Do enough businesses survive long enough for the inherent inequality of bargaining power between the bosses and the workers to emerge?
04 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
Jon Elster and Robert Nozick on the economics of Karl Marx
29 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in Marxist economics, Rawls and Nozick Tags: Jon Elster, Karl Popper, Robert Nozick
Popper held that Marxism had been initially scientific: Karl Marx postulated a theory which was genuinely predictive.
When these predictions were not in fact borne out, the theory was saved from falsification by adding ad hoc hypotheses to explain away inconvenient facts. By this, a theory which was genuinely scientific became pseudo-scientific dogma.
Popper criticizes theorists like Marx who attempt to accumulate evidence that corroborates their theories and not looking for evidence that would demonstrate that their hypothesis is false.
Popper claimed that falsifiability was an essential feature of any useful scientific theory. If a theory cannot be falsified, neither it nor its predictions can be validated, for everything that happens is by definition consistent with the theory.
As Popper and Kuhn understood it, bold, risky hypotheses are at the heart of great advances in the sciences and scholarship generally.
People say things they later regret and their friends regret they said it at all
25 Jun 2014 1 Comment
in liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: second thoughts, the overweening conceit of youth, the road to serfdom
There are plenty, now on the left and the right, who in the past, and sometimes too recent past, dabbled in ideologies that did not include an unwavering commitment to democratic government, the rule of law, and peaceful change through the ballot box.
Ex-communists: they are allowed back into polite society and into left-wing political parties often without have to admit and openly repent for being the fools that they were. Some of these ex-communists took a long time and were well past their immature youth to see the foolishness of their ways.
The forgiveness for ex-communists is odd as Hayek in the Road to Serfdom challenged the general view among British academics that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism, instead arguing that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and the power of the state over the individual.
The inter-war communists hated the Fascists because both competed for the working class vote and because ex-comrades such as Mussolini had worked out that co-opting nationalism with anti-big business rhetoric was a sure path into the hearts of the working class, lower-middle class, and small business and greatly increased the chances to seize power quickly and legally with wide support in times of discontent.
The economist Joan Robinson gazed on China and North Korea with “starry eyes”, as Geoffrey Harcourt put it, as well as making some utterly devastating criticisms of Marxian economics at earlier points in her long career. Robinson became more left wing as she aged, and in Economic Management in China (1975), she praised the Cultural Revolution! Her colleagues were quite embarrassed.
Noam Chomsky spoke when he should have listened on Cambodia under Pol Pot.
Orwell’s Proposed Preface to ‘Animal Farm’ is a wonderful dissection of renegade liberal that glorified communist experiments. For Orwell, these intellectuals loved the Stalin’s Soviet Union despite the purges, mocked bourgeois liberty despite their own pleasing bourgeois circumstances, and identified with communists would who have shipped them off to camps straight after the revolution. The renegade liberals excused the Moscow purges because communists were just ‘liberals in a hurry’!
Groucho Marx on the economics of Karl Marx
13 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in Marxist economics Tags: Groucho Marx, inherent inequality of bargaining power, marxist economics
Wild Swans and Star Trek
29 Mar 2014 1 Comment
in applied price theory, development economics, economics of bureaucracy, Marxist economics, Public Choice, technological progress, television Tags: economics of planning, star trek
About the only book I almost read in one sitting was Wild Swans. I stopped reading at 2 in the morning. This autobiography is 676 pages long. Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women and their families in 20th century China. It is the biggest grossing non-fiction paperback in publishing history.
Wild Swans starts with Jung Chang’s grandmother whose feet were bound at the age of two in 1909. She was later to be a concubine to the local warlord. Her mother was a communist revolutionary in the 1940s onwards and her own story as among other things a teenage Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution. The Guardian described Wild Swan as “For many in the west, Wild Swans was their first real insight into life under the Chinese Communist party.”
I will only mention the part of it that reminded me of Steven Cheung’s analysis of how class ridden communist societies were.
A party membership card puts you above others. That card described in enormous detail what privileges you received depending on your rank in the party.
This is exactly what happened in wild swans. Jung Chang’s father was of the 14th rank while her mother was of the 17th rank. This rank decided what food you got, your accommodation, whether your parents could live with you and even the type of seat you got on the railways.
Star Trek was supposed to be a society that had abolished money and as a post-scarcity economy because everything was available through a replicator. The type of economics it is based on is cooperative economics. To quote Captain Picard:
A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of ‘things’. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions.
The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century… The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity.
The Ferengi and their 285 rules of acquisition were a satire on capitalism. The Ferengi was originally meant to replace the Klingons as the Federation’s arch-rival but they were far too comical.
Gene Roddenberry’s love story with socialism is the most class-ridden society I have ever seen. In Star Trek, higher ranked officers had larger cabins, and most of all they always beamed back from the planet.
Anyone who beamed down with Captain Kirk dressed in those red security officer tops were expendables. Death and accommodation were class based on Star Trek.
The U.S.S. Enterprise also spent a lot of time negotiating trade treaties and visiting planets where the Earth colonists lived in agrarian poverty with famines and preventable diseases.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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