/lit/ - Literature

>>13992345
>All stock are essentially based on value-producing assets.
A long time ago people came up with the idea of intangible assets. At first it was just stuff like patents and trademarks but over time, more and more immaterial assets were created and sold and put on balance sheets as corporate bonds, credit derivatives, hybrid securities, etc, etc. A corporation is just a bunch of immaterial assets and liabilities. A corporations failure or successes depends on how much credit it can raise i.e. can it sell the promise of future success.

>>13992360
Define "competition" here.

>>12081488
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class

>>11955848
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/philip-pilkington-divine-mathematics-neoclassical-economics-as-spiritual-meditation.html

If you think abstraction and formalism is the only criterion of scientific methodology you really should reconsider.


>>11955867
You want to ignore the real key institution underlying all modern economies? Understanding a concept like "saving" isn't as simple as you want to believe and I wouldn't advocate becoming a miser.

>>11956444
It's reassuring and seems reasonable because it doesn't actually attempt to critically explain any of the central categories and just takes them as given and presents a closed totally "logical" series of equilibrating exchanges. Framing economics as being about distribution, instead of looking at the actual technicalities of production, means concepts like "efficiency", and even "scarcity", take on a highly reified form. Distribution is always a consequence of productive relationships.
The marginalist revolution was very much an attempt to reorient economics away from questions of production to exchange because certain issues couldn't be solved, or the answer would be very problematic and ideologically uncomfortable. This all occurred during the exact moment market exchange relations were diminishing in favour of collective planning during the rise of the corporate form of enterprise, cartels, trusts, syndicates, etc in the late 19th century. Thorstein Veblen was the only American economist to really "get" any of this, he wrote a very funny work in 1904 called The Theory of Business Enterprise which you should read and see why people like Milton Friedman are charlatans.

http://www.businessbuildersbanquet.com/software/veblen2.pdf

>>8334699
The problem is you're an infantile Marxist friend if you're still thinking simply in terms of profitability of corporations as being in anyway relevant under financial capitalism. Business in America is about capitalization upon reputation and other intangible assets not profit generation. The predatory methods they use to capture income is the concurrence of business strategy.

Veblen is a bit of an elitist technocrat in some sense so you might like him.
The working class tends to emulate the worst elements of the upper class e.g. get a credit card and run up a shit ton of debt to signal status. This emulative tendency would probably prevent anything like the Marxist notion of "class consciousness" from ever emerging since people view themselves as consumers first and foremost.

>In The Theory of the Leisure Class, the instincts of emulation and predation play a major role. People, rich and poor alike, attempt to impress others and seek to gain advantage through what Veblen termed "conspicuous consumption" and the ability to engage in “conspicuous leisure”. In this work Veblen argued that consumption is used as a way to gain and signal status. Through "conspicuous consumption" often came "conspicuous waste", which Veblen detested. He further spoke of a "predatory phase" of culture in the sense of the predatory attitude having become the habitual spiritual attitude of the individual.

Veblen talks about Pecuniary Emulation in chapter 2 of The Theory of the Leisure Class

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/veblen/chap02.html

Check out Thorstein Veblen's theories on economics/sociology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Business_Enterprise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class

Capitalization is a pecuniary transaction whose magnitude is determined by an "appraisement of the gain expected from ownership." Anything which can yield an income can be capitalized. Capitalization unlike the marginalists or Marxists believe doesn't neccesarily have anything at all to do with ‘output’, ‘production’ or ‘serviceability’.

The value of tangible assets merely represents but does not measure the potential serviceability of them. Intangible assets, such as goodwill or patent protection are never identified with potential serviceability but with factors affecting the distribution of wealth but they are capitalized as a differential advantage and in themselves can become a tangible asset according to the exigencies of pecuniary calculation.

Capital and accumulation thus is somewhat freed from any tangible material base since value can go up or down without equal increase or decrease in the amount of material objects underlying capitalization.

A corporation is just an incorporation of credit, capitalized on the basis of the funds invested and to the amount of its prospective earnings capacity. Inasmuch as the corporation is organized for profit and not for industrial production per se, this type of organization should be viewed as a strategic institution controlling the productive capacity of industry for profitable ends. Business must of necessity limit industry in order to be profitable and it does so chiefly through the unemployment of industrial capacity. Corporations at the strategic or tactical center of the interdependent industrial system have incredible leverage to control the system towards profitable ends through the strategic use of sabotage. The level of sabotage increases or decreases according to time and need and subject to the level of prices and anticipated profits.

Thorstein Veblen is way better than any of those pretentious eurotards

Thorstein Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class

>>7210140
Read Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904)

Then read Michael Hudson's new book Killing the Host

Here's a good economic blog: http://real-economics.blogspot.ca/