/lit/ - Literature

>>14955669
hello, based department?

>>14868907
you don't deal with it. social determination, otherwise known as methodological holism, is a self-refuting idea that derives its popularity from the fact that it offers a convenient way to explain your personal shortcomings through an invocation of a force beyond your control. one way to refute this fallacious idea is to ask yourself a question - why is it that people only use this tactic when they're losers and not winners? to be precise - why ought your loss be shared by us collectively to make up for your bad luck when you'd surely claim the prize for yourself if you were a winner? now in theory people who preach the religion of social determination often concede that they'd be willing to share their wealth too if they had any but in practice they are far less generous when in a good state of nature than they are demanding of generosity from others when they're afflicted. a second way to dismantle the social determinist's position is to notice its evident inconsistency with historical facts. if we were in fact 100% socially conditioned we'd expect social structures to remain rigid. a feudal society would condition people unfortunate enought to be born into it to be complacent and accept feudalism as the ultimate mode of production for humanity. but we know that we progressed beyond feudalism which refutes the doctrine of social determination (Marx realized that he couldn't reconcile his extreme social determinism with this dynamism of history and ingeniously introduced a third factor, namely material progress, into the equation).

>>14862779
revealed preference theory uses the assumption that preferences are fixed over time, this is laughably inconsistent with whatever you see in the real world
>Even if you still dislike the theory, accept the enormouse benefit of Econometrics. There is no ideology in Statistics, it is raw data on resources and relationships.
lol read Mises to find out how wrong you are.

>>14845973
cope
>>14845924
Mises - "Socialism", "Human Action", "Economic Calculation in a Socialist Commonwealth", "Theory and History"
Jon Elster - "An Introduction to Karl Marx"
Bohm-Bawerk - "Karl Marx and the close of his system"
O.D. Skelton - "Socialism A Critical Analysis"
Max Eastman - "Reflections on the failures of Socialism"
Schumpeter - "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy"
Max Weber - "Protestant Ethic and the spirit of Capitalism
Hayek - "Fatal Conceit", "Individualism and Economic Order"
Karl Popper - "Open Society and Its Enemies", "Poverty of Historicism"

>>14831752
this, if Taleb's thesis sounds like common sense and nothing deserving of our attention remember that contemporary political economists unironically believe that future market conditions can be modelled mathematically in the same manner as a simple lottery. this is the result of autistic ramblings of von Neumann and Morgenstern. for treatment of actual real life uncertainty look into Keynes, Hayek, Shackle, von Mises and Taleb

>>14542880
Bentham and other utilitarians were refuted by the economists long ago. There is no way of knowing whether a given action will increase or decrease social welfare without prior knowledge of the social welfare function . However, practical construction of a social welfare function is problematic for few reasons:

>unlike with individual utility functions, you cannot transform it monotonically and preserve the optimal allocation

what this means is that functions which map the same set of preferences will give rise to vastly different socially optimal allocations which is undesirable for a function that is supposed to be a policy guidance. in other words, government planners would probably decide upon the allocation on an arbitrary basis. this is evident when you consider how many potential candidates for a social utility function there are - Rawls' function (min of u1, u2..., ui), utilitarian function (arithmetic sum of u1, u2..., ui) and so on.

>Arrow's impossibility theorem

the economists did away with concerns about social utility. the only objective criterion which can be used to compare social welfare is the Pareto optimality criterion. that's why you should ignore utilitarian sophistry and start with the economists

>>14542905
based retard

>>14414764
8) We could technically overcome this problem by assuming that everyone agrees with the statement "state/community X is a democracy" and hence there is no need to confirm this through voting. If someone disagrees with the said statement, he is free to leave our yet to be democratic state/community and therefore all that remain will be adherents to the basic principle that "majority's will constitutes a legitimate decission". There are at least two problems with this line of defense.
a) Our consideration of whether or not to leave the yet to be democratic society will necessarily be a function of all decissions that might be made in the future in other words it is impossible to say in advance whether or not we agree with some principle of collective decission making without knowing what particular decissions would be made in a democracy. One could try to rescue our yet to be democratic society by arguing that in real life we often cannot envision with 100% accuracy the effects of our decisions and yet some decissions HAVE TO be made. In response to this it will suffice to say that
b) A democracy without any additional safety networks like inalienable natural rights will surely restrict people's freedoms of locomotion, therefore it is reasonable to postulate that in light of a) if some people adversly affected by the results of democratic process were to try and flee the democratic community, a retaliatory action from the community would follow that would necessitate the incarceration of said individual under accusation of "trying to undermine democracy". Notice that this already happened albeit not in a democratic state but in the authocratic Soviet Union.
What follows is the logical impossibility of democracy and that is exactly what we intended to prove, QED.

I don't know if he qualifies as a philosopher, but:

>The story I remember best happened at the initial Mont Pelerin meeting when he got up and said, "You're all a bunch of socialists." We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should have progressive income taxes. Some of the people there were expressing the view that there could be a justification for it.

>Another occasion which is equally telling: Fritz Machlup was a student of Mises's, one of his most faithful disciples. At one of the Mont Pelerin meetings, Machlup gave a talk in which I think he questioned the idea of a gold standard; he came out in favor of floating exchange rates. Mises was so mad he wouldn't speak to Machlup for three years. Some people had to come around and bring them together again.

And this is coming from an admirer. Imagine the type of shit his regular students had to deal with.

Also, just look at that face.