Cool that you weren’t scared away by all the Toxicity in he other comments.

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

Ursula K. LeGuin

The other comments are quite sarcastic and I want to give you a bit of a less antagonizing response why Steven Pinker is kind of a hack.

He more or less “cooked the books” when it comes to explaining how much good capitalism helped the people around the world by doing very selective data analysis. In the end he really advocates for being complacent with the status quo and basically argues for the argument of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (which has been disproven a lot by anthropologists.

These videos are quite long but go into more detail:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwXV71hF7cs

And if you prefer to read: I’d recommend The Dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Joking

I thought the “/j” tone-tag was enough ;_;

woosh

Not sure if sarcastic and woosh, or adding to the joke ಠ_ಠ

I did (skimmed it, at least) and I liked it. 🙃

If you are so sure that you are right and already “know it all”, why bother and even read this? There is no comment section to argue.

I beg to differ. You utter fool! You created a comment section yourself on lemmy and you are clearly wrong about everything!

You take the mean of 1 and 9 which is 4.5!

/j

Get that unfunny,creatively bankrupt, so-called “AI” bullshit out of here.

There’s a book on the subject by Simon Singh, where he writes about all the math jokes in the Simpsons. There are a bunch. ;)

I meant line 2 (it’s actually a joke the math professors on the writing team of the Simpsons put in there: it doesn’t disprove Fermat’s Theorem, but most calculators at the time didn’t have the accuracy to cumpute that directly, which is kind of the joke)

Did Homer just disprove Fermat’s Last Theorem? O.o

Reducing value to nothing but commodities is already a very ideologically charged act. We were talking about value before. The value of commodities is only a subset of what counts as value.

My tone is reflective of my mistrust of your intention

How have I earned that mistrust? Do you think it’s fair to continue that mistrust after my efforts to elaborate my point?

I am sorry if that is uncomfortable.

Pardon my tone, but: That’s a nonpology. I can do without those.

On the contrary, I think applying theoretical models to current real-world economics is the only way to make sense of where theory and reality deviate.

I agree. My original “reminder” was to point out that deviations occur. The mental shortcut that I meant was to only take LTV into account when discussing economics.

I would have found it more interesting if you had been more specific in how you think LTV was being misused.

I don’t know if “misused” is the right term, but one example where LTV falls flat is that it doesn’t model the destruction of value due to environmental pollution.

Thank you for that comment. I feel like finally someone understood what I was trying to get across.

Probably formulated it badly, but still: the answers are a bit exhausting.

EDIT: Thought of another example of your qase where harming nature decreases value. Having to buy carbon certificates for releasing CO2 models the destruction of value by polluting the environment.

I think you’ve misunderstood what a model is.

I generally educate myself by reading, rather than watching YouTube. I’d prefer not to continue this conversation.

Thank youfor the ableist, condescending comment. /s

Why the neutral language all of a sudden?

I was trying to be understood a bit better.

Are you trying to say 'all economic theories and models are not objectively true"?

Not explicitally, but yeah: models aren’t used for “objective truth”. They’re used to model (i.e. simplify) reality to make observations and guesses for the future.

Why would that be worth saying in response to the OP?

I feel like a lot of leftists think that understanding economics starts and ends with “capitalists exploit the labouring class”, while not actually engaging with the subject matter. I guess most can’t even explain LTV properly before getting mad at capitalists.

As I’ve written before: I agree with most conclusions of marxist analysis that I know and I probably don’t even know half of them. But I think that political analysis should use LTV as a tool to understand the world and not the end of socio-economical disgussion (because that would ignore important parts of today’s economy).

It really just seems like you disagree with the ‘your stolen labor value’ claim in the OP, and are attributing it to the ‘labor theory of value’

I don’t. I wanted to remind people as to make political analysis not too easy by taking the mental shortcut of reducing current capitalism on the problems pointed out by Marx rendition of LTV.

(as opposed to dismissing it because you disagree with some portion of the theory you’ve neglected to mention)

I don’t disagree. I also don’t disagree with the atomic model of Niels Bohr when it comes to calculating electron potential. When it comes to observing e.g. electron spin, that particular model will probably fall flat. That doesn’t mean I “disagree” with the model, though.

My hunch is that you don’t feel confident enough in your understanding to make any kind of firm claim and are just dancing around making vague gestures toward ‘labor’ and ‘value’ definitions as a way of avoiding it.

I’m not too confident in my economic knowledge, true. But I am quite confident in how models should be used in soft sciences.

Addendum: I’d like to kindly ask you to give me a little bit of benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, I’ll just disengage due to that accusatory tone I’m getting from you being a bit exhausting.

An LTV analysis begins with such workers because they are the original contributors of surplus value that is appropriated by the ownership class.

And what’s that reasoning, if not based on ideology?

I really suggest watching unlearning egonomics video on the matter. I’m a leftist and mostly agree with Marx, but the LTV is a model and should be treated as such.

Doesn’t that only take the economics of people into account that are close to this irreducible subsistence requirement?