Also look into Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vo...
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Vo...
The beginning of Capital is quite dense (establishing the basic definitions of a study often is, and Marx's dialectical approach takes some getting used to if, like me, you never could understand Hegel) so I would recommend reading it along with David Harvey's lectures available on Youtube. However, the book does open up from there and becomes very much more concrete: working day lengths in the factory, increasing automation of industry, transition from feudalism by expropriation of land from farmers, ...
It is of course important to understand the works that Marx was critiquing or building on. Smith's Wealth of Nations, for example, is available for free from Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-n...). This translation is very readable so I encourage you to take a look.
- the length and regulation of the working day for factory workers
- the division of labor
- the economic impacts of increasing automation/mechanization
- wages (the factor payments for labor)
These are all topics that I think reasonably fall under the umbrella of economics. Certainly Capital is not a book on positive economics. It is, throughout, quite normative, and expressly interested in the combination of politics and economy.
Reading Capital may not help you understand how modern mainstream economists think, but it will definitely get you thinking about the same kinds of problems that they deal with. For example: how regulations might be used to enforce a 40 hour work week. Of course, capitalism has quite outgrown Marx's mid-19th century conception of it. It's an old book. But I find it difficult to understand how a book critiquing the work of the first economists is not a text about economics.
This is probably as pointless of a statement to argue against as it is to make in the first place. But, Marxian economics is still considered one of the main schools of economic theory today and comprises several other schools within it
> He thought about how greed effects decision making and power corrupts.
This is not really something he wrote about. Maybe you're confusing him with the anarchist Bakunin who believed anyone with any amount of (unequal) power would inevitably become corrupt. But given that he believed you could have a "dictatorship of the proletariat" to usher in revolution, he clearly didn't share this view.
> He was interested in a political revolution because he believed capitalist systems are unable to solve market failures.
I guess in a vague, broad sense this is sorta correct... But he actually believed capitalism was a necessary step towards socialism. So much so that Russian Marxists like Lenin specifically tried to bring Western-style capitalism to Russia. They thought it necessary for the advancement of society
> Economics is generally less interested in the politics of how to implement solutions and more interested in what the optimal solutions are.
Karl Marx was specifically interested in "Scientific Socialism". In his time he was hailed as "having done for economics what Newton did for physics". He developed a pretty in-depth and rigorous theory that provided really useful tools to study and analyze society. And he and his followers believed that his conclusions were a result of this rigorous and scientific approach to social analysis
Mind you, this is not really unlike modern economic theory. We have tons of tools that had never actually been tested. In fact, I'd say that the past 15-ish years of economics are revolutionary precisely because it's the first we're actually being data-driven about things. Things like the Phillips curve are still taught in Econ 101 classes around the country but it has thoroughly been debunked using actual real-world data
You can argue that Marx's theories had issues but they were just as "scientific" as modern economics has been up until very very recently. (That is, not very)
By whom? Can you point to a single aspect of modern mainstream economics that is influenced by Marx?
1. Classical
2. Neoclassical
3. Marxist
4. Developmentalist
5. Austrian
6. Schumpeterian
7. Keynesian
8. Institutionalist
9. Behavioralist
With behavioralism obviously being one of the newest. Anyways if you'd like to read more about contemporary impact of Marxian economics:
https://mronline.org/2020/09/15/contemporary-relevance-of-ma...
I'm sorry, what? Look at the curriculum for any economics degree, look at the winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize. How much political economy do you see there?
> based on ideology
Krugman and Manikw are on the opposite ends of the ideological divide. But the economics textbooks that they each wrote will not contradict the other.
(There will be failures otherwise. Pollution ends up under A, monopolies under B, and a whole host of modern stupidities ends up under C — e.g. just for instance, no one at a minimum wage job is going to afford a lawyer to negotiate their employment contract: transaction costs are too high; the bigcorp employer, by contrast, only has to draw up the contract once. Instant structural unfairness follows.)
Orchestrating both information and incentives like this is really really hard. It's hard enough at a mid-sized project at a mid-sized company, where management spends hours and hours hammering on the idea of "alignment". At the scale of the global economy it's utterly intractable.
Was ancient Rome capitalist?
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm
It's unclear what you think Marx said on "how" to end capitalism and how this relates directly to his theory of money.
Economics is about making decisions when your decisions have trade-offs because you have limited resources. Everything has a price, but the prices aren't always measured in a nice money-based price tag for your convenience, they're ultimately measured by the next-best alternatives. Decisions and policies don't just have consequences, they have second-order effects and third-order effects and you need to chase those down too, because excluding anything makes you understand the costs wrong (e.g. add highway lanes to relieve congestion -> now there is more traffic, because of "induced demand", not sure that was a good idea -> but why was there even induced demand? where are those trips coming from and what was the cost of the previous configuration? is this a housing-policy thing now??). You also learn to worry a lot about how decisions are actually made by self-interested decision-makers, rather than by abstractions-seeking-the-greater-good, and you examine what the decision-makers' incentives are....
Whereas a work like Das Kapital tells you very little about how to think this way. It's not intended to; it's more about the relative influence of various actors within a political-economic system, while raising tough questions about the meaning of private property.
But land isn't limited in the sense that there isn't enough of it for everyone, there is a fixed quantity of land on this planet but more than enough for everyone. Somehow some people got this absurd theory in their head that once there is abundance there is no need for economic allocation mechanisms. This completely ignores that even if there is enough land for everyone, a single person may have more land fenced off than he needs for himself, meaning that someone else ends up with less land than he needs for himself. Despite abundance of land you still need to allocate it properly and you still need economics to do that but economists shrug and do nothing. Artificial scarcity is the new normal.
Since all producable goods tend toward market saturation you will have this problem in more and more sectors in the economy as your country gets wealthier. In fact the problem isn't poverty, the wealthier we gets the worse things get.
Why is that the case? Why does the economy fail to allow abundance to happen? Why did economists put on a brain cage that tells them that scarcity is absolute and that if something isn't scarce it should be made scarce?
Reality is quite boring. Assume that there is a floor on capital yields meaning the income share in labor can never reach 100%.
Since economic activity gets siphoned off into the pockets of the owners of capital aka the rich get richer and they don't spend their wealth back into the economy, the rest of the economy must shrink. A game of musical chairs starts. There must be a loser and people will do absolutely everything to not end up as the loser. To prevent the non rich economy from shrinking and shriveling into nothing, we must keep up this farce of endless economic growth so that living standards don't get worse.
You have assigned an economic value system and denied doing it - that someone can have "enough" land and someone else does not have "enough". By who's pricing model and oops - guess we're back to plain old economics.
1. How much land is enough for someone?
2. Is land fungible?
> economists shrug and do nothing
What exactly do you want economists to do here? Redistribute land?
> if something isn't scarce it should be made scarce?
Which economist is advocating for this?
There is vigorous disagreement in the field regarding just about everything. The title of the underlying article may more appropriately be, “Popular Economics for Non-Academics.”
to the average citizen of the world they are indistinguishable
Macroeconomics and econometrics are two major subfields which literally didn't exist in Marx's day: economists may disagree significantly on conclusions and somewhat less significantly on certain assumptions models make, but they're focusing on the same variables (interest rates matter and fiscal policy somewhat matters, inflation is a thing which can be reduced, boosting employment and staving of recessions is more difficult) and doing similar maths.
This article on the 2008 financial crisis has lots of interesting references to government data. Then you can see if you reach the same conclusions as the authors.
https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...
For me personally, it was Marx that first made sense when I read it, very much like Bayesian statistics first made sense to me where I found Frequentist stats very confusing.
That said it shares the same problem: If you learn Bayesian statistics the Summer before Stats 101 in college, it will likely hurt your performance in that class. Likewise, while Marx makes a lot of sense, understanding Marx will mean you have an even more difficult time communicating with mainstream/orthodox economists.
However from a Marxist perspective this is no accident. One of, if not the most, important ideas coming out of Marx is the idea of ideology. The idea is that even our most basic thinking and views about the world are formed around the idea of maintaining existing social relations in favor of the ruling class.
An example of this (my own) is the way that Christianity in Medieval Europe quickly evolved into a belief system where the natural order involves an all mighty ruler that must not be questioned. The idea that the natural order of things involves a strict monarchistic hierarchy was fundamental to the Medieval European world view. Clearly this is a beneficial world view if you are a ruling monarch. You still see the impact of this today in the way we tell stories about princesses who, even when their identity is either unknown or hidden, are innately superior to other around them, or in other narratives where justice is satisfied only when the "true king" sits on the throne.
Orthodox economics, from a Marxist perspective, is referred to as bourgeois economics. That is, at a fundamental intellectual level, orthodox economics exists to reaffirm a capitalist worldview, in a similar way to medieval theology evolves to support monarchistic rule. An example of this is the way that the role of labor in the creation of value is fairly hidden, the economic inputs and outputs are all framed in a way to distract from the very idea that the worker creates value.
Another good example of the difference is the "business cycle" vs Marx's crisis theory. In orthodox economics the business cycle is a borderline supernatural process that we just accept as "how things go". For Marx periodic market crises are because Capitialism is filled with unresolvable internal contradictions (one example is the incentive for Capitialist to maximize the exploitation of the worker while simultaneously depending on that worker for the creation of surplus value). Marx spends a good chunk of Capital vol III developing this idea. For Marx the big concern is that deep contradictions in the foundations in the logic of Capitialism will ultimately lead to it's collapse.
So while I do recommend nearly everyone read Marx, it will likely hurt, not help, you understand mainstream economic theories.
Solved by reading Atlas Shrugged in the interim.