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Nobel laureate economist savages his own profession as clueless and unethical
(www.crikey.com.au)
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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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My (apparently) most controversial take is economics in the way it's discussed with a capitalist framing by economists is made up. Literally none of it is based in reality, and it's just used to enrich capitalists and act as a barrier to actual change for the benefit of all humans. Eg "The GDP of the USSR in 1955..." type shit that I somehow see people "on the left" saying a lot. It's so prevalent in society to think of everything in these bullshit terms and ways and locks everyone into this mindset of "but if GDP no go up... how good?" Shit just annoys me.
western economists are just clowns coming up with excuses to justify rich people's feelings
me screaming Ceteris paribus in a crowded lecture hall as I slowly shrink and turn into a cob of corn
I don't think GDP is an inherently 'bad', its just that it doesn't really show everything. It doesn't show how the GDP is distributed (per-capita is just an average) or the environmental/social aspects.
this article is a pretty good read
GDP made a lot more sense to me after I finished vol. 2 of Capital. In a very loose and non-literal sense, I think GDP reflects the amount of surplus value floating around in an economy. The US has a high GDP but when you consider that production is the only source of value (that’s part of where vol 2 comes in) how does that make sense? It’s because the US “steals” surplus value from the global south. The US economy (the non-financial part of it, at least) is a merchant capitalist economy. The US doesn’t make anything - Nike, Apple, Gap, Walmart, etc… none of them make hardly anything in-house much less in the US. Contractors in the global south are where most of the production happens and thus that’s where the value is created, but the hegemonic position of the US as sort the the ultimate merchant capitalist with nuclear weapons , means the production side gets squeezed out of their surplus value and it’s moved to the US with the product. And GDP largely aligns with these flows of value, products, and money.