Value theory in economics. Economic Sociology and Political Economy Finance, Class, and the Birth of Neoclassical Economics: The Marginalist Revolution Revisited Yair Kaldor | PhD candidate in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a member of Koah LaOvdim (“Power to the Workers”), an Israeli labor union.
Read More »Brad DeLong — The extremely intelligent Martin Wolf reviews Maria Mazzucato
I would post a link to Martin Wolf's article but it is behind a paywall at the Financial Times. So this will have to do unless you have access. Somewhat embarrassingly, Brad DeLong gets Mariana Mazzacuto's name wrong. Oh, well, I make mistakes like that, too, on occasion.Wolf review poses a very pregnant question, "… she forces us to ask ourselves what adds value to society and how to create an economic and social order that promotes that."WCEGThe extremely intelligent Martin Wolf...
Read More »Umar Haque — Americans Are Dying For Healthcare
Yet there’s a logic — however absurd — to it. It’s a case of income maximization gone extreme. Repealing healthcare will maximize incomes for healthcare providers, Congressmen, lobbyists, pharmaceutical companies. And repealing healthcare will maximize incomes for households, by lowering taxes. Never mind that it shrinks life expectancy, which is to say: never mind the long-term benefits of such investments — in this paradigm, all that matters is income, right now. Thus, the overarching...
Read More »On the Value of Work in a Social Democracy
A career and a job where one does economically and socially useful work is an important part of any successful, healthy and wealthy society. But more than this, it gives people an identity through the job that they have and a social dignity lacking in long-term unemployment.There are of course a lot of difficult, boring, dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs that have to be done, but a technologically advanced society like ours can use its inventive genius to create more and better machines and...
Read More »Alexander Gray on the Two Contradictions in Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value in Volume 1 of Capital
From Alexander Gray’s book The Development of Economic Doctrine: An Introductory Survey (1956): “… the Marxian explanation suffers from two inner inherent contradictions (or two aspects of the same contradiction) from which it never escaped, and on which it finally made shipwreck in the third volume. In the first place, if all profit springs from variable capital and none from machinery, then it is the height of folly ever to introduce machinery, and it is a poor explanation to suggest that...
Read More »Marx on Wages in Value, Price and Profit (1865)
Marx’s Value, Price and Profit was a series of lectures he delivered in 1865, even though it was first published in 1898.In this work, Marx has the following to say about the determination of wages in capitalism: (1) “I might answer by a generalization, and say that, as with all other commodities, so with labor, its market price will, in the long run, adapt itself to its value; that, therefore, despite all the ups and downs, and do what he may, the working man will, on an average, only...
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