• frezik@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months 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. Though we might be close enough to cover the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

    Economics as a practical discipline tends to assume capitalism. Economics can still be valid without assuming capitalism. There are tons of non-capitalist modes of distributing limited goods.

    • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      4 months 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. But pretending like this is not just another brand of harm reduction capitalism is rhetorically counterproductive.

      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.

      • StopJoiningWars@discuss.online
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        4 months ago

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

        • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          4 months 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.