I was recently interviewed on my book, The Long Depression, and on other economic ideas, by José Carlos Díaz Silva from the Economics Department of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) where I have been invited next March 2018 to deliver a series of lectures. In the first part of this interview, posted over a week ago, Jose questions me on the basic themes of my book.
In this second part of an interview, we discuss the importance of profitability in understanding the state of capitalist economies and whether Marxist economics can be attractive to economics students.Michael Roberts Blog
The profitability of Marxian economics
Michael Roberts
1 comment:
Marx, the moron
Comment on Michael Roberts on ‘The profitability of Marxian economics’
There is political economics and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics anything goes; in theoretical economics the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.
Theoretical economics consists of four main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism ― which are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and which got the foundational economic concept profit wrong.
Marx, clearly, was NOT a scientist but a political agenda pusher. However, after the scientific triumphs of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Leibniz etcetera agenda pushing had to be dressed as science. This gave rise to what Feynman famously called cargo cult sciences.
What Marx did was sociology, history, storytelling, prophesy and agenda pushing. He had NO idea how the monetary economy works because he never figured out what profit is.#1 That is rather bad for an economist but what is worse is that After-Marxians did not spot and rectify Marx’s blunders in the past 130+ years.#2
What we actually have is the pluralism of provable false theories. Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism look antagonistic on the surface but have one essential thing in common: they are all fake science.
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
#1 See ‘Profit for Marxists’
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2414301
#2 See ‘Profit and stupidity’
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/06/profit-and-stupidity.html
and ‘Economists: scientists or political clowns?’
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/06/economists-scientists-or-political.html
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