Book recommendation: "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Michael Pettis.
If you don't buy the apologetics that permeate the popular economics sphere but still want an expert to walk you through the details, this is your book.
If you don't buy the apologetics that permeate the popular economics sphere but still want an expert to walk you through the details, this is your book.
(RIP Norm MacDonald, the thinking mans comedian!)
Oh, and did you know that Ricardo based his analysis on the assumption of a closed capital account? It's interesting how the theory of comparative advantage usually gets invoked without mentioning that ;)
If you dogmatically reject the idea that political economy could possibly involve the concept of class, I'd love to hear how your analysis clusters the interests involved. In any case, he's not a CCP shill. He throws some mean punches in that direction with facts and figures to back them up. Everyone hustles in the world economy.
Class is a suitcase word that may refer to different ways of classifying people but often does not clarify which dimensions and clusters are being used in a particular context. Maybe Pettis does a better job than other authors. Perhaps you or the sibling comment author can provide an example?
This book gives detailed, and very accurate, descriptions of how trade wars which appear to be foreign conflicts-- i.e. one country united against another-- are almost always actually domestic conflicts between competing interest groups inside the same country; often during these conflicts, those interest groups can make alliances with equivalent groups in other countries. This is a commonly-observed phenomenon which, for brevity's sake, we reify as class, and does not require any Marxist axioms or analysis to understand.