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Politics and religion
3013

No, they are exactly the same as livestock economically.

That’s the problem with slavery, because it treats human beings as property.

But your attempt to formulate an argument about slaves, acting as though they are merely unpaid labor, is supremely misguided.

Slaves were not engaged in an unpaid internship. They were property.

Look dude, I’m really not that interested going further in this. You can go and read a multitude of books explaining why your position is wrong. Basically any modern economics text.

3014

I mean, your argument contradicts itself. If an economic system can run into problems when treating something as property, then clearly something other than an economic system is a better judge of what is and isn’t property.

That is Marx’s entire point: “Your economic system says X, but apparently people think your economic system is bullshit. Now, what would cause people to throw out an entire economic system? Religion? Rationalism? A fundamental sense of value?”

Marx goes with choice 3.

3015

You aren’t even coming close to making a coherent argument.
But have fun with Marxism.

3016

Slaves were property. How were they different than an oxen pulling the yoke? They had no ability to choose where to work or what jobs to pursue.

3017

Because unlike oxen, slaves will inevitably revolt. Why? Because according to Marx, they recognize that they are obviously underpaid.

So, how could anyone possibly recognize that they are underpaid?

Is the concept of “underpaid” even defined under capitalism?

3018

Jesus christ dude.

Slaves are not laborers. They aren’t the proletariat. They are SLAVES. They are owned as property, like machines or animals. They have no ability to make choices for themselves. They are not engaging in the normal exchange of services for wages that exist in an economic system. They are not participants in the economic system, they are merely commodities.

This is not a matter of economics at this point. Capitalism does not believe this to be ok. This is a separate aspect of human culture, where some people are denied rights. It has nothing to do with economics.

Your attempts to conflate actual slaves with Marx’s proletariat is demonstrating that you need to learn more about Marx’s actual writings.

3019

I mean… it’s Marxism.
This should have been you a while ago:

3020

Ok, Timex. How about you address the elephant in the room?

Is the work of women equally valuable as that of men, for an identical job? If value equals price, then you must answer no: the work of women is typically less valuable.

What’s your answer?

3021

If you are saying the labour market is not perfect, then no, no it is not. That’s not controversial. However empirically the conclusions we reach from looking at perfect markets still have value when examining imperfect real world markets.

Beyond that I’m afraid your argument was too incoherent for me to perceive anything that could be described as a point. The people defending mainstream economics here have already said some global concept of value isn’t meaningful, so why are you bringing this up as some kind of killer hole in their arguments?

Economics is the study of resource distributions. You don’t need a concept of value to derive useful results, although you do need a concept of utility.

3022

I am specifically addressing Timex’s statement that “value effectively IS price”.

This in direct contrast with HumanTon, quoting Wilde, who said “economists know the price of everything, and the value of nothing”. That’s a fair statement, as I said.

Value and price are not the same, and there is a real tension between them. This tension becomes apparent when there is a perceived injustice, such as in the wages paid to men and women (which are definitely unequal) and the value of their work (which, no matter how loosely defined, are perceived as equal).

The tension is not so important if you want to figure out how to price widgets for next quarter. It is extremely important if you want to explain why people will reject an economic system and burn down the widget factory. Modern economists are often interested in the former, but Marx was strictly interested in the latter.

Economics is the study of resource distributions.

That’s a modern definition. In Marx’s time, one might have described economics as a study of wealth. For him it was not so much a question of what, but who. And it was inextricable from politics.

3023

“Price widgets for the next quarter”? Economics is of a lot more use than that. For one thing, it tries to predict what the effect of policy changes will be on resource distributions, which helps us determine what action to take to make the widget factory workers better off.

Marx understood that people would burn down the widget factory if exploited (maybe that was an insight in the 1800s) but his prescriptions for how to avoid people wanting to burn down the widget factory have failed time and time again.

3024

You think this is some kind of amazing gotcha, don’t you?

No, no service or commodity has an inherent or stable value.

I’ve fully qualified that statement when i said it and explained it completely.

And what I said is the accepted belief of literally every mainstream economist in the world.

You are arguing from a position of ignorance. You need to educate yourself. I’ve tried to explain it to you, but you aren’t getting it. All of your arguments have already been addressed exhaustively by a mountain of economic texts.

It was freaking Oscar Wilde, dude! He wasn’t an economist. He was a playwright. His statement is not a logical argument.

3026

Ok, so you really do think that women’s work is not as valuable as that of men.

And you follow that up by claiming that nothing has an inherent value. But if that’s so, then nobody can claim that women are being treated unfairly. To argue that they are being treated unfairly, you would need to compare their wage to a “fair” wage. And as soon as you bring up a fair wage, you are suggesting that their actual wage does not fully reflect the value of their work.

Your idea of value inescapably leads to the conclusion that whatever women is paid must be fair. This is not a mainstream opinion.

3027
3028

That is a textbook strawman argument. You took statements Timex made that were NOT that conclusion, misrepresented his argument, and attacked it as a conclusion.

But more to the point, how did we get from Fox News to here? I’m lost at this point.

3029

No, I took statements that Timex did NOT make, and showed that they logically followed from the statements that he DID make. If you have a problem with how I got from point A to point B, please let me know.

Finally:

Let me also add that this is not true. As HumanTon and Oscar Wilde pointed out, modern economists do not like to talk about value. This isn’t a logical argument, it’s just an observation. But it’s an astute observation, and it suggests that economists have difficulty defining value. Instead, they like to restrict their discussion to prices and costs. But every so often, the idea of “inherent value” comes up. Namely, whenever economists talk about market failures.

You would think that market failure is impossible if price and value were identical. But nearly every economist can point to an example where price does not fully capture the value of something. And how is that even possible using your definition?

Some random examples that I just found online:

the prices of assets may not reflect the full range of costs and benefits associated with owning, or trading in, those assets.

Huh, if only there were a word that one could use in place of “full range of costs and benefits associated with owning, or trading in” something, which is not always reflected by price. Wait, I know!

Externalities prevent efficiency because external costs or benefits mean demand prices or supply prices do not fully reflect the value of goods produced or the value of goods not produced.

So, demand price =/= value, and supply price =/= value. Hmmm…

failing to establish the ‘risk’ associated with holding a financial asset may cause a divergence between the market (or traded) value of the asset, and the true value.

True value equals what?

The problem is that it is hard to protect the property rights of a producer of information… This makes it difficult for those who produce facts to sell them for their full value.

Full value equals what?

There are more examples, but you get the picture. In each case, economists are suggesting that the price of something fails to capture something inherent about that thing. Even if they have difficult specifying what the inherent value is, they know it’s not the price.

3030

We went from something about Islam, extreme religion, to the relationship between religions and government, then communism. try to keep up.

edit: I tried to put g in here to show my humor but discourse hates humor

3031

I hear you. Plus we jump around between threads sometimes with different arguments.

@magnet I would be the last person to argue anything from a firm understanding of economics. I’ll leave you two to hash that out. I was referencing that I’m not sure that is a solid conclusion that Timex thinks all women are paid fairly. I probably shouldn’t impulsively answer for Timex, because I’m assuming that it is not the case.

3032

God help us all.

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3033

Timex is a good guy, and I don’t think he believes that women are paid fairly, either. That means that either something in my argument is flawed (Ha! Don’t think so!) or something else in his argument is flawed.