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Comment by zztop44 | Hacker News Reader

This kind of shallow dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx remains one of the most relevant and influential theoreticians amongst people who do spend a lot of time thinking about economics.

For a start, Marx understood well that the price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync. If you’re confused about the difference between those things, think about Dogecoin as a particularly extreme example.

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This kind of shallow dismissal of my shallow dismissal of a frankly idiotic idea that doesn't deserve a deeper dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn't spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx was popular not for his economic thoughts but for his sociological/political ones. Someone being popular doesn't make them right, but Marx was right about many things. Just not about labor theory of value.

But here's a deeper dismissal for you anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/fht0ti/marxs_...

it even conveniently brings up your doge argument

> This kind of shallow dismissal of my shallow dismissal of a frankly idiotic idea that doesn't deserve a deeper dismissal

The labor theory of value was accepted wisdom prior to the late 19th century: it originates with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It's wrong (or more accurately, not a good conceptual framework) but it's not obviously wrong, let alone "idiotic".

fair enough. Maybe my dismissal was too shallow

This is misleading. Adam Smith presented this as a possible solution to an economic paradox at the time. But later philosophers came up with much better solutions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value

There's no reason to believe that Smith wouldn't have latched onto the much better solution. So being hell-bent on the incomplete answer from the 1700s is a unique peculiarity of Marxist theory.

> But later philosophers came up with much better solutions

Yes, later than both Smith and Marx. Marginalism didn't go mainstream until the 1890s, though the necessary pieces were there waiting to be assembled from about 1870.

> price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync

Based on Marx's own flawed logic! https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-05-02

How much is a glass of water worth? Should it change if it takes me 5 seconds or 5 years to procure? Using labor theory to assign value makes no sense and is not a workable model for anything for anything other than justifying Marx's own circular logic.

this is not what the labor theory of value is. i wrote my interpretation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37411772

Marx discusses how skill (and factors like machinery, etc) factors into value in Capital vol 1. The idea isn't that any labor on any endeavor creates value at a constant rate across all individuals and all time.

Marx has some concept of "socially necessary" labor, but it doesn't really make sense because it wants to treat skill as some kind of simple multiplier as if we can assume that a modern doctor's labor is some simple multiple of a random medieval peasant's labor in diagnosing an illness, which is just a silly and oversimplified model.

Honestly it reminds me of like Marx's non-rigorous "eh whatever" approach to dividing by zero in his mathematical work. While one can define division by zero in non-standard analysis, that involves some actual rigor in how your treat it according to your definitions, not just shrugging your shoulders and doing it.

What you're getting at vis-a-vis highly skilled labor is known in Marxist economics as the labor reduction problem, and it's complicated (enough so that I wouldn't do it justice trying to elaborate the approaches in the time I have to respond). Marx died with it unsolved and it's a matter of discussion to this day. But you're conflating that problem with the concept of socially necessary labor, which is different and actually addresses the problem you posed (in Capital Vol 1, in the difficult early chapters). In order to produce value, the labor must be socially necessary, and the labor of any number of unskilled workers towards a highly complex problem (eg, treating a rare cancer) would not be socially necessary. It doesn't even have to be that complex. I don't have the skills necessary to make a wedding cake, and any attempt I make to do so would be so inept that it wouldn't be socially necessary labor.

Can't speak to the division by zero, but it doesn't come up in any of Marx important work. His mathematical manuscripts don't have any significant relationship to his work on political economy.

I mean, economics is a mathematical profession. It's hard for me to take his storytelling about things like the freedom of hunter-gatherers and such seriously when I know he wasn't rigorous in the things that are easier to check. Never mind the, err, implementation problems in basically every attempted revolution until somewhere around the point where the Nordic states found a way to subsidize it with resource extraction and found a voluntary version.

It strikes me as incurious to dismiss an entire field of thought because there were errors in a mathematical manuscript, especially when you clearly don't understand the fundamental concepts (I don't mean this as a dig. You just haven't learned them.). Marxism isn't the writings of a long dead guy in England in 1860. It's a living, breathing school of thought that's evolved significantly since then. What you're doing is akin to finding an error in Smith or Ricardo's [edit: unpublished manuscripts, not completed work] work (of which there were many) and using those errors to dismiss all of orthodox economics.

The revolutionary approaches have not succeeded thus far, granted. There is a branch of Marxism about revolution, but what we're talking about here is a description of capitalism. Marxist revolutionary activities have nothing to do with how potent that analysis is.

I spend a lot of time thinking about economics, and spend a lot of time surrounded by people who also spend a lot of time thinking about economics, being an economist. The labour theory of value, along with every other objective theory of value, was abandoned by economists more than 100 years ago, because it failed to explain how and why economic agents assign value to economic goods, which is what economists are interested in.

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