No.5387
Existing systems are already based on idealized models. Even the ideas for modifying them are based on idealized beliefs about how society should function that is disconnected from everday life.
No.5388
I think we have relegated all of our economic decisions to """experts""", who are trained under one or another doctrine that lacks (to varying degrees) actual scientific rigour, when we should all be taking the matter into our hands, instead of expecting one of those financial priests to figure things out for us.
No.5389
>>5387>>5388Are they though? Planned economies always fail, either overtly sliding back into open economies or covertly being replaced by a black market.
No.5390
>>5389They do but many elements of market economies also seem contrived or engineered from above with disasterous effects.
>>5388How can you get scientific rigor with a social science? Unlike a natural science, the object of economics isn't well defined. What the hell is economics anyway? Even sociologists don't have this problem. Unlike physics or biology, the object of a social science is changing and mutating all the time. A microorganism will tend to do the same thing under the same conditions, but humans are often not like this and any hard rule you try and nail down falls apart because they suddenly start doing other things.
>when we should all be taking the matter into our hands, instead of expecting one of those financial priests to figure things out for us.I like this but there's a possibility that those financial priests have muddied the water so badly its hard to make sense of anything without being deceptively influenced by one or another of their unsubstantiated ideas.
No.5391
I think the most interesting part of OP's post was noting the relationship between the logic of economics and incel ideology. When applying economizing logic to other human relationships, in this case romance, the degree to which it is instrumentalizing and dehumanizing suddenly becomes apparent. Why is that?
I would suggest it has something to do with reducing qualitative experience to quantitative data. When it comes to love, this is an experience that is almost impossible to quantify. The fact that it's impossible to quantify is the basis for the common trope of the "no I love you more" game. It's almost a joke. One can talk about the qualities of love, parental love versus romantic love, different forms of romantic love etc; but once one starts to talk about quantities of love, suddenly things get strange. It fundamentally contradicts the nature of love, you can't count "loves". Once you start measuring and quantifying romance, like the incel redpillers try to do, not only are you missing the point in a very particular way, you're also dehumanizing the people involved. A qualitative approach to love is poetry, a quantitative approach to love is incelism.
Production, distribution, and consumption are similarly fundamental aspects of being alive to romance. Perhaps the fundamental problem with the logic of economics is that it denies the qualitative in favor of the purely quantitative, and in doing so denies anything human in the economy. OP criticized marxian economists, and I agree, however Marx himself actually talked about this exact issue, most clearly in his critique on the "value-form". This is the reason why the subtitle of Capital is "a critique of political economy" (political economy was an old name for what we would now call economics). So called "economizing marxists" really are missing the entire point, although I'd also wonder if Marx himself wasn't really aware of what he'd stumbled across.
If this sounds interesting to you, I'd recommend reading "99 theses on the revaluation of value" by Brian Massumi. It's mostly a great book that goes in depth about how our notions of qualitative value fail us, and what to replace it with. However, towards the end it takes a strange left turn into advocating for cryptocurrencies which I strongly disagree with. I'd say his analysis of the problem is good, but his solution is pretty bad.
Secondly, I'd recommend "The Accursed Share" by Georges Bataille. He completely flips economics on it's head, from a study of scarcity to a study of excess. For me personally, this book changed my life, and I can't recommend it strongly enough.
Third, maybe take a look at "Seeing Like a State" by James C Scott. It looks at why these formalized quantifying methodologies exist, and why they tend to fail. It's a pretty dry book but it's also really fascinating.
Finally, I'm going to tentatively recommend ""Communisation and Value-Form Theory" by Endnotes. I'm going to warn you up front, this takes a very marxist lens, so if that's off-putting to you I understand. However, I think it's a good starting point to look at some of the undercurrents in Marx regarding his critique of this quantifying logic present in economics, and it's strictly opposed to the leninist party-state model. It's also pretty short although quite dense.
No.5392
>>5391>When it comes to love, this is an experience that is almost impossible to quantify.I have to disagree on this. Is your love for a stranger equal to your love for a neighbor, your love for a friend, your love for family, your love for a partner?
Love can most easily be quantified by the amount of sacrifice you would be willing to make to protect someone. For example, suppose you saw someone dying on the side of the street, depending on how much you love that person your actions could fall somewhere on the below scale:
-Walk past and ignore them as they're dying
-Call for emergency services
-As above, but also stay with them and offer comfort
-As above, but also offer to care for them while they are recovering
-As above, but also sell everything you own to clear their gambling debts with the mafia
-As above, but also volunteer one of your kidneys for a transplant they need
-Stand in front of them to prevent an assailant with a knife from finishing them off, knowing that you will almost certainly die
No.5393
>>5389This "either-or" attitude is part of the cold-war narrative that is rapidly eroding, if not altogether obsolete by now.
>>5390Right, economy cannot be a ""scientific"" discipline, at least not in the galilean sense. This is precisely the aim of my critique, that they dress it up as such, by the use of mathematical manipulations that make it appear so.
>I like this but there's a possibility that those financial priests have muddied the water so badly its hard to make sense of anything without being deceptively influenced by one or another of their unsubstantiated ideas.It may seem so, but they are only really in charge of the financial system, which is ever more removed from actual material transactions and increasingly a manipulation of debt. The cheap fossil fuel energy that's allowed for the growth of such a financial system isn't keeping up with the demands of the number-inflating machine that is modern finance.
No.5394
>>5391>I would suggest it has something to do with reducing qualitative experience to quantitative data.Yeah. Another side to this is the way large bureaucracies process humans by putting them in labelled boxes that determine their role within a system by observing their outward behavior. Knowing any person is simply knowing what labels apply to them, not actually caring much about who they are as a unique person but as a representative of a label that defines their purpose, what kind of cog they are and where they fit.
>A qualitative approach to love is poetry, a quantitative approach to love is incelismModern approaches to love a really twisted. Incels aren't the only ones, just the most extreme example. Take a look at common dating advice books and they are all about strategy, knowing your place within a system, how to manipulate others on the dating market. Therapists, sexologists, and experts split people into separate sexual orientations, determine our correct place within the dating market, and apply an pseudo-economic utilitarian philosophy where self-interest and maximizing profit are good. Incels are just depressed social outcasts who read this stuff and it poisoned them.
>I'd also wonder if Marx himself wasn't really aware of what he'd stumbled across.This problem was probably less noticeable in Marx's day before this bourgeois rationality colonized many areas of our lives.
>>5392Distinguishing between types of love isn't the same as reducing love to a bunch of numbers.
>>5393Everywhere people are assaulted by experts trained in economics whose basic concepts have filtered down to the point most ordinary people have been overwhelmed by them. We talk about dating markets, incentives, the virtue of self-interest, and apply these ideas from everything from sex to raising children. They might officially control only the financial system, but they also shape 'truth' to the point we just take many of their unjustified dogmas as common sense.
No.5395
I'm not even educated in economics but what a stupid thread lol. If I was actually curious if economics was "a bunch of lies" I'd look into it somewhere else than an imageboard so isn't it more likely you're just looking for confirmation of something you've already decided?
>It has been said the economists definition of rational behavior as behavior consistent with their own models, with all other behavior dubbed irrational, amounts to a huge project to reshape humanity into people who behave the way economists say they should behaveWho is saying this? Alex Jones? A single google search doesn't seem to show that being the definition at all
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-behavior.asp No.5396
>>5395>For example, while it is likely more financially beneficial for an executive to stay on at a company rather than retire early, it is still considered rational behavior for her to seek an early retirement if she feels the benefits of retired life outweigh the utility from the paycheck she receives. The optimal benefit for an individual may involve non-monetary returns.this literally answers the part of OPs rant about piracy being some kind of unexplainable paradox too lmao
No.5397
>>5394> they also shape 'truth' to the point we just take many of their unjustified dogmas as common sense.it's precisely through narratives that they manage to manage the world economy through exponentially increasing debt, indeed the chance of masses of shedding such ideas as money and 'rational self interest' is pretty much zero.
priests were a mitake.
No.5398
>>5394>Distinguishing between types of love isn't the same as reducing love to a bunch of numbers.ok but love can be reduced to numbers. Love is directly related to the time/resources you are willing to sacrifice for someone. Obviously not the same quantities for different people – for a wealthy person the resources are often inconsequential; likewise for a NEET the time is often inconsequential. But if you look at the sacrifices a person is willing to make for various other people you can quantify that person's relative love for the other people.
No.5399
>>5385>Similarly, Trobriand islanders used to travel great distances to trade seemingly useless and valueless objects Why? It defies the models of the economists. Why do people share stuff for free over the internet? There are a thousand things they can't explain.That's not a great point, it only really applies to neoclassical economics
>>5391 >Marx himself actually talked about this exact issue, most clearly in his critique on the "value-form". This is the reason why the subtitle of Capital is "a critique of political economy" (political economy was an old name for what we would now call economics). So called "economizing marxists" really are missing the entire point, although I'd also wonder if Marx himself wasn't really aware of what he'd stumbled across. I don't know, he seemed fairly aware of the implications of his critique, even if he didn't know the exact frontiers to which commodity production and its cultural reflection would expand to.
>All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaneI think a lot about how his critique of capitalism revolves around alienation. He paints an intricate web of alienated labour and economic decisionmaking necessary for an economic system that centers around permanently expanding commodity production. The phenomenon of incels and their view of evolutionary psychology is an ugly little cultural reflection of capitalism on relationships between human beings. It's a way to assess the exchange value of a human being on the dating market.
No.5400
I have practically zero knowledge of economics beyond a handful of books and personal distaste for the economists I've interacted with. But it seems there are a handful of things that annoy me about them and I can't help wanting to slap them. I really hate how pop economics has infiltrated other areas of life. Its extremely annoying.
>>5395While yes maybe "a bunch of lies" is excessive, I don't think its wrong to say that self-fulfilling prophecy exists and many economists claim to be neutral scientists when they very definite prescriptive views on how humans ought to behave and how society ought to look. Defining behavior that is of optimal utility to the individual as rational behavior, all other behavior presumably being non-rational, makes too many uncomfortable assumptions. It assumes that people think primarily in individualistic and utilitarian terms. Saying that people seek benefits or what they perceive to be good is pretty evident, but how this is understood varies a great deal. Ultimately, what appears to be a rational choice is shaped heavily by context. You can't calculate an abstract grammar of how each individual would logically behave under an abstract set of circumstances shorn of actual context and apply it to every living human, yet many economists, psychologists and political scientists think they can in fact do this.
>>5398Quantifying it would be turning it into an easily measurable bunch of stats and nobody has been able to do that yet. Probably one of the reason many neuroscience types think love doesn't exist. Measuring love by time and affection is measuring it by a personal experience not quantifying it into a bunch of stats.
No.5401
>>5400time and resources, not time and affection. This is quantifiable, e.g. if you love Person A up to 2 hr/day and $1,000/yr, but you love Person B up to 16 hr/day and $100,000/yr, Person B is the one that you love more.
No.5402
>>5401You probably love your landlord most of all.
No.5403
>>5402Indeed, I started a second job so I can tip her 20% on my rent payments.
No.5404
>>5392I think I wasn't clear enough on what I meant by quantification. While yes, I could distinguish the love I have for my partner from the love I have towards a stranger on the street, it wouldn't make sense to start plugging distinct "loves" into mathematical formulae and expecting to get any useful output.
>>5399>he seemed fairly aware of the implications of his critique, even if he didn't know the exact frontiers to which commodity production and its cultural reflection would expand to.This is true, I didn't want to derail the thread with marxology but it's more likely he and Engles intentionally de-emphasized this aspect of his critique in favor of a more digestible Ricardian model in order to appeal to the existing worker's movement as a strategic decision. It's also likely that Engles never quite wrapped his head around it.
>>5401This is a great example of my point: the way in which our social relations are mediated by commodities, how the things which we produce end up producing us (the commodity form produces a particular economizing subjectivity).
No.5405
>>5404Love can be plugged into a mathematical formula.
No.5406
>>5405>Love can be plugged into a mathematical formula.it's one of those weird self feeding ones where the result is chaotic
No.5407
Where do I get started with Marx?
No.5408
i always think that in order to be a good leader you should be another one of the group who understands the people, the culture and the world they have
No.5409
>>5385just curious
can you give at least two real life examples of exactly this happening in the same order of causes?
No.5410
>>5407i suggest starting with "Wage Labour and Capital" by Karl Marx, it's one of the shorter text made by Marx, concerning his economic theory.
if you like his ideas and want to read more, here's a list of what i have read so far: "Value, Price, and Profit" by Karl Marx, "Principles of Communism" by Friedrich Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" by Friedrich Engels, "Critique of the Gotha Program" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and "The German Ideology" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. most of these are under 100 pages and can be found for free on marxists.org (
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm)
i'm thinking of reading more of Marx's work (like an abridged version of Das Kapital volume 1,2, and 3 i found on the net, and one of his more earlier works concerning alienation within the work place) but i'm currently reading about other socialist organisational structures.
other socialist theories have their own understandings of Marx, so it's best to start with the man himself and then start reading about other Socialist theories.
No.5411
>>5410I don't like the tradition of pairing Marx's work with Engels. Its had a corrupting effect.
No.5412
Yes, economics is pseudoscience at best malicious propaganda for elites at worst. Externalities is one of the biggest jokes of it along with the lie that GDP going up is inherently a good thing.
>>5407Marx never actually detailed what communism, socialism would be in detail he only criticized capitalism and the economics and made predictions of it's end based off of historical analysis. So you may be disappointed depending what you want to understand. If you start with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Peter Kropotkin, and Mikhail Bakunin for example you would get more I would imagine since Marx's views did not emerge from a vacuum and he often referenced other people. Also knowing Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative is needed. Hegel would be too difficult to approach for a beginner so forget it lol
If you want economics you'd be better off with someone more current like Paul Cockshott (setting aside his other views) or if you want someone more easy to digest and current then Richard D Wolff who is an economist. If you want something more futurist than political look into Jacque Fresco.
No.5414
Why was this moved to /hell/ ??? Apparently serious topics are not allowed. Sushis have to be treated with kid gloves?
No.5415
>>5414the OP post is silly and the whole thread is politics adjacent with everyone going on about planned economies and landlords and marx. imo I'd prefer this kind of contentious discussion stay in the myriad places that are made for it.
>Stay comfy~! Uncomfy topics should be obvious, but include religion, politics, misogyny, racism, gay-bashing, ranting, insulting people's hobbies, intentional flamebaiting etc. and will be locked and moved to /superhell/ most likely. No.5416
>>5415Discussion of economics is political? What? Its no more political than demography or statistics and you are complaining about a silly OP on a fricken imageboard. There's nothing contentious about discussing legitimate social sciences just because some people associate one or two of its main contributors (Marx in this case) with contentious political stuff.
No.5417
>>5410While abridged versions can be okay, they'll often contain less depth and therefore fall flat of providing a comprehensive understanding, so it's better just head to the source material. A new translation of Capital vol. 1 came out recently and ime it's easier to read than the previous one. As long as you get through the first couple of chapters, (get a guide, as it's easy to miss the point at times) you're pretty much golden, because that's where Marx establishes the "basic units" of his analysis and things get less abstract as he moves away from them. You're in for an intellectually stimulating read if you go through with it.
>>5412You don't really have to read any of these to understand the points that Marx is making. You'd be better off reading Marx and some of the more modern theorists mentioned here if you're solely interested in economics rather than philosophy, and coming back to Marx's predecessors and contemporaries after you feel confident enough to tackle such a workload.
>>5416I'd say it's inherently pretty political
No.5418
>>5416Yes? Economics directly influence politics and vice versa. One should not judge others work based on the rest of their work. Yet ignoring it altogether is a foolish endeavor.
src:
https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/10546/312056/4/ml-how-politics-and-economics-intersect-270114-en.pdf https://news.virginia.edu/content/qa-do-politics-and-economics-go-hand-handEven if that was not the case, imagine coming to a DnD session with the sole intention of forcing others an opinion on such a heavy topic. That's what you are basically performing.
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To contribute, from my limited research political economy theories of Das Kapital I. are mostly about explaining economic structures with models that utilize raw production time of the humans producing the object (and defines it as Socially necesery labor time). He then goes on to propose scenarios where capitalistic principles and the free market decrease SNLT by inhumane and unethical practices and exploitation, according to him.
And then some rainbow rolls took it for gospel and tried to optimize the world based on Marx's metrics and principles. And there it went into the obvious clash with human agency and basic human rights and freedoms. Which it (for the most part) failed to address, resulting in even greater extortion of the working class.
If you cannot tell, this is a bait to get you to tell me how horribly I am wrong and educate me.
No.5420
>>5414Yes, economy is a political issue.
I am not opposed to having political arguments so long as they don't become shitfests. I also realize it is commonly used as a vector for injecting mind viruses in these kinds of sites so
we are at a dilemma!
No.5430
There is a 'Zen' way to affluence. If there's not enough stuff, we should limit our wants and live within our means to enjoy a simple but affluent living. But it seems many politicians are obsessed with ideas like productivity and growth and think that we can meet infinite human needs through increasing industrial productivity which necessitates more extensive exploitation of people and nature. This is futile because finite resources can never meet inexhaustible desires. I've only ever read Sahlins and know very little about economics beside him so I CTRL + V'd his shtick here.
>>5410I don't think Engels is a good fit here. You can't really understand Marx without understanding who he was having conversations with intellectually. I guess for political economy, you'd need to read Adam Smith, and for his social theories you should look at Hegel's philosophy of history and his political theory as well as Darwin's Origin of the Species. Marx was a huge Darwin fanboy. Even sent him a signed copy of Capital.
>>5421Since we have a economy thread, can't we have a religious studies and theology thread too? What about an anthropology and archaeology thread? Ethnomusicology?
