Economics books

[Anonymous No.11429423]

What are the best books to understand economics? I'm gonna be trying to get more invested in politics and so I want to find out about the different economic theories and which ones work out. Any recommendations?

[Anonymous No.11429427]

>>11429423
Capital in 21st century
Thomas Piketty

[Anonymous No.11429451]

>>11429423
get an undergraduate textbook. Doesnt really matter which one.

As a general intro you may want to try "The Worldly Philosophers" and "The armchair economist".

Avoid consuming too much pop-econ, and avoid reading too much theory untill you have the base down to pat.

[Anonymous No.11429491]

Read anything by Dr. Michael Hudson

[Anonymous No.11430041]

Find local university syllabi and follow them.
Normative economic philosophy is completely a matter of opinion, of course, and you'll probably end up seeking books out to satisfy your own prejudices like the rest of us.

[Anonymous No.11430462]

>>11429423
Macroeconomics by Mankiw and Intermediate Microeconomics by Varian, there is nothing better if you truly want to understand economics. Don't go for meme books like Piketty or Sowell, and only try to read "classics" like Smith or Keynes if you are willing to go through the whole "canon" of economics, otherwise you'll miss important concepts.

[Anonymous No.11430623]

Don't listen to the psueds. Read sowell.

[Anonymous No.11430631]

>>11429423
Wage Labour and Capital. If you are interested in the mechanics, Capital vol 3 but it is a notoriously difficult text and will easily take you 6+ months to get through

[Anonymous No.11430985]

>>11429423
Henry Ford autobiography

[Anonymous No.11430989]

>>11429423
>Capital in 21st century
>Thomas Piketty
this

>>11429491
and also fucking this! hudson is the final redpill.

>>11430462
i tend to disagree. the classics didnt know lots of stuff we take for granted today.

[Anonymous No.11431001]

>>11430989
>>11430989
Absolute retardation. Economics isn’t some thing you acquire 100% correct knowledge of as time goes on.

No science is like that

[Anonymous No.11431008]

>>11429423
The Foundation for Exploration

[Anonymous No.11431042]

Smith, Ricardo and Marx for classical economics.

Friedman, Hayek, Sowell and Keynes for neo-classical economics.

After that you'll basically understand most of the divisions in economics in the modern day.

[Anonymous No.11431518]

Might want to start listening to the audiobook of The Wealth of Nations and from there move on to David Ricardo or something, at least that's what I hope to do myself.
I've read Max Weber already.
Questions 77 and 78 of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica and Milton Friedman's documentaries may also be of interest.

[Anonymous No.11431584]

Excerpts from this comparatively shorter work might also be of relevance.

[Anonymous No.11431703]

>>11429427
Hack
>>11430041
Dated, but historically significant with some ideas that merit a revival
>>11430623
Pleb
>>11430631
Historically significant, dumb, the reason it takes so hard to get through is due to the mental gymnastics you need to do to swallow it

>>11429423
I like Joan Robinson's economic philosophy. She supported Maoism later in life but don't let it deter you from giving her a chance

[Anonymous No.11431730]

>>11431703
>the reason it takes so hard to get through is due to the mental gymnastics you need to do to swallow it
It is math intense, not that you would know. Speaking of mental gymnastics...

[Anonymous No.11431732]

Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt

“If I am able to get my children to read only one economics text in their lifetime, God forbid, it would be Hazlitt’s.” - Mark Spitznagel

[Anonymous No.11431762]

>>11431703
Ah the slander of communism which isn't one to be absent has finally appeared.

[Anonymous No.11431993]

>>11431008
Fuck off Sean.

[Anonymous No.11433457]

bump

[Anonymous No.11433969]

>>11431762
Kek

[Anonymous No.11434347]

>>11429451
This, then these
>>11429427
>>11431042

Do the gay little exercises at the end of each textbook chapter.
GL anon.

[Anonymous No.11435254]

>>11430631
>reading socialist literature to understand economy
I imagine you would recommend homeopathy to medicine students too, right?

[Anonymous No.11435262]

>>11431042
>>11435254

[Anonymous No.11436534]

>>11435254
Based.

[Anonymous No.11436620]

>>11430462

This guy is right. If you want to understand economics you have to do what students in economics do. Nobody ever learned economics from reading Piketty. Stuff like that is when you want to form a normative view on economic theory, which you do after you understand how economics works.

[Anonymous No.11436647]

>>11429423
read a contemporary intro microecon textbook by a neoclassicist. then read smith, ricardo, marx, public choice theorists, anyone else who isn't a retard.

[Anonymous No.11436658]

>>11429451
>Doesnt really matter which one.
Academic textbooks are hugely biased sometimes though, especially against conservative economic policy.

[Anonymous No.11436664]

>>11436647
>marx
>isn't a retard
uhhh

[Anonymous No.11436667]

>>11429423
You'll not find an unbiased opinion here, anon. Your best bet is to pick one from each extreme position, let the propaganda, bias, and general douchebaggery cancel themselves out, then you might have a semblance of practical economics.
As a rule, look at the actions, not at what's written. Actions speak louder than words.
Also, use Adam Smiths "Wealth of Nations" as a baseline for reference purposes.

[Anonymous No.11436675]

>>11436658
all the better sweatie

[Anonymous No.11436678]

>>11436667
>You'll not find an unbiased opinion here, anon. Your best bet is to pick one from each extreme position, let the propaganda, bias, and general douchebaggery cancel themselves out, then you might have a semblance of practical economics.
this is retarded. economics isn't political. policy != economics.

[Anonymous No.11436694]

>>11430623
Sowell lives in a libertarian fantasy world. Virtually nothing he's written has any practical application in the real world.

[Anonymous No.11436697]

the talmud

[Anonymous No.11436717]

>>11435254
You must read ideas from all angles of thought to get the big picture. When working on my MBA Marx was on the mandatory reading list. He was on the reading list at West Point too. There's a reason to study theory that opposes your own. You have to understand the opponents ideas and motivations. If you don't, your just a sheeple feeding off the propaganda and poisoned kool-aid.

[Anonymous No.11436797]

>>11436717
marx actually contributed to mainstream economic thought. dsa retards bloviating about fundamental fairness don't. if an 'economic' text has the words "justice," "fairness," or "equality" in it, it's not worth reading.

[Anonymous No.11436819]

>>11436675
Wrong. We are against leftists here sweetie.

[Anonymous No.11436869]

>>11429423
Pirate bay the TTC audio course on economics. It will give you the basic background to approach other things.

The Worldly Philosophers won’t leave you with a huge amount of understanding of economics per se but it’s still a really fantastic book and very much worth your time.

University economics education is kind of notorious for totally neglecting the fields own history, and presents itself formally like mathematics, rather than quasi-historically like psychics (mastering Newtonian mechanic before learning the Hamiltonian reformulation before moving on to quantum mechanics and GR etc), so the approach people argue for here is totally at odds with ‘just get a textbook’. I think the quasi historical approach is good, but I don’t think you *need* to read all the old classics to get a basic understanding of economics.

Nobody really has the time or discipline to read a whole econ textbook outside of taking a class so seriously try to search the TTC course.


The Piketty book is definitely worth reading but it’s not an introduction to economics book and you do need to understand at least the terms of the debate to get anything meaningful out of it. Once you’ve listened to the TTC course and you know what ‘GDP, rate of return, investment, interest’ etc are then have a go at the Piketty book. It’s an argument for a specific thesis, not anything like a big new framework for understanding economics writ large.

Don’t read Sowell as your first introduction to economics, ‘Basic Economics’ is an extremely politicized account disguised as a beginners introduction. If you are gonna read it, wait till you’ve got a foundation on something that at least is trying to be a bit more neutral.

One heterodox introduction, if you want to understand Marxian economics but don’t want to work through thousands of pages of Marx, TheTheory of Capitalist Development by Paul Sweezy is the best most concise synoptic account of Marxian economics.

If you are looking around for different views within the mainstream, once you’ve got your foundations check out Joesph Stieglitz, specifically The Price of Inequality for the foremost left leaning voice in mainstream economics.

>>11436658
This is bullshit. My econ textbook (a Pearson brand Canadian unit standard) argued for the outright elimination of the minimum wage and had nothing by bad things to say about the existence of unions and all sorts of other standard lefty thing.

Also the most popular American micro textbook is the Mankiw which is unambiguously conservative.

My textbooks and profs didn’t even make allusions to the fact that ideas like ‘information asymmetry’ exist and complicate the nice simple ultra conservative view we were taught.


>>11436678
Oh buddy.. I wish I could be you.

[Anonymous No.11437025]

>>11436797
Lol at Microeconomics by Bade and Parkin, the standard Canadian first year textbook. There was half a dozen pages dedicated to the Rawlsian and Nozickian definitions of fairness, something they use to say that the existence of the minimum wage is ‘inarguably’ unfair.

Anyways, here’s a basic canon, if I knew how to make a chart I would;

Smith - wealth of nations
Ricardo - Principles
Malthus - Population
Marx - Capital (Value, Price and Profit is a summary of the key results)

Marshall - Principles of Economics (1890, this is a popular textbook that summarized and systematized the work of a bunch of people you probably don’t want to read individually, such as Walras, Menger, Pareto (he actually is worth reading himself desu), and Jevons.)

Hobson - Imperialism (Inspired Lenin’s book on the same topic)
Veblen - Theory of the Leisure Class
Schrumpeter - Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Keynes - General Theory
Samuelson - Economics (1948, a very popular textbook, it brings together Marshall’s Neoclassicism with the new Keynesian theory)

After this point economics becomes totally systematized in mathematics and it’s advanced paper by paper rather than book by book so it’s not really possible to identify singular books which define major steps forward. I’ll mention a couple of other random things of interest.

Sraffa - Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (This is a major critique of neoclassical economics and argues for a return to Ricardo. Few have taken it up but it remains of persistent fringe interest)
Galbraith - The Affulent Society, The New Industrial State
Kalecki - “Political Aspects of Full Employment” (in general he’s really worth looking into.


Amartya Sen, he has written a ton on welfare and development economics. If you are interested in the intersection of economics and politics he’s a very important name.

[Anonymous No.11437105]

Economics is a bit of a fuckshow, if youre learning to understand politics you need to do the deep dive, if youre just learning for your own personal benefit you need to do considerably less. For political purposes I would avoid textbooks, youre not approaching this as a student of economics youre approaching it as a generalist and autodidact.

So contra to others in this thread, fuck all that noise and pick up the Wealth of Nations. People love it, hate it, whatever, but nobody will bitch about it as the starting point for what we call "economics" now. It'll keep you busy.

Something I did was hit up the wiki page for economic schools of thought and go through them one by one. Identify the key figure in a school and go see what they wrote, you can get a lot for free online, both articles and books. Many schools are of course no longer thought about much, but it's still a useful exercise.

As for the current mainstream, the roots are Keynes and Hayek, with Hayek drawing somewhat on the Austrians before him while Keynes is kind of a root node in himself. Shout out to the Post-Keynesians who I don't think have been mentioned yet.

[Anonymous No.11437111]

>>11437025
>There was half a dozen pages dedicated to the Rawlsian and Nozickian definitions of fairness, something they use to say that the existence of the minimum wage is ‘inarguably’ unfair.
it goes both ways. they should cut that idiocy. topics like minimum wage should be taught from an efficiency standpoint, with no value judgments made. minimum wage really should only be addressed tangentially as a price floor.

>if I knew how to make a chart I would
download Paint.NET

[Anonymous No.11437116]

Smith, Mises, Schiff, Friedman, Sowell, Taleb

[Anonymous No.11437127]

>>11437105
fuck I also forgot, shout out to the Public Choice theorists as well

[Anonymous No.11437171]

>>11429427
gas yourself. the picketty/saez theses have been debunked a dozen times over
This is just the tip of the iceberg:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2015/02/18/economic-research-refutes-piketty/

[Anonymous No.11437188]

>>11436694
His "Conflict of Visions" is highly regarded, widely cited. But it isn't about economics though....

[Anonymous No.11437197]

>>11437171
Piketty got bashed around a lot, frankly I would skip it there's better things to read

[Anonymous No.11437298]

It appears that most of the people who posted here still agree with the labor theory of value. If that's the case, would any of you take the time to explain the reason of this?

[Anonymous No.11437320]

Man, Economy, and State
and/or
Human Action

[Anonymous No.11437330]

>>11437111
Impossible. Politics will be in some of the economics some of the time.

I think we’d both agree it should never be in all of the economics all of the time

[Anonymous No.11437336]

>>11429423
Economics: the user's guide by Ha-Joon Chang

[Anonymous No.11437345]

>>11437298
None of us do. That’s why you see all this Keynesposting. Keynes didn’t agree with the LTV, and even less so did Walras or Pareto.

[Anonymous No.11437390]

>>11437298
>It appears that most of the people who posted here still agree with the labor theory of value. If that's the case, would any of you take the time to explain the reason of this?
the price you are willing to pay for something is never greater than what it would cost you to produce such a thing yourself.

[Anonymous No.11437401]

>>11437390
>the price you are willing to pay for something is never greater than what it would cost you to produce such a thing yourself.
what would the 'cost' be, for the average person, to learn how to design and manufacture their own laptop computer?

[Anonymous No.11437527]

>>11437390
People's time has different opportunity costs.

[Anonymous No.11437543]

>>11430041
what kind of math do you need to know for pure elements?

[Anonymous No.11437563]

>>11437390
thats an upper bound on its subjective value

[Anonymous No.11437664]

If you're really serious about understanding economics, first you should study mathematics. If you're too rusty on basic stuff, I suggest that you work on Serge Lang's Basic Mathematics. After that, I would recommend either Apostol or Spivak for Calculus, Strang and Axler for Linear Algebra, Velleman as a introduction to proofs, Casella and Berger for Statistics and Abbott for Real Analysis. After all those books you should be ready to tackle economics textbooks. For microeconomics read Varian (either his undergraduate book or graduate, whichever you prefer) and either Microeconomic Theory by Mas-Colell, Whinston and Geeen or Advanced Microeconomic Theory by Jehle and Reny. For macroeconomics read Advanced Macroeconomics, by David Romer and Recursive Macroeconomic Theory by Sargent and Ljungqvist. Finally, for econometrics, you can read both Wooldridge's Introductory Econometrics and Econometrics of Cross Section and Panel Data. Also, do check out Applied Econometric Time Series by Enders. All this should give you a working knowledge on the fundamentals of current state economic science.

[Anonymous No.11437688]

>>11437111
It would have been nice if that was the case but first year economics has an extremely conservative bend nearly everywhere.

They did use the minimum wage as an example of price floors, but then went on to make the case that it is scientifically correct policy. They cited the 'consensus of economists' by referring to a 1991 survey despite being a book published in 2012, and spend time trashing a number of empirical studies that found minimum wage raises not raising unemployment and so on.

The point was obviously that most kids in the class aren't going to go on to take advanced microeconomics and learn that maybe it's a bit more complicated, so you leave a few hundred people at a time trained to reflexively side with business against labour.

[Anonymous No.11437695]

To me it is always funny how a mere mention of Marx causes massive assflame.

[Anonymous No.11437700]

>>11437298
Because people reflexively say 'Smith, Ricardo, Marx'? It's just that people here are obsessed with 'canon' and 'the classics' regardless of the topic. If somebody asked for books on chemistry people here would probably tell them to 'start with the alchemists'.

[Anonymous No.11437706]

macroeconomics is mostly contextual bullshit, but the classics of Keynes, Smith, Ricardo is fine I guess. Talking about economies at large (i.e. macroeconomics) is difficult because they do not necessarily follow consistent and predictable models into the future. If they did, macroeconomists would drop out of the profession and go into finance because they could apparently predict the future better than random.

Microeconomics (including game theory) is the actual domain where economics is fruitful and insightful. You absolutely would need solid background in proof based mathematics and calculus to follow it in any way though, so I recommend learning that first anyways because proofs and calculus are more useful than anything else you'll read anyway.

[Anonymous No.11437752]

>>11437664
I should also mention that, contrary to most suggestions on this thread, you should not learn economics by reading the classics. In physics, nobody learns classical mechanics or electromagnetism by reading Newton and Maxwell. Everyone goes for the modern textbooks. In economics, if you are a serious student, it is the same.
While reading the classics is occasionally an enriching experience, much of that stuff is either now outdated or has been incorporated by the current mainstream.

[Anonymous No.11437772]

>>11437401
a lot, what's your point?

>>11437527
this is totally irrelevant.

>>11437563
the only source of objective value a good has within any given market is the amount of socially-useful labor hours that went into producing it. this is exchange-value. use-value is always subjective.

[Anonymous No.11437778]

>>11437700
>start with the alchemists
any good books on alchemy?

[Anonymous No.11437901]

>>11437390
yeah it is. I buy fast food all the time

[Anonymous No.11437916]

>>11429423
Has anyone looked at MRU courses? They seem good.

>>11437778
Probably out there by Issac Newton that might be interesting.

[Anonymous No.11437920]

>>11437390
>The most fundamental flaw in Marx's theory of value is the premise that the value of goods is determined by their cost of production alone. This fallacy was pointed out as early as 1871 by Carl Menger, who observed that the value of a diamond is the same whether it was found by accident or whether it was found as a result of a thousand days of a miner's labour.

[Anonymous No.11437927]

>>11437901
sorry, but you must be at least this intelligent (IQ: 100) to participate in the discussion

[Anonymous No.11437944]

>>11437927
IQ is a myth and so is LTV

[Anonymous No.11437948]

>>11437772
but that isnt true, there's no objective exchange-value, there's just the revealed price

[Anonymous No.11437952]

>>11437920
strawman/non-argument. nobody rational would be mining for diamonds if it was less labor-intensive to comb for them. let's test this: when you get engaged, see if you wander the streets looking for a diamond, or if you buy one.

On a related note, a sandwich isn't worth more because your autistic little brother took three hours to make it. Socially. Useful. Labor.

[Anonymous No.11437982]

>>11437772
>this is totally irrelevant.
Differential time preference is totally irrelevant to the question of paying for something versus making it. Uh, right anon.

[Anonymous No.11437998]

>>11437948
let me put this a different way:
there are two widgets, A and B, which are identical except for color. Nobody cares about the color, but widget B took more effort to make because of some issue with red dye.

More labor went into Widget B, but it is not any more valuable than the other. Dyeing Widget B red was not socially useful labor.

Labor is only useful insofar as it allows a want to be met at a lower cost than it otherwise could have been. All value, ultimately, derives from labor. If every time you wanted a cigarette, one appeared ready-lit in your maw, you would never pay for a cigarette again. If you knew a spell that conjured a cigarette, but it took five minutes to recite, you might still buy a pack now and again.

[Anonymous No.11437999]

>>11437772

Value by definition is subjective. There is no such thing as objective value. You are trying to ram the round block through the square hole.

[Anonymous No.11438006]

>>11437998
>Tfw I first read this as Midgets

[Anonymous No.11438007]

>>11437982
you're trying to tell me that labor isn't the source of value because different people's labor is differently valued.

[Anonymous No.11438008]

>>11437998

Let me get this clear. You are defining "socially useful labor" as such that labor is only "socially useful" when in the eyes of the market it adds value to a product? Then all you did was devise a very round-about way of declaring that value is determined by the market and not by how much labor went into it.

[Anonymous No.11438016]

>>11437952
>no commodities or luxuries are both discovered as windfall and simultaneously laboriously excavated/cultivated
yeah okay buddy, you're not a fucking moron or anything

[Anonymous No.11438018]

>>11437952
It’s not a non-argument, and means almost nothing anyway. The LTV is not predicated on asserting a goods price equals its cost of production, which is just half of the equation, to use the phrase. The LTV simply asserts the value of the good is equal to the price. This is the stupidest fallacy economists as late as John Maynard Keynes fell into; the price is something determined by different valuations of utility, not from the costs of production. The costs of production usually help determine a range of what the price is to be set at, but even this range ultimately fails if the producer has a monopoly or oligopolistic trust going on, which is most likely very frequently these days.

[Anonymous No.11438062]

>>11437999
exchange-value is the value of a good in a marketplace. an orange might be worth $1 to you or $2 to me, but if it's worth $5 to a market participant, either of us could sell the orange to him for $5. If he was capable of producing an orange at a cost less than $5, he wouldn't pay it. However, some other producer, one more efficient at producing oranges, might undercut us.

>>11438008
Sort of, yes, but it's important to acknowledge that labor is the font of all value. Market participants only value that which others can do more efficiently than themselves, with the constraint that the price of some good X is less than or equal to their use-value for good X.

>>11438018
try making an argument next time

[Anonymous No.11438068]

>>11438018
if two goods are perfect substitutes and one costs more to produce, it will never be produced. tell me how that has anything to do with utility. ultimately, it's a function of labor.

[Anonymous No.11438180]

>>11438068
If the good is overvalued or centralized in control (the production thereof) the more expensive good can still be produced with a large profit accruing to the capital owners. I don’t see how this isn’t the case.

[Anonymous No.11438196]

Things Only Cost Money Because They Took Time And Effort To Produce

Capital Is Congealed Labor

[Anonymous No.11438323]

past a certain point LTV just seems useless. initially all things attain a non-zero value status because they require some amount of labor or time, but beyond that, value is completely subjective for each person depending on their needs and LTV doesn't have any way of determining the ultimate value of a product for a particular person or even society

[Anonymous No.11438412]

>>11438323
>LTV doesn't have any way of determining the ultimate value of a product for a particular person or even society
no theory can, LTV just reminds us where 'value' comes from.

[Anonymous No.11438430]

>>11438412
Value is a meaningless term. It has to be relative to something. Value to whom? To the market? Then it’s exchangeable value.

[Anonymous No.11438474]

>>11438430
>Value is a meaningless term. It has to be relative to something.
No it's not, and it's relative to labor.

It all flows from the ultimate scarce resource, your time alive on this earth. This is why things like usury, debasement of currency, etc. are sinful.

[Anonymous No.11438492]

>>11438474
What you are talking about is exchangeable value.

Value relative to persons is called utility.

Utility estimations of groups can influence the price. Therefore price =/= value.

[Anonymous No.11438518]

>>11438492
what point are you even trying to make? i know you want to feel smart, but you don't have to keep bringing up irrelevant bullshit.

[Anonymous No.11438532]

>>11438492
use-value = amount of labor hours you would willingly expend to obtain a good

exchange-value = amount of socially useful labor hours required to produce a good

[Anonymous No.11438582]

>>11438430
>>11438474
Value.
Jesus you two! What difference does it make? You are assigning a term to nothing..

The purpose of a market is not to assign value to anything, but to remove scarcity by incentivizing production and discouraging surplus incentivizing efficiency. Value is a McGuffin - a dummy variable.

And what difference does it make when the only thing that assigns value is Money? The money has long since replaced any comparative trade value, (or even more ridiculous the moral value of work), by becoming the most valuable thing in the market! You don't trade products; you trade for money.

[Anonymous No.11438585]

economics is a scam science

[Anonymous No.11438602]

>>11438582
>The purpose of a market is not to assign value to anything, but to remove scarcity by incentivizing production and discouraging surplus incentivizing efficiency.
???
the point of accessing a market is to lower your cost of obtaining goods

[Anonymous No.11438636]

>>11438582
anyways, this whole post is a dumpster fire.

[Anonymous No.11438676]

>>11438602

Mind your point of view. That is the selfish narrator. Changing the point of view changes the story and its intent.

The macro intent of Market is as I stated.

The micro intent of the seller is to control Supply and Price to maximize both the Marginal and Volume profit to the constraints of Physical Production, Cost, Demand, Market Competition, Geographic Marketplace, and the Rules of Trade.

Economics is the macro expression of the Social Bargain: Collective Action creates more than the sum of individual action within the collective.

#. By changing your narrator from "I" to "We" we can overcome the physical constraints on the individual of Time Space Matter, and Configuration. "I" can only be in one place at a time, but "we" can be in many places. "I" can only do 100 lb work, but "we" can do 200 lb work. "I" can only work for so long, but "we" can work indefinitely. "I" can only learn so much, but "we" can learn everything.

This is why Milton Friedman fails, and why Capitalism isn't a Market economy. It is an Exploitative economy masquerading as a market economy.

[Anonymous No.11438683]

>>11429423
If you want to invest you're better off learning psychology rather than "market fundamentals". They don't exist and it's all a confidence game about convincing people that the abstract holding you have has value.

[Anonymous No.11438715]

>>11438676
>Mind your point of view. That is the selfish narrator.
what the fuck... i will not participate in a market if it does not lower my cost of goods. why is that so hard to understand? the ability to exercise my comparative advantage via a market, which is what i think you're getting at, ultimately lowers my cost of goods. moving product is not an end in itself.

what meds are you taking btw

>>11438683
psychology is fake

[Anonymous No.11439060]

>>11429423
Coming through with real shit.

This guy took Germany from a 3rd world country to the most prosperous in Europe in a few short years with his economic ideas.

[Anonymous No.11439084]

look at this img.

[Anonymous No.11439089]

>>11439060
holy shit, you're a fucking idiot. germany was the most industrially developed country in europe.

[Anonymous No.11439122]

It seems you've forgotten about somebody, my fellow dissipative structures.

[Anonymous No.11439168]

Any LTV posters care to prove that intrinsic value exists?

[Anonymous No.11439196]

>>11439089

[Anonymous No.11439377]

>>11439060
Based.

[Anonymous No.11439435]

>>11439377
Based retard, that is

[Anonymous No.11439448]

>>11439435
Takes one to know one.

[Anonymous No.11439600]

>>11439168
Intrinsic value is a myth and everyone who says otherwise is an idiot

[Anonymous No.11439879]

>>11439168
>>11439600
>potable water is not intrinsically valuable
lol

[Anonymous No.11439945]

>>11439879
it ain't. It has intrinsic utility, which is subjective.

Suppose that you're in a desert and you're dying of thirst. In this situation, a bottle of water has inestimable value. But if you're at home and you have a shelf full of water ready to drink, the value of a bottle of water is obviously way less.

Value is subjective, so what you consider the intrinsic value of water is its great utility for human beings. Even though it's true that we need it to survive, the value doesn't come from within, but instead from the individual that needs them.

[Anonymous No.11439966]

>>11438532
ffs just read Menger you're too obtuse to learn except through the deep dive

[Anonymous No.11440002]

>>11437920
Is this really an accurate representation of Menger's critique? If so I'm incredibly disappointed. Marx emphasizes socially necessary labor time from what, the second page?

>>11438018
Marx wasn't concerned with oligopolies or monopolies. Those aren't operating under normal market forces. If you were looking to study the development of capitalist business would you look to a municipal utility as a great example? He talks about monopolies, but obviously they aren't under the same pressures as a competitive business.

[Anonymous No.11440010]

>>11439168
>intrinsic value
Marx's term "value" has little to do with an objective value in the sense you're suggesting.

[Anonymous No.11440015]

>>11438492
Marx doesn't suggest value=price, he specifically says this isn't the case. A part of the generally accepted line of critique against Marx was that he never demonstrated a satisfactory or rigorous way of translating value into price, but value and price are not suggested to be equal.

[Anonymous No.11440057]

>>11438532
Except those labor hours can mean different things for different individuals.

This is Marx’s time unity is fucking retarded. Keynes criticizes it particularly well in his General Theory

[Anonymous No.11440089]

[Anonymous No.11440095]

>>11440057
>Except those labor hours can mean different things for different individuals.
Explain or reference where Keynes explains. I don't remember Keynes talking much about Marx, I actually remember it claimed somewhere he had never read Marx, but there are a couple of his letters where he calls Marx boring.

[Anonymous No.11440116]

>>11439945
valuable = able to be valuated
that is, given an exchange-value relative to some other good. as I've said before, the only sensible denominator, that is, the only thing which at all times is capable of valuation, is our time here on earth.

I'm only rearticulating the neo-classical concept of utility in terms of labor. Utility isn't a scarce resource, you can't valuate it- which is why a smart person would denominate values in labor-hours, because utility-maximization is subject to a single constraint: time.

Autistics who think about everything in terms of utils or dollars miss what's going on beneath the surface. Every transaction is an exchange of goods, and the ultimate good is our time. Nothing is utile which does not take time and effort to procure.

>>11439966
you are, simply put, not on my level

>>11440002
>from what, the second page?
yeah, around there.

[Anonymous No.11440121]

>>11439168
The point is value isn't constantly "intrinsic" but it's objective in so far as all commodities as a standardized class are theoretically reducible to the necessary labour inputs in the long run and this is the reality of all production not taste. This changes over time as production methods/knowledge develops but in reality you must factor in rents today which aren't reducible in the same manner and are political e.g. oil prices today are a factor of geopolitics without much to do with the technical reality of Energy Return on Investment.

A depreciating machines value clearly isn't "subjective", you as an individual may get lucky and pawn it off on a gullible rube at any rate but if society tried this over the long run the trick would be exposed. People will cash out their paper claims eventually and if it all can't be serviced you get hyperinflation.

>>11439945
>Suppose that you're in a desert and you're dying of thirst. In this situation, a bottle of water has inestimable value. But if you're at home and you have a shelf full of water ready to drink, the value of a bottle of water is obviously way less.

That's a great deep parable but it's irrelevant to the reality of capitalistic production, you want to reduce every exchange to a mere "decision-making problem" but you're not actually dealing with what the solution depends on (you're just assuming income/prices/etc as given, responding supply/demand is a mere tautological truism which ignores prices are already necessary to determine demand). You want to retreat into a desert instead of the reality of production and distribution in a real economy because the empirical reality of price formation isn't reducible to a mere story about individuals exchanging goods to equalize their utility levels. Investment decisions are made to maximize a rate of return and the reality of what this means in practice can be quite dirty (industrial sabotage/manipulation/etc). There's no diminishing returns when it comes to accumulating wealth in the abstract, marginal utility ignores the reality of the object of capitalism as accumulating the largest sum of abstract paper claims on wealth as possible and maintaining their yield value at any cost.

A mode of production/distribution that only considered utility, and no one was faced with the reality of budget constraints, would be very different than what exists today.

[Anonymous No.11440126]

>>11440057
>Except those labor hours can mean different things for different individuals.
Nobody has ever claimed that every real hour ever spent in toil is worth some fixed amount $Y. Try understanding what you're arguing against instead of nettling men of good sense with your knee-jerk reaction.

[Anonymous No.11440448]

>>11440121
On the subject of yield, one thing I find practical in understanding the Marxist framework (though not exclusive to Marxism, and in a more general sense) in opposition to the "marginal utility" or colloquially understood "subjective value" ideology is how the latter has informed the conception of price formation in equities for uninitiated crypto kids. The culture around bitcoin was at least initially very libertarian, which caused much conversation around the price of bitcoins and it's spinoffs to center around "subjective value". I noticed when the same group got more into the institutional financial markets there was the common misconception that equity prices were simply a function of "what people are willing to pay", which seems nearly useless in its analytic power. They would often argue how the actual or potential yield of the asset through dividends had no connection to its value as a "share in the company", which is basically meaningless without understanding how it yields income on a per share basis as a function of the company's potential growth, and the amount of shares it has outstanding. It feels as though it fosters this kind of lack of attention to the material basis of production and profit, which can be hand waved away as subjective preferences and similar things. Though I do think those crypto kids weren't even well read in the kinds of theories that vaguely influenced them, but I'd imagine the "materialist" Marxist influence would have led to more investigation of the basis of price formation instead of its dismissal as voodoo, since that was a huge part of Marx's project.

[Anonymous No.11440829]

>>11440448
>It feels as though it fosters this kind of lack of attention to the material basis of production and profit
good post

[Anonymous No.11440851]

>>11440126
>men of good sense
We’re talking about men who have read Marx here, and most likely not Keynes. They are not men of good sense.

Let’s be honest here, Marx is an idiot. But Keynes’ idea of a wage-unit is also flawed.

You’re acting like I don’t know the definition of Marx’s time unit either, I have never attempted to define it for you and I don’t need to, it’s fucking stupid like you

[Anonymous No.11440861]

>>11440851
he just repeats Marx's definitions as if they matter. Value is a spook, a ghost, a mistake, an illusion, it isnt real, it cant be measured, it cant even be approached.

[Anonymous No.11440874]

>>11440861
Keynes doesn’t agree with fundamental aspects of Marxian economics, like the time unit though. Keynes’ idea of economics is a collection of good and bad ideas, basically, but at least it’s better than Marx’s economics which is just a collection of bad ideas

Go Henry George + Léon Walras or go home

[Anonymous No.11441014]

>>11440448
This doesn't just have to do with the crypto community, the thing is next to no academic economists would even understand how to read a corporate balance sheet if it was placed in front of them. They don't learn about history or things like accountancy, business administration, etc, etc. A practical falsification of their entire theory can be found in any journal relating to advertising, demand is never just "taken as given". Economists know notting about business, as a discipline it functions as purely a formal theology and is the overhead cost of ideologically maintaining legitimacy for vested interests. Veblen was the only American economist to understand overcapitalization as a phenomena and the fact there's no way to clearly demarcate white-collar crime from "legitimatise" business activity.

[Anonymous No.11441021]

>>11440874
Keynes DID see some things very clearly but he was totally committed to safeguarding vested interests e.g. he understood Say's law was false and this lead him to believe it was therefore the governments job to make it real in practice. Keynes was very muddleheaded [his writing are even harder in some ways to understand to me than Marx who is very esoteric] since he didn't want to totally drop the baggage of contemporary academic understandings when they just weighed down any insights he had.

>The most important confusion concerning the meaning and significance of the marginal efficiency of capital has ensued on the failure to see that it depends on the prospective yield of capital, and not merely on its current yield. This can be best illustrated by pointing out the effect on the marginal efficiency of capital of an expectation of changes in the prospective cost of production, whether these changes are expected to come from changes in labour cost, i.e. in the wage-unit, or from inventions and new technique. The output from equipment produced to-day will have to compete, in the course of its life, with the output from equipment produced subsequently, perhaps at a lower labour cost, perhaps by an improved technique, which is content with a lower price for its output and will be increased in quantity until the price of its output has fallen to the lower figure with which it is content. Moreover, the entrepreneur's profit (in terms of money) from equipment, old or new, will be reduced, if all output comes to be produced more cheaply. In so far as such developments are foreseen as probable, or even as possible, the marginal efficiency of capital produced to-day is appropriately diminished.
- Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

>The contradiction, to put it in a very general way, consists in that the capitalist mode of production involves a tendency towards the absolute development of the productive forces, regardless of the value and surplus-value it contains, and regardless of the social conditions under which capitalist production takes place; while, on the other hand, its aim is to preserve the value of the existing capital and promote its self- expansion to the highest limit... The specific feature about it is that it uses the existing value of capital as a means of increasing this value to the utmost. The methods by which it accomplishes this include the fall of the rate of profit, depreciation of existing capital [devaluation], and development of the productive forces of labour at the expense of the already created productive forces.
- Marx, Capital Volume 3

[Anonymous No.11441058]

>>11440874
I am just starting to read about Georgism, it seems interesting, kind of blew my mind his book Progress and Poverty was the bestselling American book ever when it was released

[Anonymous No.11441067]

>>11441058
yo i just heard about henry george's economic writings recently too! did u listen to/read that newly released volume 5 of the oxford history of the united states covering the gilded age? i think it was in there, anyways henry george fiction is p shit, but now im curious about his non-fics

[Anonymous No.11441171]

>>11440874
>>11440851
I know you probably don't give a shit but this constant need to berate the guy gives me the signal that somebody is likely to have not read Marx because for one, I don't think his analysis of capitalism was that contentious, and secondly it has become all too common that people on the internet or even in more professional capacities will completely misrepresent Marx in a way that makes clear they did not read him, but feel the conditioned need to indicate that they know for a fact he is a morally odious character that was actually quite stupid.

I'm not a scholar on Keynes, though I read the General Theory and have a memory of the large strokes of his ideas, like Marx, and I don't know what you mean by him thinking the time-unit was flawed. I searched the GT because I remembered him talking about labor units, and in chapter 4 here he references the labor unit right after discussing how the only way the price level can be made intelligible is if we discuss the amount of labor employed in production. What he says here is a different framing than Marx, but not so much different that I'd consider it justifiable to say "Keynes can be pretty good sometimes, but Marx is a total idiot". They both reconcile specialized labor in terms of unskilled labor units, and the implication of Keynes here is that the equality of labor employed (along with the wage-unit per whatever labor is employed) is what makes production across industries and cycles intelligible. This passage doesn't go into competitive pressures or anything like that, but speaking of labor employed against capital in such a way seems not far from simply saying that the magnitudes of different kinds of production are dependent on how much labor can profitable be employed per unit of capital such that there is growth and reinvestment. That suggests that the lower bound to all of capitalism is the unskilled unit of labor generating more surplus value, more capital.

[Anonymous No.11441209]

>>11441021
>he understood Say's law was false and this lead him to believe it was therefore the governments job to make it real in practice.

Is this wrong though? My contention with Marx is still that I'm not convinced why the falling rate of profit is some kind of necessity. If I understand him right (which is always hotly debated obviously and many Marxists are at each other's throats trying to interpret Marx), the falling rate of profit requires the assumption of constant reinvestment into capital. If capital investment slows, then I don't see why the relative magnitudes of capital to labor can't remain roughly fixed or in line with growth, and therefore have the profit rate simply stagnate. Though I would say that capital usually searches for yield wherever it can, and we've seen equity prices balloon because of a search for yield which created precisely the scenario Marx discussed (yields fell as dividend growth didn't keep up with rising asset prices).

But Keynes method seems like a rational solution to stagnation in aggregate demand. Reboot the system with the only entity that can conjure money out of thin air, and have itself as the mass employer slowly replaced by rejuvenated business.

[Anonymous No.11441220]

>>11441058
I don't know why it should "blow your mind"... George doesn't say anything the classical economists didn't before him... Mill especially used similar rhetoric throughout his work:

>The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth, is at all times tending to augment the incomes of landlords; to give them both a greater amount and a greater proportion of the wealth of the community, independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing. What claim have they, on the general principle of social justice, to this accession of riches? In what would they have been wronged if society had, from the beginning, reserved the right of taxing the spontaneous increase of rent, to the highest amount required by financial exigencies?
- John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy

It was very straightforward to understand that the use-value of land was largely the result of the infrastructure/populations not landlords who just captured an inflated "unearned" income generated by the actions of others... Adam Smith already talked about taxing unearned income to fund social services. The point is marginal utility theory can ignore the history of rentier compound interest demands tending to approach infinity.

George is very 19th century thinker, land shenanigans were well understood to Americans living in a frontier context to a degree it isn't today. Today I think it's more obvious intangible assets are the primary source of unearned income and the control of knowledge (copyrights) is holding back experimentation, the institutionalized structures that once worked are just giving visible diminishing returns now... if people were just paid well all this wouldn't be necessary.

[Anonymous No.11441275]

>>11441220
we need LVT but also for IP, closed borders, mercantalism, and an end to usury.

thank me later.

[Anonymous No.11441371]

>>11441209
Say's law isn't the source of the falling rate of profit, it should just be a source of embarrassment e.g. Smith and Ricardo believed in Say's law [before it had a name] AND a falling rate of profit. The issue with capitalism isn't just an aggregate demand issue according to Marx [it was essiently for Keynes], the thing is you get a greater proportion/mass of fixed capital which results in a greater proportion/mass of depreciation expenses... wear-and-tear, physical depreciation costs are combined with obsolescence write-offs against gross profits. Capitalist development it seems should reach a point where the "growth" capitalists claim to crave will destroy more old value than create new value and this should result in a decrease in net profitability... the thing is Marx wrote before the corporate form of enterprise became dominate in the Gilded Age so he's essiently theorizing in terms of a competitive liberal economy and how things may play out [the corporate form was NECESSARY to socialize the economy in a sense]... the thing is we see today capitalists/landlords/etc, to maintain the yield-value of their assets, will drop any liberal pretence and resort to political measures to curtail further investment/productivity increases... or an outright state bail-out as the last resort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmi8cJG0BJo

[Anonymous No.11441376]

>>11441371
This is the earliest reference I can find in his works:
>Presupposing the same surplus value, the same surplus labour in proportion to necessary labour, then, the rate of profit depends on the relation between the part of capital exchanged for living labour and the part existing in the form of raw material and means of production. Hence, the smaller the portion exchanged for living labour becomes, the smaller becomes the rate of profit. Thus, in the same proportion as capital takes up a larger place as capital in the production process relative to immediate labour, i.e. the more the relative surplus value grows – the value-creating power of capital – the more does the rate of profit fall. We have seen that the magnitude of the capital already presupposed, presupposed to reproduction, is specifically expressed in the growth of fixed capital, as the produced productive force, objectified labour endowed with apparent life. The total value of the producing capital will express itself in each of its portions as a diminished proportion of the capital exchanged for living labour relative to the part of capital existing as constant value. Take e.g. manufacturing industry. In the same proportion as fixed capital grows here, machinery etc., the part of capital existing in raw materials must grow, while the part exchanged for living labour decreases. Hence, the rate of profit falls relative to the total value of the capital presupposed to production – and of the part of capital acting as capital in production. The wider the existence already achieved by capital, the narrower the relation of newly created value to presupposed value (reproduced value).
- Grundrisse

[Anonymous No.11441393]

>>11441371
Oh sorry, I was just digressing on some rant before about Marx because I've been caping for him in this topic, so I randomly felt like I should qualify that I'm not an ardent Marxist since I'm unsure of the TFRP. Say's law was basically a way to suggest the market always cleared and so there could never be a crisis, right?

[Anonymous No.11441409]

>>11441393
>Say's law was basically a way to suggest the market always cleared and so there could never be a crisis, right?
Yes, supply creates demand e.g. Smith didn't believe cyclical crises would emerge or really have any idea of technological development [he didn't see/understand the industrial revolution which was just emerging]... but still thougth capitalism would result in a diminishing profit rate naively just as a result of competition [though it would be FAR in the future] and governments discouraging monopolization.

[Anonymous No.11441791]

>>11437390
I like cooking but I still buy take-out, sometimes. The ingredients put together would be priced lower than the take-out, but the difference isn't related to the time I would spend transforming the ingredients into the meal - after all, I like cooking, I do it for free for friends and guests. How does that work?

[Anonymous No.11441942]

>>11441791
It's a misrepresentation of the LTV. If anybody ever mentions really marginal things that don't involve capital investment or employment for production to sell things on a market, then it's probably outside of the scope of the general principles underlying Marxist analysis of capitalism.

But just to clarify in relation to that post, it isn't that you are unwilling to pay for something beyond what it would cost to do it yourself. In the simplest way I can think to put it, it is just that labor is your basic cost to produce anything, and so the prices of commodities have a gravity that oscillates around the magnitudes of labor required to produce certain commodities. This is why a house will always tend to cost more than a cat carrier, or a TV more than a book. Marginal instances of something costing a lot more because it has some special significance (a signed one of a kind book, for instance) has no bearing on the general market for books or the factors of production that go into that market, which is why it is generally irrelevant to Marx. It is the exception to the rule, and is of little use for describing how the market in general allocates labor and resources. Free labor for friends and family is the same. This is basically non-commodified labor. Though as anon pointed out above, rents and global monopolies on things like energy have an effect on capitalism as we know it, but it wouldn't simply break Marx's brain. He did discuss monopolies and rent-seeking, but it is all basically just siphoning off value from the system. If the whole economy was made of such rentiers who extracted value to too great a degree, it would break down and there'd be inflation as production of good became scarce but money circulated in similar amounts.

[Anonymous No.11442386]

>>11441791
apples and oranges. dining in and eating out are not perfect substitutes, unless all you want are "X calories Y minutes from now," in which case you would be perfectly indifferent and choose whichever is cheaper.

grow a brain

[Anonymous No.11442480]

>>11431042
As someone who has just graduated with a degree in Economics. This is all you pretty much need to know

[Anonymous No.11443335]

>>11436678
Have you ever peered into economics? It's a game of ideological warfare and pseudoscience. With that said, plenty of contemporary microeconomics is fairly scientific, but it runs on the basis of the above.

[Anonymous No.11443652]

>>11437664

Thanks for this.

[Anonymous No.11443713]

>>11437171
Housing prices were included. Critics just overblow the prices of housing taking other statistics.

[Anonymous No.11443746]

[Anonymous No.11443844]

>>11437695
>To me it is always funny how a mere mention of Marx causes massive assflame.

Maybe because of the incalculable death and suffering his followers have caused.

[Anonymous No.11444029]

>>11429427
Piketty gets ass blasted by other economists on a daily basis. His thesis is empirically wrong

[Anonymous No.11444045]

>>11438532
What is marginal revolution?

[Anonymous No.11444167]

>>11441171
There is a section specifically in The General Theory where he criticizes Marx.

Your post amounts to basically nothing. Which is essentially Keynes’ explanation of the wage unit, that’s my biggest problem with Keynes. I SORT OF know what he’s getting at with the wage unit but, he’s wrong. He’s so wrong it’s not even funny, the wage unit is a pile of bullshit, employers and syndicates vary with such intensity that the wage can be so drastically different in different companies within a sector, that you cannot apply weights or a uniform correlation to wage growth at all. This is how Keynes gets around everything by making it seem like wages move around discontinuously as you increase output and employment. He’s right, they move discontinuously, but that’s the only thing he’s right about. It is because of psychological/sociological reasons that they move discontinuously, aka negotiations. To apply this in principle to a graph or equation is ridiculous, but it’s what Keynes is trying to do.

This same criticism can be applied to Marx as well, for all his simplifications of time units, and trying to base wages around that. I think a whole book or system of equations at least, could be built around recognizing how wages in particular industries move together, but at different rates depending on what it is.

Specifically, it’s all institution based, Mises is right because of that, and Keynes is right too sometimes, but Marx is wrong

[Anonymous No.11444172]

>>11437543
Calculus, basic stuff.

[Anonymous No.11444281]

>>11444045
autism. 'utility' doesn't produce anything and can't be the ultimate source of value.

[Anonymous No.11445028]

>>11443746

[Anonymous No.11445174]

>>11444281
you're right, the ultimate source of value is human action

[Anonymous No.11445179]

>>11443844
massive assflame

[Anonymous No.11445195]

>>11445179

Yeah, getting your country torn to pieces does tend to make you salty.

[Anonymous No.11445198]

>>11438062
I think you're mixing Marxian economics up. How can a price be "equal" to a use value. One is quantitative and the other qualitative. Use values cannot be "equal" to anything but themselves.

[Anonymous No.11445210]

>>11438323
What you're describing is macroeconomics. The LTV is not supposed to be of any use for your personal finances

[Anonymous No.11445411]

>>11445198
>How can a price be "equal" to a use value
at the point of indifference