There are a few thousand other books you should read - going back to Plato. You should also understand linear algebra and multivariate calculus. You should understand the equations in economics - even for the economics you disapprove of. This means working through people like Von Mises and Fridman that are enemies of socialism. If you want a meaningful framework through which economics should be approached mathematically you should read Brian Arthur as he was the first economist (to my knowledge) to apply dif frac calc and path dependencies into models.
So if by educated you mean you've read a few thousand books dating back to Athens and have a highly developed understanding of mathematics, history and economics then cool. If you mean you read some "Marxist" books and you've somehow a great command of human knowledge then go crawl under a fucking rock please.
All hail /u/Yeuph, master of a thousand other books you should read
You should understand the equations in economics - even for the economics you disapprove of. This means working through people like Von Mises and Fridman that are enemies of socialism
i took a macro class. there's not that many equations, and half of them are like profit = revenue - expenses
A lot of them also don't refer to actual numbers, but just relationships (when this go up, that go up, but if true we don't know or care by how much).
economics has this physics envy where they want to have the equations and the graphs and all the trappings, but most of them are just a convoluted way to say some baby brained shit in mathematical notation
even when it comes to microeconomics and behavioural economics, the maths aren't PhD worthy
like, temporal discounting is technically hyperbolic, but you don't care, it's just non-linear
It’s not envy, though, it’s one of the strongest means of manufacturing consent, you make bourgeoise economics seem like a hard science, like physics, so that questioning it seems just as ludicrous as flat-earth or something. It’s a calculated propaganda move.
good point, it seems obvious now that you stated it, but i haven't even considered it
The most complex one is probably the compounding interest rate formula, but that isn't something that you need to know to understand why capitalism is fucking dumb.
A = P (1 + r/n)^(nt)
Here's a more intuitive way to learn that. At 1% compound interest it takes 72 cycles to double your original value. At 2% it's 72/2, at 8% it's 72/8, etc.
Wow. Even their hard formulae can be simplified into 1st grade arithmetic.
Marx wasn't joking when he said all that economy stuff and bookkeeping could be done by the workers with minimal extra education. Hell he was talking about workers who had maybe 2 years of schooling and barely knew how to read. The workers of today are almost entirely highschool educated and absolutely already do everything themselves.
I had to do that in 5th grade. It's literally just a plug and chug equation.
Oh yeah I remember that one! Ironically i didn't learn it even in a traditional economics class, but in an engineering class
Yeah, they're like "Socialist Planning Calculation problem. Simultaneous equation too hard therfore communism wrong, no we will not explain. Socialism no bread"
its still not that many books tho. like wtf else are you gonna do for the next couple decades? just NOT read a book every week?
:meow-tableflip:
You could honestly read the core works of the past 3 millennium in like a year at a leisurely pace of like 3-4 hours a day reading.
Most of those will probably be published in the past 200 years too lol
reading is for fucking nerds, anyone telling you to read theory is a fucking dweeb. if it was that interesting they'd make a movie of it
Yeah, but then they will take away the core meaning , turn into a dumb action movie and introduce an unnecessary love triangle between Marx Lenin And Engels
Not to mention that the way Hollywood does things it will be horribly heteronormative and they will make Lenin a girl and advertise it as a revolutionary expression of grrrlpower
I accidentally spent the last ten years studying Kantian moral imperatives and I am not only no longer a leftist, but my mom thinks I want to fuck her, please help
I accidentally read Russell's Principia by mistake and now I'm a member of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves.
This has to be some kind of plot to keep leftists busy reading books instead of revolting.
I mean yes, please read, but c'mon man
It's a combination of:
- Misguided leftists who think being the One True Leftist in an ever-more exclusive group will get anything done, and
- Cops who want to encourage leftists to form ever-more exclusive groups instead of a mass movement.
As with many problems on the left, there's a mix of intentional and unintentional wrecking.
" Lmfao I have read a lot more philosophy than Marx but as he says "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." "
Yeah sure, that was Dewey's criticism of philosophers of his time too. Its not a stupid observation.
As for calculus you quoted Marx above. Exactly how do you expect people discuss economics beyond a neophyte conceptual level if not with calculus? I mean your argument is refuting the observations of Copernicus; which along with the discovery of Cicero's letters propelled us to a civilization that was able to overcome feudalism and at least acknowledge some basic rights humans have under liberalism.
At some point you need to be able to describe - when talking to educated capitalists or neoliberal economists - how worker-owned economies work. Von Mises criticized this idea heavily; and he did so largely with equations (that I think are bullshit). Still if you want to be taken seriously be serious people you do need ways to describe how such economies operate. Largely this work has never been done IMO and it leads to neoliberals being able to dominate conversations about economics while leftists defer to pure philosophy.
The thing that bothers me about a lot of leftists - and its why I spend so much time reading "enemies of humanity" (like Von Mises) philosophy is because we do need to be able to deal with their criticisms at a high level - as Varofoukis does.
And frankly I do have a hard time listening to people claim how educated they are if they don't understand 300 year old mathematics; if they can at least respect it and acknowledge its importance but are "bad at math" - that's fine. I don't want to dismiss everyone's opinion that couldn't learn mathematics due to our failed educational system that was/is being crushed under capitalism - but we can at least acknowledge the importance.
I'm going to take a class in geometry (Socrates? Ever heard of him you fucking acolyte?) so that I can design a locker that lets me shove this nerd into it forever. Like when you put two mirrors against each other at an angle and it's an endless world of mirrors inside. I shove him into one and there's another locker behind it. Every 10th locker I'll ask if he knows an equation that will make Narnia appear behind the next one to save him. Then it's just another locker regardless of whatever answer he has.
Philosophy is good, but it can make people into weird nerds that think everything is about ideas and arguments, and they forget that most people actually engage with the world by living in it and responding to...material conditions.
What got me is that was after I had described labour as a universal metabolic process that both bees and architects participate in. Biodiversity is baked into that and it only explains where the value comes from in that biodiversity as each species' labour affects its ecosystem.
Nope, they value biodiversity. It's more gooder than badder things like Marxism.
mean your argument is refuting the observations of Copernicus; which along with the discovery of Cicero’s letters propelled us to a civilization that was able to overcome feudalism
yeah....that's why we transitioned from feudalism.
yeesh....and I thought I was dumb.It reminds me of this equally pretentious philosophy student who tried to le debate my simpleton labour theory of value. They never made a coherent argument, only pointing out what kind of philosophical arguments I made with "I can disagree with that". Everything was met with a PHI101 definition what they were looking at. When I asked what their alternative to it was, they said "I value biodiversity". They refused to translate that into some kind of actionable framework beyond "things that reduce biodiversity are bad".
The most gifted child I've seen on reddit. Real square-block-smashed-through-round-hole-because-squares-are-gooder energy.
