His mathematics isn't wrong, exactly. It just hurts his case rather than helps because it gives the wrong impression. Take LTV, for example. In the past, it's been dismissed, nearly out of hand, by both marginalists and tons of Marxist economists because Marx says that the price of commodities should represent the aggregate sum of exploited labor value, i.e. surplus value. This is obviously not how commodities are actually priced and it's much more complicated. So was Marx a big dummy who missed the obvious? Of course not: he's using a different interpretation of most of these terms than a naive English reader immediately expects and is making a critique of the non-degenerated form of capitalism described by classical economics. But this is obscured by his decision to simplify it into math, on top of his language. That math sure does look like an economic model you'd want to make predictions with, but you generally cannot because the quantities are difficult to measure and real-world systems don't behave exactly like that, nor was Marx saying they did.
He does this kind of thing repeatedly. It would have been far better to focus on clarity of language and concept than to embed the math with which he was enamored. He showed us too much of his thought process and it ended up confusing probably 90% of the people who read Capital.
Varoufakis gets things about Marx wrong, but some of his criticisms on this topic are valid. And basically every neo-Marxist economist's criticism derives from this sort of interpretation problem due to a focus on trying to find prescriptive economic value from Marx's models. Roemer introduced game theory and agent-based simulations, for example, that led to artifacts like exploitation, but he naturally used a modified model so that it could be more concrete and relevant.
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Highest stage of liberalism is never elaborating on a post
It's literally the history of mathematics after Marx.
Just because someone is an absolute lad doesn't mean that they magically have access to future developments in knowledge.
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His mathematics isn't wrong, exactly. It just hurts his case rather than helps because it gives the wrong impression. Take LTV, for example. In the past, it's been dismissed, nearly out of hand, by both marginalists and tons of Marxist economists because Marx says that the price of commodities should represent the aggregate sum of exploited labor value, i.e. surplus value. This is obviously not how commodities are actually priced and it's much more complicated. So was Marx a big dummy who missed the obvious? Of course not: he's using a different interpretation of most of these terms than a naive English reader immediately expects and is making a critique of the non-degenerated form of capitalism described by classical economics. But this is obscured by his decision to simplify it into math, on top of his language. That math sure does look like an economic model you'd want to make predictions with, but you generally cannot because the quantities are difficult to measure and real-world systems don't behave exactly like that, nor was Marx saying they did.
He does this kind of thing repeatedly. It would have been far better to focus on clarity of language and concept than to embed the math with which he was enamored. He showed us too much of his thought process and it ended up confusing probably 90% of the people who read Capital.
Varoufakis gets things about Marx wrong, but some of his criticisms on this topic are valid. And basically every neo-Marxist economist's criticism derives from this sort of interpretation problem due to a focus on trying to find prescriptive economic value from Marx's models. Roemer introduced game theory and agent-based simulations, for example, that led to artifacts like exploitation, but he naturally used a modified model so that it could be more concrete and relevant.
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I'd say those Twitter uses are probably confused because Marx's understanding of differentiation was accurate and well-framed.