Wednesday, June 10, 2015

How The Heck Did Labor-Capital Get Excluded From Capital?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

No, economics never was biology, or even thermodynamics .... and yes orthodox economics comes with so much invented, anthropomorphic gibberish that you'd think it was a religion.

Nevertheless, you'd think an Upper Looting Class trying to foist BS on targeted serfs would at least try to come up with consistent definitions.

Last time I looked, Labor-Capital was one of the forms of capital.

So why the heck do we even have discussions like the following one?
Yes, it's a valiant complaint, but please, don't even have this discussion. It's based on a false premise, and it's mal-adaptive for any social species.

Victims can't win a debate by accepting the oratorical premise of the aggressor. It's a dead end. You've lost by the 2nd sentence, since the biggest lie in propaganda is always in the opening sentence. Be resolute, and just call bullshit. Everything past that opening sentence of propaganda is a downhill slope, so don't even get on it.

Just call "Bullshit!" at the opening sentence. That's the story of how reality resists propaganda, so please stick with it.
Accounting has it's purpose as a valuable tool, but ONLY if it is used equally on ALL forms of accounting, including the statistical return on coordination first implied by Walter Shewhart. There's a vast literature on the value of human cooperativity, from multiple disciplines, from biology to anthropology to psychology to sociology and on to Statistical Process Control as invented by Walter Shewhart and W.E. Deming, not to mention the root concept of agile teamwork in culture, military doctrine and team sports. The famous, military OODA Loop is a simple adaptation of Shewhart's PDSA Cycle.

Until we add human-capital AND return-on-coordination to Double-Entry Bookkeeping, orthodox macroeconomics will continue to be a parasite on humanity, rather than a useful part of humanity.

Will the proportion of selfish, uneducated people in economics & policy decline? Only at the rate at which we the peeps select that as our desired aggregate outcome.



We may be wired for culture, but we still have to follow our instincts to actually get what we want.

3 comments:

Marian Ruccius said...

Good post. Makes me think as well of capital inherent in the social relations of the gift economy, which is about the return on coordination, among other things. I am thinking about Akerlof's classic article on Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange, even though he does not directly mention capital in the article.

Roger Erickson said...

Hi Pearce,
Yes, any member of any team, or any tribe knows implicitly that economic theory is more of an albatross than a useful guide. Unless, that is, a given equipment manager wants to hoard all the gear and kill the game.

We as a culture are behaving very much like a futbol team that is arguing about who gets which shoes & shirts (and how many), instead of focusing on perfecting the learned behaviors inherent to the game itself.

No one pays to watch equipment mgrs argue over kit. Eventually, electorates will stop attending a game that's not longer beautiful, or even a game. They may even mug the dimwits hoarding the kit. It'll happen. It just takes a while for the fans up in the cheap seats to realize what's happening down on the main field.

After a growth spurt, it's a simple question of whether we are or are NOT going to regain adaptive agility, as nation states and as a species.

Matt Franko said...

Good analogy imo Roger... Rsp