• CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Watch out people we got an econ 101 grad amongst us, if we’re not careful he’ll pull out his Mas Colell textbook and start babbling about maximizing utility curves and general equilibrium

    • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Bro I’m completing a dissertation in political economy and I hate myself for it. The world is an easy place if you assume the gospel drivel spewed in orthodox econ departments is all there is. How about you go read up on the Cambridge Capital debate and then tell me how robust a “science” economics is. While you’re at it eat a crayon, maybe you’ll shit out a more intelligent comment next time.

        • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          I’m not talking about the inherent limitations of social science, I’m responding to your absurd attitude that somehow formal education makes your ideas inherently superior/above critique, and I named a specific example of theoretical failure of orthodox economics as an example of the entire project being basically woo. Lots of aristotelean scholastics wrote the dumbest shit imaginable about physics for a thousand years, and their thought was funded, reproduced, and taught as authoritative by formal education the entire time; progress was only made when criticism came from outside the academy and overcame it. Much like then, our contemporary “Political Science” and “Economics” departments are nearly completely captured by a dead-end ideology/research project, but still have the support of the ruling class so they keep cranking along misinforming more and more students every year. You claiming advanced understanding of the matter is the equivalent of an Aristotelean physicist or Lamarkian biologist sticking their nose up and saying learning outside of the academy is somehow less than their own. That’s worse than just being wrong, it’s wrong and using elitism to refuse to recognize it. The Black Panthers went into the poorest and least educated communities in America, and they taught people Marxist theory while they taught them to read. What do you think well to do Nixon Republicans had to say about their education? That’s where you stand right now looking down on folks engaging in education outside of the academy itself.

          Also, lots of Marxists are tired of dumb liberals reciting the same garbage authoritatively while never questioning basic undercurrents of their own ideological world view. So sorry they have reached a conclusion and don’t want to rehash baby’s first socialism with every shmuck who thinks their poli-sci degree makes them an expert.

            • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              You’re still not getting it lol. Neoclassical economics is theoretically standing out way over a cliff and simply refusing to look down like Wiley coyote. Your appeal to mathematics is unintentionally hilarious, because it was physics envy and the chasing of mathematical models over real life evidence/coherent theory that led the field astray to begin with lmao. You can come up with all kinds of fancy models and as much mathematics as you like, but none of it matters if you’re basing it on incorrect axioms.

              “Functioning in the real world” - oh yeah for sure. Burning the environment down and cooking the biosphere while forever chemicals and microplastics permanently saturate the ecosystem. Liberal societies are “Functioning” in so far as they’re not actively failed states this very moment, but that is accomplished on the back of neo-imperialism, unequal exchange with the global south, and unresolvable contradictions inherent to neo-liberalism/capitalism. A car driving 80 mph towards a cliff is working, sure, but is that a desirable state of affairs?

              Also take a quick look around my guy. We’re not in a laboratory. I’m calling you an idiot on the internet. Not every conversation is the platonic ideal of scientific pursuit you nerd.

                • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Hear that @Civility@hexbear.net? I’ve been a bad boy! Come frown at me for hurting the widdle wiberals feelings. He was just using elitism to disparage his interlocutors and maintain a worldview that harms people every day! Why did I have to go and be so uncivil! Whoa is me.

                  Classic liberal. When confronted with arguments you don’t understand or have a retort to, you pearl clutch and complain about tone.

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Idk, if it was so plainly “false” and “uneducated” then it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to provide a refutation of, especially since these are criticisms that even several liberal economists have been making for decades, e.g. “assume a can-opener” discourse.

                  And he is talking about axioms, so you don’t even need to worry about correctly notating your fancylad mathematics.

                  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    Nah, Libs are like this everywhere. The self righteousness, the aggressive ignorance, the near absolutely inability to recognize their own limitations, the incuriousness. I think it’s mostly a consequence of living in a hegemonic cultural and media environment where they never encounter any meaningful challenges to their world view. Liberalism is all they know, and the only thing outside of it that they even casually encounter is fascism through the lens of Lib media venues, so they’re just completely unprepared to critique their own beliefs or situation.

                  • MemesAreTheory [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    He’s pretty clearly misunderstood entirely or at least the point of 80% of what I said alone. This man is a weenie and the absolute epitome of someone who took Econ 101 and now thinks they know the secrets of the universe. It’s incredible how much air economics departments blow up their students ass. That just can’t be safe for the human body.

                    I STILL WANT MY MAN’S THOUGHTS ON THE CAMBRIDGE CAPITAL DEBATE.

                    "It is important, for the record, to recognize that key participants in the debate openly admitted their mistakes. Samuelson’s seventh edition of Economics was purged of errors. Levhari and Samuelson published a paper which began, ‘We wish to make it clear for the record that the nonreswitching theorem associated with us is definitely false. We are grateful to Dr. Pasinetti…’ (Levhari and Samuelson 1966). Leland Yeager and I jointly published a note acknowledging his earlier error and attempting to resolve the conflict between our theoretical perspectives. (Burmeister and Yeager, 1978).

                    However, the damage had been done, and Cambridge, UK, ‘declared victory’: Levhari was wrong, Samuelson was wrong, Solow was wrong, MIT was wrong and therefore neoclassical economics was wrong. As a result there are some groups of economists who have abandoned neoclassical economics for their own refinements of classical economics. In the United States, on the other hand, mainstream economics goes on as if the controversy had never occurred. Macroeconomics textbooks discuss ‘capital’ as if it were a well-defined concept — which it is not, except in a very special one-capital-good world (or under other unrealistically restrictive conditions). The problems of heterogeneous capital goods have also been ignored in the ‘rational expectations revolution’ and in virtually all econometric work."

                    (Burmeister 2000)

                    Awh gee, I wonder where our Poli-sci wonderboy got his degree curious-marx

            • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I’m a biologist, but my college offered a few humanities courses, so I took an introductory course in economics.

              The maths was fine; it was mostly linear equations and differentiation. But the priors seemed to defy all logic and common sense. It was like a physicist assuming that there was no friction. The impression I got was that economists put too much effort into mathematical rigour and too little into empirical verification.

              Now there are biologists who study animal societies and their ‘economic systems’. But they care more for experiments than for theory, and this seems to me to be the more reasonable approach.

    • ZzyzxRoad@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Or some of us might have multiple sociology degrees and/or are in academia. But I’m sure if they wrote comments about Marx (or Weber or Gramsci or Veblen etc) you’d just assume they got it from wikipedia anyway. Though I’m not sure why that’s a bad thing. It’s not like it makes a difference whether someone read primary texts online or overpaid at the college bookstore. It’s the same information. The fact that anyone has a desire to learn, better themselves, and then try to use that knowledge is admirable and a service to society at large. More people should try it.

    • anachronist@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Marxists are hardly alone in arguing from a conclusion. That pretty much describes all of economics and most of political science. Liberal economics in particular could easily be retitled Just So Stories, With Jargon.

    • Zoboomafoo@yiffit.net
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      1 year ago

      The number of times where it becomes clear that a Marxist is arguing from a conclusion is too high to be ignored.

      That’s just how Marxism is, he claimed that our course of economic history is the only way it could have gone with a single data point then concluded that the current system (in 1850) would imminently collapse.

      I don’t know why anyone lends credence to his theories