/lit/ - Literature

I am slowly coming to terms with how full of shit everything and everyone is.

You can't even read a book and, after being bored to death by page 200, call it boring and go do something else. There are 9001 academics and journalists and other pseudointellectuals ready to call you a pleb.

I've read wealth of nations to page 200 and it's literally nothing but painstakingly slow anecdotes about increased supply lowering prices and decreased supply raising prices. It's boring as shit trivial anecdotes yet I will be called a pleb for saying that.

I am at about page 350 of a Dickens book and even though its paid by the word turgid aimless nonsense I will be called a pleb for saying that. Even though Dickens wrote for people with less formal education than 10 year olds today, pseudointellectuals pretend that reading him is a sign of intelligence and that you need ten PhDs to understand him. THAT is how high pseudointellectualism has progressed.

I read Plato and he spent 80 pages wondering whether names are just labels or whether they properly describe (or match) the nature of what they name... I'm not even fucking joking. Yet people will defend this.

I don't want to dwell on books but shit permeates everywhere.

My engineering degree was just introductory maths and physics and chemistry class plus a load of stamp collecting brain-dead corporate wagecuck training courses.

You're told that work is noble... yet people look down on me and laugh at me for working in a retailcuck job.

You are 90 % judged on what university you went to. My one was ranked in the world's top 150 (I only chose it because it was nearest to me) and I still feel like a prole who has been branded as an idiot.

>i dont like one book written over a hundred years ago so all books written over a hundred years ago are bad

I think you might be retarded sempai

>>8878583
tfw not even top 600

>>8878583
Not every book is interesting to everyone.

>>8878573
Do whatever the fuck you want man. Just stop asking. Jesus fucking christ can't you think for yourself? Don't you feel ashamed?

>>8878573
Very few people have actually read the Wealth of Nations, let alone can contextualize it and actually understand it. Book 1 is about natural tendencies toward static equilibrium. Book 2 is more dynamical and examines the forces and institutional patterns, including the role of social status, customs and habit, and sources of income, which bear upon consumption. The last 3 books are almost entirely historical and generally totally neglected.


>>8878583
>I've read wealth of nations to page 200 and it's literally nothing but painstakingly slow anecdotes about increased supply lowering prices and decreased supply raising prices. It's boring as shit trivial anecdotes yet I will be called a pleb for saying that.
You didn't understand Smiths [muddle headed] concept of value if it all just boils down to supply/demand triviality to you. Marx covers it in the chapter on Adam Smith in his Theories of Surplus-Value:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch03.htm

>>8878573
>>8878583
I think it's interesting as fuck. He talks about a lot of cool stuff:

-mass production making everything more efficient vs. someone trying to make everything themselves. You get really good at that one thing, and getting into a workflow saves you time that is normally lost when you transition from one task to another

-why division of labor is dependent on market size. You need people to want your shit; if you live in the boonies and try to make/sell a thousand nails, it's gonna take you forever. This also explains why seaport towns got really big before the inland areas, b/c it was cheaper to ship stuff farther, so you could sell your shit to more people

-the origins of currency: people started out bartering, but then people realized not everyone is going to want what you have, so people started stocking up on commonly wanted stuff like cattle. But using cattle as currency kind of sucked b/c if you want to buy some salt for example, you need to buy a whole cow's worth of salt at a time (which is a fuckload of salt) since you can't pay with a fractional amount of a cow. People switched to precious metals, but even metals kind of still sucked because it was a pain in the ass to weigh, and also people might rip you off by giving you fake shit, so governments started stamping them, and that's how coins and minting got started.

That's just from the very very beginning of the book, like within the first 50 pages.

>>8878718

Marx is also the guy who wrote a fucking treatise on high school maths. Maybe he's a bit of a mental masturbator?

No, it really is fucking trivial. You can mentally masturbate over made up reasons for why apples cost more than oranges at their mature market price all fucking day long but in the end it is trivial.

The whole thing seems circular. The value affects the price... The price affects (or reflects, to be fair) the value... Why don't you just admit this is flailing about within the unfalsifiable miasma? What about the property each object has, which I made up just now, called "boto"? Why does the chair cost less than the table when the chair has more boto? This will take at least 50,000 more critiques to figure out.

>>8878753
He literally tells you that only real measure of value of a good is the amount of labor that goes into it, but since you can't accurately determine that, people use money.

>why does the chair cost less than the table
cause the chair takes less labour to fucking make than a table, so why would someone sell it for less than the cost of a table?

>>8878777
That's fucking retarded. Something can take a relatively small amount of labor to produce but still be worth more than, say, a car. For example, a rare ancient manuscript

>>8878777

>measure of value

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>amount

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>of labour

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No but seriously (though the above was also serious), I think I vaguely remember reading that part in book 1. My memory is awful but I think I remember giving him the benefit of the doubt and not thinking he said anything stupid. Maybe back when corn and cattle was all there was, you could say stuff like that but GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK if you think he is saying anything non trivial or correct.

>>8878753
>You can mentally masturbate over made up reasons for why apples cost more than oranges at their mature market price all fucking day long but in the end it is trivial.
You can continue believing your degenerate empiricist account but I'm going to attempt to penetrate the real full essence of reality

>The whole thing seems circular. The value affects the price... The price affects (or reflects, to be fair) the value... Why don't you just admit this is flailing about within the unfalsifiable miasma? What about the property each object has, which I made up just now, called "boto"? Why does the chair cost less than the table when the chair has more boto? This will take at least 50,000 more critiques to figure out.
The circularity starts to vanish once you realize abstract labour is the substance of value, socially necessary labour time is the quantitative magnitude of value, money/prices are the necessary form of the phenomenal appearance of value

>>8878783
The price of an ancient manuscript is wholly dependent upon the whims of the buyer due to their intrinsic scarcity and would thus not be regulated by their socially necessary labour time of reproduction. Your typical commodities are reproducible and their value is subject to continuous devaluation thanks to the capitalistic process of production/reproduction and competition.

>>8878820
>The price of an ancient manuscript is wholly dependent upon the whims of the buyer due to their intrinsic scarcity and would thus not be regulated by their socially necessary labour time of reproduction. Your typical commodities are reproducible and their value is subject to continuous devaluation thanks to the capitalistic process of production/reproduction and competition.

Can you reword this for me/ explain in a watered down way?

>>8878820
>The price of an ancient manuscript is wholly dependent upon the whims of the buyer due to their intrinsic scarcity and would thus not be regulated by their socially necessary labour time of reproduction. Your typical commodities are reproducible and their value is subject to continuous devaluation thanks to the capitalistic process of production/reproduction and competition.
What's your point? The price of a commodity is wholly dependent on the market. It doesn't really matter how much work was put into it, I could have spent billions of dollars manufacturing a single car but if it doesn't run nobody will buy it and I'd have to lower the price.

>>8878835
The manuscript is only worth what a buyer's willing to pay for it, based upon the manuscript's scarcity. The amount of labor that went into producing the manuscript (hundreds or thousands of years ago) is not proportional to how much it's worth now that it's so rare. Typical things that are still produced now can go up or down in prices.

>>8878837
>I could have spent billions of dollars manufacturing a single car but if it doesn't run nobody will buy it and I'd have to lower the price
>I spent billions of dollars
Somebody still ends up paying for that labour even if it isn't the consumer. If you make a car that can't run and have to lower the price, you're eating the loss.

>>8878573
That means you aren't interested in what your reading. Read something else.

>>8878835
An ancient manuscript is more like land than a commodity since its supply is fixed, think of its price like rent instead of the value of a commodity.

>>8878837
>The price of a commodity is wholly dependent on the market.
That's right.
>It doesn't really matter how much work was put into it
Wrong. Labour is a cost of production, even at a crude empirical level that is one factor determining the lower limits of a profitable price you can set.
>I could have spent billions of dollars manufacturing a single car but if it doesn't run nobody will buy it and I'd have to lower the price.
I don't see your point beyond the fact you can't set prices at whatever you want and expect to be able to sell. Car companies can come and go, if someone is stupid enough to spent billions of dollars manufacturing a single car they probably won't survive and their plants/intellectual property if reusable will be sold off at a discount and utilized (if possible).

>>8878890
This coming from the same guy who wrote "Put a gun to his head and make him read" in response to another thread where OP was asking how to get their 7 year old stepbrother interested in reading. Nice.

>>8878583
Honestly you want the truth? You are a bitch with no concept of self worth. The only people who read The Wealth of Nations front to back are people who plan on doing something useful with their lives. You are basically just sitting on your ass making shitposts on 4chan because you have to read a book that is very long and monotonous. As human history develops, the literature becomes increasingly terse, dense, and sometimes just plain hard to read. You will miss the days when you read The Wealth of Nations and complain about size and topics.

Also, it's a great hstorical read. Appreciate it for the discussion of economics, sure, but what other people are saying about the content is correct: almost half of it could be called a history book, especially Book III iirc.