Ero

It's precisely these disclaimers that make it so difficult. There are people who are genuinely a danger to themselves and others without them. I have family members and close friends on them, so it is a topic on which I generally have to be careful.

Kilindi Iyi? Brother is probably in the 17th dimension right now.

I think I made that clear.

I don't think you are wrong here, I would rather reframe it as needing to "graduate" to a post-Marxist socialism rather than pre-marxist.

@Elliott Then you are much closer to where I stand. The "bringing a marxist YouTube video to a school project on economic theory" was giving me flashbacks lol.

A nuanced modern take on this topic is Thomas Piketty's Capital, I recommend it. His argument is that concentration of wealth follows when the return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy. He acknowledges it as politically consequential without defaulting to a Marxian "collapse ".

I agree with Jack's critique on this statement, it is epistemically disingenuous to claim marginal value theory has greater "expressivity" than LTV. That just isn't true. There are indeed rigorous predictions you can make with the latter but not the former, as both the document you linked and (Ref 1) in my previous response show. I was trying to add nuance on top of that to why LTV is not my sole explanatory framework. Absolutely. My "social metaphysics" point was aimed at Elliot and the "that's not what he meant" move by Richard Wolff in the YouTube Video, which makes Marxism into a philosophy and not a falsifiable theory, at which point I tune out lol.

Replace "end stage" with "political philosophy". I am not interested in intellectual regurgitation which is what these academics get paid to do. All of this is post-factum rationalizations of what "Marx meant" has the purpose to protect their ideology, distancing it away from any concrete economic theory to value in the abstract. That's the same thing the Christian's did after Darwin. I can give you explicit quotes from Das Kapital that demonstrate Marx was very much talking about economics, not just political philosophy, but you bringing a YouTube video to the already multiple paper references I have provided dissuades me from doing so. Clearly we care for different things. You have the freedom to be a Marxist, but I found no epistemic value in your responses, so I won't engage further.

I have read Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital and a dozen other books and textbooks, most recently Keynes's Treatise and General Theory books. How you see or what it means to you does not change the epistemic power of it as a "theory", which is something you can test and see that it as a statistical predictor (Ref 1). You can conduct similar statistical tests for the other variables I mentioned (Ref 2) (Ref 3) with demonstrable contributions, not explainable by labor. I have about 14 more references. What are yours? As I said above, I treat LTV as any other explanatory framework or theory, I never said there isn't value in it. If you choose to LTV/Marxism as your "end stage", that's a perfectly fine choice to make, but we are no longer talking about a 'general theory', rather a 'social metaphysics' which is a different discussion entirely that I am not at all interested in. The thing with economic theories is that you can literally put your money where your mouth is. I and all my quant friends at Jane Street, Jump Trading or Citadel would gladly take any bets you wanna make.

The faults are numerous and fundamentally about "missing variables" to the theory - Fed capital devaluation and inflation accounting, globalization and deindustrialization, intangible capital and IP, financial derivates and instruments, etc. To put it simply, we are long past the point of history where labor, be it useful or abstract, is the sole and primary determinant of monetary value. It's like trying to do a linear fit (first order Taylor expansion) on a multi-dimensional manifold. Being a Marxist in today's day and age is an ideological position, not a scientific one. That is to say nothing of automation, which is another matter entirely.

Sam Altman already (1) backtracking (2).

Yeah. Think of the distinction between the Pure Mathematics vs that of Applied Mathematics. The former is abstract concepts in of themselves, whereas the latter is some segment of the world with its own effective theory. For Pure Math, internal consistency is the minimal requirement for a theory/ framework to even be considered. What one does is to make a full description of the theory/object as a system - what it assumes, what it tracks, what are the dynamical laws, etc. in order to place it into the context (i.e. background) of all other theories/ ideas. For Applied Mathematics, "background knowledge" is implicitly limiting here. The world is always noisy and more complex than you can account for, so in the context of an applied theory (such as economics), after you have set on a model, you need to perform statistical inference and hypothesis testing. That's why "empiricism" is in fact a much more nuanced concept than naive science bros can appreciate.

Thanks, I didn't get that far because I was losing brain cells lol. If one is ignorant from the get go that LTV have prescriptive power, then losing a debate to a moderately well-read individual isn't a particularly high bar. In general, I treat LTV as I do any theory or explanatory framework: through the lens of "meta-epistemic synthesis", i.e. first I conduct a self-contained "for-its-own-sake" examination of assumptions, confounding variables and dynamics and only after do I pass on epistemic filters, such as empiricism. From a contemporary POV, even the author of the paper you linked above acknowledges that "empirical evidence generally supports this prediction of Marx's theory at least up through the Great Depression of the 1930s". This failure is explained, but not exhuasted by, the Federal Reserve Act and the beginning with Roosevelt in 1933 of the U.S gold-standard break, both of which need to be accounted for in any contemporary economic framework.

Depends on your head shape. Also on the sub-demographic you are trying to attract. I am rocking a buzz cut and it really works for me.

@zurew Anything this guy has written up or explicitly references? I agree with his pushback against Destiny for talking out his ass about LTV with only superficial understanding, but his appeal to "scientific theories" without the references are a big red flag for me. Economic debates should start with a bibliography list from both sides. "If you didn't do your homework, you don't get to talk in class."