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Brad DeLong — Warning! Reading Marx’s Capital Can Introduce Serious Bugs into Your Wetware!: Hoisted from 2006

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Contra the relevance of Marx today based on assumptions of conventional economics.Grasping RealityWarning! Reading Marx's Capital Can Introduce Serious Bugs into Your Wetware!: Hoisted from 2006 Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley See also Another one dismissive of Marx. Conversable EconomistMarx on Economics: "Its True Ideal is the Ascetic but Rapacious Skinflint and the Ascetic but Productive Slave" Timothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota I'll be posting links to recent posts supportive of Marx separately for weekend reading. My own view is that Marx is still relevant. Marx was not an "economist." Nor was Adam Smith. Both were philosophers and Smith was a professor of

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Contra the relevance of Marx today based on assumptions of conventional economics.

Grasping Reality
Warning! Reading Marx's Capital Can Introduce Serious Bugs into Your Wetware!: Hoisted from 2006

Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

See also

Another one dismissive of Marx.

Conversable Economist
Marx on Economics: "Its True Ideal is the Ascetic but Rapacious Skinflint and the Ascetic but Productive Slave"
Timothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

I'll be posting links to recent posts supportive of Marx separately for weekend reading.

My own view is that Marx is still relevant. Marx was not an "economist." Nor was Adam Smith. Both were philosophers and Smith was a professor of moral philosophy. 

Smith is one of the early founders of what latter developed into the branch of academic study and research now called economics.

Marx was one of the early founders of sociology and one of the first to write on economic sociology and political theory.

The scope of conventional economics excludes sociology and economic sociology, as well as political theory, although many of the assumptions of conventional economics presume a particular view of sociology, economic sociology and political theory that are hidden assumptions. This gives conventional economics a cognitive-affective bias. 

In science, such biases are corrected through empirical testing. This is not the case with conventional economics. Now that inequality is rising to obscene levels it is obvious to any with a working brain that something is radically wrong. 

Marx provided an explanation in terms of what he observed in his day, which he recognized as historical. Since the historical dialectic is dynamic, one would expect that conditions would change over time. So while it may be possible and even easy to point out where Marx "got it wrong" in terms of conditions now, the inquiry should focus on aspects of the dialectic that Marx identified that may be relevant to contemporary conditions. 

Marx's class-based approach to economic sociology and political theory is still considered relevant in those fields. A good example is C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (PDF download).
Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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