Cannot express how deeply hilarious it is to me that this is an active debate in the reception of Marx in the 21st century. If you ever needed proof that intellectual progress can be negative this is it

it should be a simple thing to say that "money is a political problem," but saying that puts you at odds with both marxists and MMT. for Marxists, money isn't political at all, it's just an expression of value. and for MMTers, money is political and therefore not a problem.

https://twitter.com/drumm_colin/status/1911828741753589898

the fact that there's all this deeply obvious stuff about money that everyone refuses to see is a sign of deep repression.

in a just society everyone would have access to a publicly funded lawyer and accountant who can simply explain to you how you are supposed to follow the rules for whatever thing you want to do. Figuring out HOW to follow the rules is way harder than following them I want to follow the rules! I love following the rules! Please tell me how!

criticism of economics would be more effective if humanities academics scored fewer own goals. e.g. if you are like "economic should historicize its knowledge, it's POLITICAL economy not just economics" that just shows that you yourself dont understand the intellectual history "political economy" was already the project of containing politics by economics, there is no relevant difference here. there is a methodological difference that is basically just learning calculus but the project is the same

this is why i prefer all of my obligations to be overwrought, overheated, ambiguously defined, and uncomfortably personal the funny thing about david is that he *thinks* he's more charismatic and a people person than he actually is

problem is that there isn't any such thing as "capitalism" w/ its "immanent contradictions" and "laws of motion." these things don't exist, because economic phenomena are nominal and (counter-)performative rather than real and necessarily-appearing. if so, nothing left of marxism the only responses to this are to a) deny that things are like this, which is empirically false and requires you to refuse to examine what actually appears, or b) deny that marxism claims anything in particular, at all, as opposed to just being kind of a vibe

The conflict between philosophy and theology boils down to the relationship between "a group" and "the truth." For philosophy, you hold the group constant and let the truth float. With theology it's the opposite: truth constant, group floats. This is why philosophy ends up apologizing for evil: because the group has evil people in it! The group is full of slave masters and zionists and racists and what have you. But since you hold the group constant and let the truth float, they all get their say; you must deliberate

i'm so bored of saying this, if i can say it right one last time maybe i'll never have to say it again

Abusive systems perpetuate themselves because they are very good at making people afraid to speak out about them, and very good at coopting even basically good people into perpetuating this, out of loyalty to institutions and networks. That's why sociality is the origin of evil And that's why you should distrust anyone who lectures you about how human social relations are what makes us good! It's not the case, that's abuser talk. Valuing your relationships with others is just as likely to lead you into evil as anything else

the problem with climate change economics is that the field believes that it is possible to price the value of existential security in terms of "real" economic measures: that existential security has a price above which it wouldn't be worth purchasing. but does it? the reduction of the value of security to the value of the "wealth of societies" is the adam smith move (read book 5). william nordhaus follows smith in constructing such a tradeoff for climate change. this is the paradigm, and it's a suicidal one

basic thing you need to grasp to get drumm-pilled about money is that money is not a signifier. money does not refer to anything other than itself. it's the other way around: when things are priced, they refer to money! money doesnt refer to "value", values refer to money! everyone wants to turn this on its head and pretend like money is a signifier of something other than itself. that money *refers*. so they twist themselves into metaphysical knots over it.

Economists know the paradigm is insane, they are just secure in their clique. But sometimes phenomena can't be ignored. That's why they keep heterodox econs around and pretend to hate each other, so that they can incorporate ad hoc new ideas in as nonthreatening a way as possible This is a performance whose purpose is to give the impression that the paradigm is open to revision, at its most fundamental level -- the illusion that economics is a living research program.

Don't fall for it. The heterodox economists only goal is to save the paradigm

Current debates in economic theory include:

Is there more than one person in the economy? Do they live forever? Is there more than one good?

https://twitter.com/jcbecker_econ/status/1668814779161489408

These people, as a category, are entirely unserious. When this is what the orthodoxy looks like, the value of heterodoxy, simply for being heterodoxy, is zero.

"heterodox" economists want to have their cake and eat it too, by acknowledging the existence of pricing power but nonetheless continuing to do economics. But the whole point of economics is to make a theodicy by distinguishing relative from absolute goods, and this destroys it Economics as a paradigm has a few fundamental conceptual problems. Chief among them are, how do we distinguish relative from absolute goods, and also the problem that there does not exist a well defined time horizon. These two problems make economics incoherent ab initio

malthus is so advanced lol it's really very cheeky. defend the rentiers by arguing that, yeah, they spend their money on unproductive labor, but that's good because it fixes your crisis of effective demand!

keynesians are just malthusians

and it explains why marx hated him so much

I suspect that most of our conversations are going to become pretty irrelevant pretty fast

https://twitter.com/ExplainThisBob/status/1668074917269581825

A grim reality when you're in the conversations business. But nonetheless

good question. my position here really comes down to burden of proof: should you have to prove something hurts humans in order to stop environmental destruction, or should you have to prove something is within environmental tolerances to do it in the first place?

https://twitter.com/HochmanWoody/status/1659699368692432896

i don't think humans are capable of rationally reducing all problems about ecology to problems about the self interest of humans, so the law should err on the side of privileging the environment itself over human interest.

when i think about "the crisis," I see a chemistry problem, a biology problem, a logistics problem, a politics problem, a theology problem... not sure that i see any "economics" problem anywhere in there, though. What is it? what i'm saying is that if i ever find a problem that needs someone to set the derivative to zero, we'll give y'all a call. until then, grownups are talking

economics is a paradigm that basically constrains relevant phenomena to a space of zero-to-positive sum interactions (comes out of the whig-tory dispute in 18thc english politics).

unfortunately the most important phenomena and problems are about negative sum interactions staple that to a post-christian soteriology about the postmillenarian "march out of poverty" and you've got the stupidest and most dangerous ideology ever produced by humankind (which is saying something)

at this point i'm afraid to ask but what's "the economy"?

https://twitter.com/spignal/status/1659547891491299329

it does get a bit wearying to hear people say "we must do genocide in order to defend a poorly posed measurement of the tax base masquerading as a welfare measure"

but this is why i'm only a petit bourgeois intellectual

claiming to have a secret, more sophisticated view that solves all the problems in the actual literature of your camp only gets you so far

i do look forward to taking a look at this research once you can find time in your busy schedule to lay it out for us.

sincerely, "voice" but the real question is, will you be repudiating the position advanced by Desan, Kelton, Wray, et al?