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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Kapital is extremely interesting from the point of view of understanding Marx's very singular view of the world, but doesn't tell you much about how modern economists think about modern economies even from a contrasting perspective since neither existed at the time of writing...

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“Modern economists” aren’t really a thing, at least in the sense that a consensus or collective understanding of economics is shared by a group denominated as such.

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.”

There is vigorous disagreement in the field regarding just about everything, but some of the few things they agree on (and the key fault lines for what they disagree on) didn't exist at the time Kapital was written.

What are the few things they agree on?

Subjectivism vs Labour theory of value is a pretty easy one.

Krugman and Manikw are ideological adversaries. They both wrote Macroeconomics textbooks which fully agree with each other.

krugman and mankiw are adversaries in the sense one prefers the current world neoliberal order designed for the benefit of the us to be led by democrats and the other prefers it to be led by republicans

to the average citizen of the world they are indistinguishable

Most of Econ 101, as a sibling comment notes, from basic approaches (definitions, deductive reasoning from models using algebra, testing of models with data) to detail (marginalism, "new consensus" macro modelling).

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.

For modern topics, read the Monthly Review ( https://monthlyreview.org ).

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...

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