Comment on Flowchart for STEM

I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• StopJoiningWars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Of course a hexbear tankie would think that. Sincerely hope you’re joking, but maybe I shouldn’t hope to not get severely disappointed.

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  • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    That’s cool dude, except you worship it like a religion. Did you know your GDP numbers count rents and debts the same as production?

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    • Brosplosion@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Did you know that’s just one possible economic model in the field of economics?

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      • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        What are you talking about Keynesian liberals or something? I do like to read Adam Tooze to see him close in on an interesting point only to veer wildly. Foreign Policy in general has some interesting writers if you want to mine the most advanced liberal cope.

        The model of economics I’m describing is the one which has been most heavily promoted by the west, neoliberalism, it has been used to dissolve the social welfare state which was set up to compete with the socialist bloc since defeating its chief rival and counterbalance in the USSR.

        I am aware of plenty of different non-Marxist models of economics and none of them are great because they treat various sectors of production wrong. China and Vietnam have their shit all figured out that’s why finance capital and food aid can’t decimate their agricultural production and then extort them into unfavorable IMF deals.

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    • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Which is why it’s explained in economic courses beyond your baseless ideas that there are better models to calculate standards of living than GDP. But you’d never know that. Because you know nothing of economics.

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      • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Dude you are not going to get better results by looking at further cherry-picked statistics from first world countries. The standard of living in the first world is collapsing because of finance capital and economics as a science there exists to cope about it.

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    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It’s almost like that’s one way of measuring economic output and not the only way.

      GDP is meant to drive down variance by being a relatively simple thing to measure, and therefore provide a consistent means of tracking long term trends.

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  • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I’m no fan of Hexies but economics - at least as understood by neoliberals - is not real.

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    • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Economics gathers and interprets data like any other STEM field, don’t know what else to tell you. The stuff I learned in my degree is very much real.

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      • jlou@mastodon.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Economics treats metaphors as deep truths while treating simple facts as superficial. An example of this is in presentations of MP theory where the pie metaphor is emphasized while the actual structure of property rights and liabilities is ignored and obfuscated @sciencememes

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• Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Yeah but what if we imagine it’s real and convince everyone to believe it too. Surely nothing will go wrong!

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  • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I’m kind of joking, if you want legit economics check out Mike Hudson and other MMT authors or preferably become a communist. Mainstream economists live to justify rent seeking by the ruling class. They don’t distinguish between production and rents and debts etc

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    • jlou@mastodon.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I would recommend checking out David Ellerman. He shows that workers get 0% the property rights to what they produce positive and negative violating the principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match @sciencememes

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• frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Economics just means studying how we distribute limited goods. It breaks down when goods aren’t limited (or rather, we have more of it than we can reasonably use), but we’re not quite at that level of post-scarcity for most things.

  The fact that Economics as a practical discipline tends to assume capitalism doesn’t mean Economics don’t real. There are tons of non-capitalist modes of distributing limited goods.

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  • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I mean mainstream economics is a farce. MMT at least approaches sanity. Yeah you need Marxism-Leninism but there aren’t many of those economists in Western academia.

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    • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      You’re confusing the study of economics with specific economic ideologies. Clearly you’ve never studied the subject and are very much biased.

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      • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I’ve studied economics as a discipline too much not to acknowledge its institutional biases. The statement “economics isn’t real bro” is a joke, but it’s a joke about how bad the state of the academy is in promoting neoliberal economics.

        If that weren’t true it wouldn’t be powerful enough to turn Argentina into a fourth world nation. Milei is a product of these academic institutions.

        If you actually went to or taught at a university that eludes these biases like the Braudel fans at Binghampton, you wouldn’t be scolding me for making a joke about how stupid most economics degrees render people.

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      • jlou@mastodon.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        The ideology is often implicit in how the model is explained. For example, 2 simple facts that go unmentioned.

        1. Only persons can be responsible for anything. Things, no matter how causally efficacious, can't be responsible for what is done with them
        2. The employer receives 100% of the property rights for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs. The workers qua employees get 0% legal claim on that. This fact is obfuscated using the pie metaphor

        @science_memes

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  • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The assumption of capitalist-like structures is for a good reason. Because there is literally zero practical evidence that scarcity can exist without them in scalable economies. If you require scalability in the presence of scarcity, you will have markets, you will have currency, you will have competition, you will have investment, and so forth. At best these things can be mediated by centrally planned state capitalism.

    The overwhelming consensus of the past century regarding Marxist economic theory is that it is incomplete at best because it takes a very naive view of scarcity. Where Marx requires revolution and then a bunch of hand waving, modern revisionism requires harm reduction and the gradual whittling down of scarcity over time. Historical materialism is certainly a pretty useful economic lens, but Marx really goes off the rails in the prescriptive conclusions he draws from that analytical framework.

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    • jlou@mastodon.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Marx ≠ anti-capitalism

      There are other modern anti-capitalist argument derived from the classical laborists such as Proudhon.

      Markets ≠ capitalism

      In postcapitalism, we can use markets where appropriate. We have practical examples of non-capitalist firms with worker coops and 100% ESOPs.

      There are theoretical mechanisms for collective ownership that can be shown to be efficient like COST.

      There are theoretical non-market democratic public goods funding mechanisms

      @sciencememes

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      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Yes of course there are syndicalist models as well but these things are still fundamentally different approaches to harm reduction. Capitalism is a boogie man bad word for a number of different economic forces which are inevitable in the face of scarcity. Don’t get caught up in linguistic pigeonholes. The point is that we seek to meditate and mitigate these forces, not that we worship some particular dogma which pretends they can be eliminated.

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    • frezik@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Marx is incomplete. That doesn’t mean non-capitalist economics stopped with Marx.

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      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying, but this is what MLs tend to believe.

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  • jlou@mastodon.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Sure, in theory, that is what it should be about. In practice, many economists bias the theories they develop to make sure the conclude in favor of their own ideological biases. Often, metaphors are treated as deep truths while simple facts are treated as superficial and ignored or even obfuscated due to their ideological implications if they were plainly stated @sciencememes

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