u/Pendergrass

http://stats.org/in_depth/faq/causation_correlation.htm

Honesty I am not so sure there ever was that much of a debate. As far as I can tell the entire Keynes vs Hayek meme was formed by Russ Roberts' video in 2010, and now it is fashionable to view the debate on economic policy as if it has sprung forth from some (nonexistent) decades-old rivalry between the two. I am no expert, but Keynes and Hayek mostly disregarded each other, and Hayek's ideas did not reach anywhere near the level of popular intellectual cache held by Keynesian until the 1970's (at least in America... the Road to Serfdom was popular amongst European intellectual circles before then, but by his death in 1946, Keynes was a world-renowned thinker whilst Hayek had just published his first major works on political economy... and even today, many more people have heard of Keynes).

This is not to say that Keynes is "better", just that it would seem that Hayek would be more famous if there had been some definite debate between the two... but there wasn't.

Just pointing out that your detractive assertion of the original post "political ideology" is just as relevant to your post... in fact I think the accusation that "your ideology is showing" is more aptly applied to your post than the OP because at least the OP recognizes and is referential towards its ideological basis.

Every one of your counterexamples deal with addresses the needs of certain interest groups, rather than economic realities, i.e. we can't cut social security because there are too many baby boomers. Certainly the original article does this as well, but when you make a value judgement rather than a positivist analysis, you are really doing politics (by which I mean the dialectic negotiations for power sharing between the objectively disparate interest groups within society) and not economics (which is a scientific study of choice and the distribution of goods and services between agents organized into a society).

So you might have an opposing view, but you are wrong if you think that yours is based on objective facts whereas the other is nothing but ideology. The truth is that we all have ideologies, and the wisest (wo)man is the one who can most readily accept a challenge to their own, rather than who can mount the swiftest and strongest defense of what they already believe to be true.

Excellent summary.

I would add that prior to the 20th century, central banking and fiat currencies were the preferred source of war financing for kings, etc. Even here in democratic America, The First US Bank was championed by Alexander Hamilton as a way to payoff debt from the Revolutionary War. Almost all early central banks ended up going bust due to a mixture of overspeculation and mismanagement, resulting in hyperinflation.

Modern democratic societies are less likely to go to war, but it would be an interesting analysis to look at the relation between Fed policy and US wars since the Fed's creation, or the way that the Fed has allowed for other socially stabilizing policies to be financed, such as Social Security.

Did I say something to make you mad or do you just like to argue?

I guess I disagree with you on the "whole reality of god-free observations part". I used to call myself an atheist. The older I've gotten, the more I don't know what I know and the more I challenge what I've come to accept as "true". I don't always trust my senses, which might sound anti-empirical to you, but only because we have a difference in our understandings of what "empirical" means, and I don't really see the point in arguing over semantics when I've stated what I believe pretty clearly and you just want to label me certain things because it helps you create the illusion of order and feign understanding in a disorderly and confounding world.

I am an agnostic in the sense that I have no meaningful evidence to support the existence of god nor deny the existence of god.

I don't necessarily agree with you in saying that most atheists are agnostic and theists gnostic, but I am sure that any confusion (on either of our parts) is purely semantic.

I am an empiricist who constructs functional ideologies based upon my perceptions and experiences. Metaphysics is fun to think about but ultimately doesn't contribute to the way I lead my life.

An atheist can be an atheist for many reasons, and still have a religious belief in reality. I am an agnostic because I ultimately think atheism is just as much a hollow ideology as theism (certainly atheism is more fashionable today, but in either case does it really matter unless you are a theist who believes in divine intervention? A non-intervening, amoral god and atheism will lead you towards the same conclusions about existence).

I myself ultimately reject solipsism because my ideological context has no use for solipsism. I can't prove that it is true or untrue, but I have a perceptual framework that leads me to believe I can live my life as if it is not true while not having much of a consequence if I am wrong and it is true. And what I mean by ideological context is the things I think (i.e. eating makes me feel less hungry, I need to go to work or else I won't get a paycheck, etc.).

Rice, I'm backing you up on your position. What is happening right now is that the CCP/military industrial complex of China is subsidizing American imports, and these subsidies are being paid for by Chinese workers.

People will disagree (they already have in this very thread), but the truth of the matter is that it is a net gain for the world economy to have China do the manufacturing of low-margin, value goods since it has a comparative advantage in cheap, unskilled labor. The person on this thread you says it is good for America in the short term but bad in the long term isn't actually considering the whole picture. In the long(er than what they were thinking) term, America will be able to reemploy human capital into other, more productive enterprises. The unemployment is actually the short-to-medium term effect. Capital stocks will be readjusted to profitable uses. We will suffer a higher than average unemployment rate as this adjustment takes place (exacerbated as well by the recession/potential depression). American manufacturing needs to be retooled to higher technology industries. Propping up and supporting the moribund domestic manufacturing sector with government policy is not economic growth; it is a political ploy designed to artificially inflate employment, and the costs are ultimately born to the American consumer.

I know this is a controversial subject; I want people to be employed. I also want people to be employed in productive industries. Making a domestic industry artificially profitable through protective tariffs is not the same as making it genuinely productive. Democratic government is a dialectic process, but from the perspective of positive economics (rather than political self-interest), entrepreneurship and innovation create jobs and economic growth, period. We need to focus on identifying, building, and sustaining comparative advantages, and when it comes to cheap labor, we are never going to be able to compete with Asia until we emerge from the other side of a 50 year Depression.

Saving jobs that are not capable of being supported by the fundamentals of the US economy is just foolish policy, but it is popular with the masses who don't understand economics, so our elected officials continue to beat on the drum of jingoism and protectionism (especially in times of economic crisis: history is rife with examples from every continent).

If we really are going to lead the future, we need to focus on being competitive rather than protectionism. Protectionism only works if you have no industry and need to "boot-strap" your economy (see: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China). In an industrialized (nay, post-industrialized) America, protectionism is bad policy (see Smoot-Hawley, pre-Uruguay Round GATT). It is the economic equivalent of drill, baby drill: give me what I want now, damn the spillovers and implications for the next generation (who in this case will be faced with the same problems we are faced with now, extended by using political solutions to economic problems).

I second Worldly Philsophers, had to read that for my first economics class way back in high school, and if you are a fan of history it is a good entry point to economics. My only caveat would be to make sure you understand it is just as notable for its omissions as its inclusions. They could have made the book twice (or 3x) as long and included everyone whose important, but that would have defeated the purpose of the book. I still wish they would come out with a 2nd volume, and include more 20th century economists, since I would argue that the more recent economists have a greater impact on our contemporary society than Malthus or Veblen, and the book implies a lot by making Keynes the final chapter, as if he is the ultimate synthesis of economic thought (I seem to remember some very enthusiastic/worshiping prose about him in the book). There have been many relevant economic philosophers since him, perhaps even more in the last 100 years than in the 300 years preceding them.

Very fascinating theory. Did you publish it? If so, I'd love to read it if you can provide a link or tell me which journal issue it was in. I'm working on a model of consumption behavior that is more based on principles from Mazlow's hierarchy, but I think your sociocultural paradigm might be more useful for my purposes.

Economics is the study of choice on the individual level and the coordination of preferences on the social level. You should decide which you are more interested in and revise your question if you want better answers. My suggestion would be to read the canon since Keynes's General Theory, and keep in mind the historical context and ideological bias of the authors, which might only be understood if you read the pre-Keynesians: Smith, Ricardo, Bastiat... even Marx because your query is so general (you don't express any indication of what you think economics really means to you).

My best advice to you, in the study of economics and anything else, is to not put your heroes on a pedestal, and to never be satisfied with a conclusion because history agrees with it. Study Keynes, study the Austrians, study the behaviorists, study philosophy, and study institutions... that is the only way you can have a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

The aforementioned sources from nutsack are a great starting point, and this notion:

Because there is so much information available about economics you might feel a little overwhelmed. That's fine, the important thing is to always keep an open mind and not to dismiss certain theories / information based on a few people's opinions.

That is probably the most important thing you can ever learn, in economics or anything else. Here on reddit, most of the debate is based on ideology (aka irrelevance) or semantics (aka bullshit), so don't take anything too seriously, think for yourself.

I assume you are referring to Foucault: biopower is based from the need to control population size. Disciplinary power is in reference to power structures needing to perpetuate their authority through making an example of people who have disrespected authority. Biopower has a relation to environmentalism, carrying capacity, and Malthusian economics, whereas disciplinary power is about the perpetuation of memes and the legitimacy of power structures, which is derived from the institutionalized sanctification of violence by the power apparatus as a way to enforce property rights. Disciplinary power has become the modality of choice due to democracy and the related need to control the perceptions of the public.

EDIT: Don't listen to me, I've never read the book, just saw a video. Listen to usampo.

I don't have much to add regarding the hypothetical positions of the philosophers you mention, but the framing of questions regarding institutional injustice should be given consideration.

The question of the distribution of incomes is more a question of how certain interest groups engage in dialectic negotiations with each other within the context of political institutions and a capitalist economic systems.

If you look at history, the current framing of the income distribution question did not come about until the industrial revolution, which created a huge number of specialized roles for workers to fill, and ended the mode of the agrarian self-sufficient lifestyle that had been around since the beginning of recorded civilization.

From the perspective of positive economics, poverty is a phenomena of relativity. The impoverished of today's America have a much greater absolute standard of living than the rich of Plato's day because of economic growth (specialization of labor, access to goods and services, access to education and employment options) and technological innovation (lighting, indoor plumbing, electronics, transportation, medicine). The socialist and progressive movements of the 19th and early 20th century were what defined the question in the terms with which we are familiar today.

If you don't pick stocks, what you are doing is saying fuck all this, I'll let everyone else pick my stocks for me. If we all do this, the stock market is no longer efficient at allocating capital.

Yes, but even if you are only buying index funds or ETFs, you are still providing capital to the economy, and as long as your capital is earning any rate of return, it is more beneficial for the investor and the economy as a whole vs. saving the money.

Ultimately, if you don't have enough information to pick stocks, it is probably more beneficial for both you and the market to buy index funds from a diverse group of asset markets because you won't be distorting relative price signals with your uninformed stock choices.

I like Chomsky. I don't think he has a coherent and systemic approach to economics in the same way that the Austrian school does, but he is a smart man, he is critical of power (which I think makes him more of a friend of the Austrian school than many would realize), and he is against fascism, totalitarianism, statism, and nationalism. He might be a socialist, but the only fault I can see with socialism is that it doesn't work as a means of allocating goods and services. I know someone will probably argue with me on this, but if you look at history, socialism by itself doesn't seem to cause violence unless it is taken in conjunction with one of the other ideologies I mentioned.

To clarify what is written in the article and for some people who aren't sure what anarcho-syndicalism is, it is essentially anarcho-communism: limited government and enterprises that are owned by the workers who work for them, with decision making being a democratic process. I think this is a hopelessly idealistic form of social organization that wouldn't work due to human nature, as is any form of communism, but I can't fault the man for being a dreamer in the same way that many of us Austrians, libertarians, and anarchocapitalists are dreamers.

It is fascinating to consider our responsibility for perpetuating a system based upon our complacency with it.

Foucalt's buddy Satre took this to the extreme, stating and believing in his personal responsibility for World War II. How much of this was stylish rhetoric used to sleep with philosophy undergrads and how much was actually the way he felt is debatable, but it does something to explain his passionate involvement with the French resistance.

My understanding of what the French existentialists were saying was that we are responsible for our own beliefs in our own ideological narratives, so if you see a world of social injustice being perpetuated by your consumption of corporate merchandise and participation in sham-democracies, you are responsible for that injustice. But if your narrative is that you don't have a choice or that you are merely one actor amongst billions, with your choice having little marginal consequence, that can be just as true. I think for someone like you or I, our recognition of some sort of problem is an indication that there is something we can do about it, and despite how difficult or impossible a certain action may seem, we have a type of moral duty to perform it, or else suffer from the resulting ennui.

The important thing to remember, I think at least, is that there is no such things as concrete, objective social narratives; they are all personal, and we merely decide which ones we believe, and which particular version at that. They are all informed by our experiences and our own ideological framework, which is itself the result of a dialectic struggle between ourselves and society, but no one's narrative is any more "true" or objective than another.

Ultimately what is more important to you: believing in something that makes you feel good, or the truth according to your empirical perceptions?

That is the fundamental question of all religious beliefs. If you subscribe to an ideology because it makes you feel good, despite the presence of empirical evidence to the contrary of your belief, you are no longer dealing with any objective conception of "truth".

I'm personally a truth-seeker (not an atheist, but an agnostic), and I am not saying one way is better than another. If what you are doing is making you happy, I have no problem with it as long as you aren't using your ideology to justify violence... and you are a hypocrite if you want to lambast anyone else for having a different religion (you don't seem like that type though).

Oh, I didn't know VG was selling ETF's. So maybe it wasn't so much a commercial as I thought... although the interviewer did fluff VG pretty good, you have to admit.

In any case I still don't think the problem is inherently within ETF's, it is with the people who are misinformed/uninformed and buy and sell them for the wrong reasons. Ultimately, they are just a product and I think if people are stupid enough to buy them without realizing what they are buying, that's the person's fault, not the seller's.

For the record, I don't own any ETF's for precisely the reasons you mention. But they do have social utility: they are a consumption choice, a product someone can choose to buy if they wish to, and I am sure there are some people who buy them for educated reasons and receive utility from them.

ETFs are in direct competition with Bogle's product... of course he doesn't like them.

He makes the point that it is dumb for most people to day trade, which is certainly true, but just because you are buying ETFs doesn't mean you are day trading.

It's not that ETFs have no social value, its that "trading" has no social value.

Ultimately, this piece is just a commercial for Vanguard.

I read through these comments, most people are just expressing angst and rage without showing any understanding of what is actually happening here, and without taking responsibility for their consumption choices.

If you don't want to pay the fee, open an account at a credit union. You are protesting the fees, the bailouts, the bonuses, and everything else you hate about the banks all at the same time, and it will "cost" you about 15-30 minutes of time to open up an account.

The truth of the matter is that this fee is just a side effect of the terrible regulation passed in the wake of the financial sector, regulation that has done very little to eliminate systemic risk, and which has been punitive to bank operations in such a way as to be punitive to consumers (i.e. debit card usage fees). Ultimately, maybe this is by design, to get people to open up bank accounts at credit unions, dispersing the risk that was concentrated into a small handful of large institutions... I don't know, but ultimately, these fees were to be expected if you were familiar with the Durbin Amendment.

Getting mad at banks for being "greedy" is pointless: they are profit machines, greedy by nature. How about instead of complaining, you send a message by closing your account (which you should have done in 2008 anyway)? Money is the only language that a business understands. If enough people do this, BofA will be forced to change the policy, but they are smart enough to know that most people will just pay the $5, even if they pitch a bitch on the internet about it.

Bat= (Ball+1.00)

Bat+Ball=1.10 therefore:

(Ball+1.00)+Ball=1.10

2Ball+1.00=1.10

2Ball=.10

Ball=.05

I don't think that necessarily killing all the sad people would be a net positive: think of all the "happy" people who would be made sad if they lost a love one to this eugenic "solution".

In your example, the mother aborting the child that she wanted to keep would be made more sad, and I am not sure how you could calculate the future happiness of the unborn child without making gross assumptions that may or may not turn out to be correct.

It's important to understand historical context and not take things too literally when analyzing historic texts.

Marx's social theory is old. It was a great description of the time he lived in: because it was so novel, it created a huge paradigm shift and was responsible for a lot of the social momentum that created the labor/progressive movement across the world (there are so many names for it all over the world, so don't get too hung up on the names people use. It all boils down to the interests of labor vs. the interests of capital).

As time has progressed, and the socioeconomic situation has become more nuanced and complicated, Marx's theories (and any other theories conceived in days long ago) need to be reinterpreted and updated to fit a modern context. What we now today call the "Middle Class" is not the same bourgeoisie middle class of the industrial revolution. A modern, post-industrial Marxist would most likely differentiate between the overlapping spheres of political machines and the entrenched business interests that they represent vs. the 99% of "the people" who are economically disenfranchised from the neoliberal world order. It is the same paradigm, just different demographic labels.

As far as the white and male part go... that's a whole different coconut to crack. Suffice it to say that not all Marxists subscribe to Marxist feminism. I consider myself a feminist and a Marxist, but not a Marxist feminist. Ditto to Critical Race Theory and Marxism. You can buy one and/or the other without having to subscribe to the combination.

Read Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, and you will realize the news is just a huge propaganda outlet used by business interests to cultivate feelings within you that will make you a more prone towards consumption. Once you realize that there is a difference between what is really happening in the world and the way it is presented in the media, you shouldn't feel so cynical of the world itself (maybe more cynical towards politics, but the sooner you disillusion yourself of the nobility of political processes, the faster you'll be able to achieve optimal mental health).

Remember that creating an atmosphere of fear and insecurity plays into the agenda of the entrenched power structure, so don't take their attempts at meme transmission too seriously and you'll be fine.