never studied the subject and are very much biased.

          • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            I’ve studied economics as a discipline too much not to acknowledge its institutional biases. The statement “economics isn’t real bro” is a joke, but it’s a joke about how bad the state of the academy is in promoting neoliberal economics.

            If that weren’t true it wouldn’t be powerful enough to turn Argentina into a fourth world nation. Milei is a product of these academic institutions.

            If you actually went to or taught at a university that eludes these biases like the Braudel fans at Binghampton, you wouldn’t be scolding me for making a joke about how stupid most economics degrees render people.

          • J Lou@mastodon.social
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            3 months ago

            The ideology is often implicit in how the model is explained. For example, 2 simple facts that go unmentioned.

            1. Only persons can be responsible for anything. Things, no matter how causally efficacious, can’t be responsible for what is done with them
            2. The employer receives 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs. The workers qua employees get 0% legal claim on that. This fact is obfuscated using the pie metaphor

            @science_memes

      • J Lou@mastodon.social
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        3 months ago

        Sure, in theory, that is what it should be about. In practice, many economists bias the theories they develop to make sure the conclude in favor of their own ideological biases. Often, metaphors are treated as deep truths while simple facts are treated as superficial and ignored or even obfuscated due to their ideological implications if they were plainly stated @science_memes

    • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online
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      3 months ago

      Of course a hexbear tankie would think that. Sincerely hope you’re joking, but maybe I shouldn’t hope to not get severely disappointed.

        • Brosplosion@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Did you know that’s just one possible economic model in the field of economics?

          • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            If you follow the flowchart and dive into most economics departments you will encounter what I’m talking about.

            What are you talking about Keynesian liberals or something? I do like to read Adam Tooze to see him close in on an interesting point only to veer wildly. Foreign Policy in general has some interesting writers if you want to mine the most advanced liberal cope.

            The model of economics I’m describing is the one which has been most heavily promoted by the west, neoliberalism, it has been used to dissolve the social welfare state which was set up to compete with the socialist bloc since defeating its chief rival and counterbalance in the USSR. It’s an ideological persuasion that works along with coercion and subterfuge to eliminate capital controls and suppress the masses with starvation and crackdowns, especially in peripheral countries which are starting to establish socialistic policies or nationalize natural resources. Look at Chile for a perfect example of liberal economics in practice.

            I am aware of plenty of different non-Marxist models of economics and none of them are great because they treat various sectors of production wrong. China and Vietnam have their shit all figured out that’s why finance capital and food aid can’t decimate their agricultural production and then extort them into unfavorable IMF deals.

        • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online
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          3 months ago

          Which is why it’s explained in economic courses beyond your baseless ideas that there are better models to calculate standards of living than GDP. But you’d never know that. Because you know nothing of economics.

        • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          It’s almost like that’s one way of measuring economic output and not the only way.

          GDP is meant to drive down variance by being a relatively simple thing to measure, and therefore provide a consistent means of tracking long term trends.

        • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online
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          3 months ago

          Economics gathers and interprets data like any other STEM field, don’t know what else to tell you. The stuff I learned in my degree is very much real.

          • J Lou@mastodon.social
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            3 months ago

            Economics treats metaphors as deep truths while treating simple facts as superficial. An example of this is in presentations of MP theory where the pie metaphor is emphasized while the actual structure of property rights and liabilities is ignored and obfuscated @science_memes