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Flowchart for STEM
(mander.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Science Memes
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Economics is not real bro
Yeah but what if we imagine it's real and convince everyone to believe it too. Surely nothing will go wrong!
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Marx is incomplete. That doesn't mean non-capitalist economics stopped with Marx.
Yes, that's exactly what I am saying, but this is what MLs tend to believe.
I mean mainstream economics is a farce. MMT at least approaches sanity. Yeah you need Marxism-Leninism but there aren't many of those economists in Western academia.
You're confusing the study of economics with specific economic ideologies. Clearly you've never studied the subject and are very much biased.
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.
This is what you claim to have done: "a joke about how bad the state of the academy is in promoting neoliberal economics"
And this is what you actually said: "Economics is not real bro"
I shouldn't need to spell it out any further than that.
Economics departments are not real bro
The ideology is often implicit in how the model is explained. For example, 2 simple facts that go unmentioned.
@science_memes
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
Of course a hexbear tankie would think that. Sincerely hope you're joking, but maybe I shouldn't hope to not get severely disappointed.
That's cool dude, except you worship it like a religion. Did you know your GDP numbers count rents and debts the same as production?
Did you know that's just one possible economic model in the field of economics?
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.
I think you are conflating performance of economic models with the study of economic systems. Economics is literally just the study of a real phenomenon that occurs in the world. It's a valid study to try and understand why it operates the way it does.
Like 90% of economics is completely divorced from real phenomenons.
Most economics degrees expose people to the toxic neoliberalism I'm joking about in the intial reply though. It's been weaponized against the third world to horrible effect.
Have you actually been to rural China by any chance?
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.
Dude you are not going to get better results by looking at further cherry-picked statistics from first world countries. The standard of living in the first world is collapsing because of finance capital and economics as a science there exists to cope about it.
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.
I'm no fan of Hexies but economics - at least as understood by neoliberals - is not real.
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.
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