Thread 17945307

How come they never teach you about Marxism in economics courses in college? Shouldn't they teach non-neoclassical theories of economics to be fair and balanced?

>>17945307 (OP)
Marxism is a sociological framework, not an economic one

>>17945307 (OP)
>How come they never teach you about Marxism in economics courses in college?
I understand that in the study of philosophy Marx is kind of a big deal, not sure why but okay
In economic history he is a complete gadfly, a minor Ricardian, if you want to understand the economics or the economist in particular that Marx admired and tried and failed to iterate on, read Ricardo
I have an economics BA
Marx is a nobody in economics and the 'theories' he proposed are easily disproved nonsense
The reason economics professors, remember, these are econ PhDs, do not spend time on Marx in public or private schools in the US, I can only speak for the US, thats where I went to school, is because it would be a waste of their time and a waste of their students time

>>17945340
I have read very little Marx and come to the conclusion he is a dark magician. This gives some sympathy for the followers of his work. For this reason I could read no more.

>>17945340
China is a Marxist state and they have had 10+ percent growth every year for like 30 years. Meanwhile Western countries struggle with stagnation and achieve 2% growth at best

>>17945355
Awwww
You'll be okay

>>17945307 (OP)
>let me tell you about Marx...
>read his work? why would I do that?
Marx isn't an economist.

Try a history or political science course if you want to learn about Marx that badly.

>>17945355
China also has 1.4 billion people, relative to their population their economic output is actually extremely poor, which you can plainly see with their per capita GDP which is less than the global average and not even in the top 60 worldwide.

>>17945355
China has been fascist for the past 40 years. It's like how the US still calls itself "the United States" despite the federal government effectively erasing the sovereignty of states after the civil war. It means nothing. It's just a business name they grew attached to even if they're an entirely different abomination.

>>17945372
Posted like someone who has never left their state, or finished high school, or does not know about literally anything.

>>17945377
Harsh

what?

you want people to realize they live in a pyramid economic abuse scam or something??

>>17945355
I don't think they teach Marxism much in economics programs though. I've heard (but can't confirm) it's much like everywhere else. They do have separate Marxism departments at universities though. That's an interesting thing.

>>17945372
you don't know what fascist means

I'm reminded of the CEO from Network. What do you think Chinese economists talk about in their meetings? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions, just like we do.

>>17945562
Are you saying this from experience or just from speculation?

You need to understand: Mainstream economics is a lot like mainstream medicine today.

We’re long past the era where everyone was divided into “schools” of what they regarded as true and what was regarded as false.

An economic hypothesis that has been empirically tested and proven and repeated is simply folded into the body of economics. Just like how a drug or treatment or pathogen empirically tested and proven and repeated is simply folded into the body of medical science.

Marginal utility and subjective value (Austrians) are mainstream. Rational expectations and market efficiency (Chicago) are mainstream. Keynesian ideas of sticky wages and the role of demand management are mainstream.

What’s NOT in the mainstream are the claims that failed empirical testing or proved too unfalsifiable. In that sense, “schools” function now more as intellectual brands or rhetorical communities than as truly separate paradigms.

Herbal treatments that actually work become drugs. Surgery that demonstrably improves outcomes becomes standard of care. The remainder that doesn’t withstand testing becomes “alternative medicine”.

Fringe schools depend on an all-or-nothing identity. They don’t want their validated insights absorbed piecemeal, because then their brand vanishes. For example, some Austrian thinkers are frustrated that mainstream econ uses subjective value but rejects their more radical methodological individualism. In alternative medicine, many practitioners resist selective adoption because the identity is bound up with the whole system (like homeopathy, vitalism, qi, humors, etc.). To them, picking out the parts that work feels like betraying the philosophy.

Non-specialists often imagine that mainstream fields are willfully “ignoring” certain schools. That’s why scientists and economists roll their eyes at such complaints: it’s like demanding they revisit flat Earth theory after already incorporating all valid geographic insights.

>>17946115
If mainstream economics is so scientific, why tf can't economists just control inflation the way engineers can come up with heaters and AC units to control temperature and humidity?

>>17946115
Marxism actually went through the same filtering process as Austrian, Chicago, etc. but with the addendum that it’s not just an economic theory, it’s also a political ideology. That distinction matters for why parts of it got absorbed while the majority is rejected.

Even economists who reject Marxist politics acknowledge that Marx made several foundational contributions. Labor Theory of Value was rejected (prices are not determined by labor input), but the idea that firms capture a surplus beyond wages influenced modern theories of profit, bargaining, and exploitation. Modern labor economics, public choice, and inequality studies integrate the idea that different groups (labor, firms, investors, government) have conflicting interests. His insistence that economic structures evolve through stages influenced economic history, development economics, and even Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction.”. Empirically, Marx’s concern about firms tending toward monopoly inspired later industrial organization theory and antitrust economics.

Unlike Austrian economics or Keynesianism, Marxism is a total worldview with moral, political, and revolutionary claims. That makes it hard for mainstream economics to “just take the useful bits” without implicitly rejecting the ideological package. And that ideological identity is what keeps Marxism alive outside the mainstream, like how alternative medicine persists as a system rather than as individual treatments.

You could compare it in this sense to “Islamic economics” or “Christian economics”.

>>17946129
Economists are like meteorologists or climate scientists. They study the system, build models, run experiments, and forecast outcomes. They can often tell you WHY inflation is happening, what factors matter most, and what the likely effects of certain policies will be.

Policymakers are like the engineers with the thermostat. They actually have their hands on the controls like interest rates, government spending, taxes, and regulations. But their tools are slow, blunt, and often politically constrained.

An engineer has precise tools and a closed system (turn knob -> air temp changes in minutes). A policymaker has crude tools and an open system full of humans who REACT to the tools themselves. Economists can tell policymakers “If you turn the knob this far, you’ll probably cool things down by this much, but only after 6–18 months, and if no other shocks hit in the meantime.”. Policymakers then face trade-offs: you can bring inflation down, but you might cause a recession, raise unemployment, or trigger political backlash.

Economists explain the system. Policymakers steer it. But the steering wheel is loose, the brakes are slow, and the passengers in the backseat keep fighting over which way to turn and how fast to go and how loud the music should be and where they actually wanna stop for lunch.

>>17945355
>>17945359
>China is a Marxist state

>>17945340
I get where you’re coming from. In mainstream U.S. economics departments, Marx really doesn’t play a central role. The standard neoclassical curriculum largely skips over him, aside from a quick mention in a history of thought class. But that doesn’t mean he’s a “nobody” in economics.

Marx took Ricardo’s labor theory of value and built it into a much broader framework about capital, accumulation, and crisis. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, his surplus value theory, ideas about concentration of capital, and analysis of crises influenced generations of economists and policymakers. Keynes, Schumpeter, Kalecki, and even modern people like Piketty are all in some way reacting to problems Marx put on the table.

It’s also worth noting that economics isn’t just about neoclassical price theory. In political economy, development studies, and economic history, Marx is still widely studied. Outside the U.S., many programs give him a lot more weight.

So yes, if you’re coming strictly from a mainstream U.S. econ BA/PhD perspective, Marx won’t seem central. But dismissing him as just “easily disproved nonsense” ignores the fact that entire fields of social science and a big chunk of the history of economics were shaped in dialogue with his work.

>>17946175
>marxism is when no gucci
why do you think there wouldn't be any commodities in a marxist society?

>>17946963
Marx in this aspect is regarded by economists and sociologists a bit like how Sigmund Freud is regarded by modern psychiatrists. Or how Aristotle is regarded by modern Scientists.

Wrong about almost everything, but got the ball rolling on some pretty significant topics.

>>17947003
That’s a fair analogy, but I’d tweak it. Unlike Freud who is almost entirely discarded, or Aristotle who is read as history, Marx still has categories like class, accumulation, and crisis that scholars actively use today. So it’s less that he “got the ball rolling” and more that his framework still shapes some of the debate.

>>17946084
Just anecdotally. You can look up people online talking about it. It's basically the same as what's taught in bog-standard mainstream Western economics courses, more or less uniform around the world. (But everybody in China also regardless of their major takes some required Marxism classes.) In reality, China has a mixed economy that's pretty much capitalism plus some other stuff, and while they have a lot of state-owned industries still they basically run according to the same principles as capitalist firms.

>>17946131
Ray Dalio is an interesting example of a billionaire founder of the world's largest hedge fund who has been influenced by (parts of) Marx.

>One of the many wonderful questions raised by Ray Dalio’s work-in-progress Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail is whether Dalio, multibillionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, may actually be... a Marxist? I don’t mean that as a comprehensive claim—Dalio is a macroeconomist and self-proclaimed capitalist, so it would be hard to infer what he thinks about, say, the microeconomics in Book I of Das Kapital—but I don’t mean it superficially either. Yes, Dalio’s book eulogizes Marx as “a brilliant man” whose theory of dialectical materialism “sounds right to me,” and yes, Dalio begins one sentence with the helpful heuristic to “Put yourself in Mao’s position,” and yes, Dalio follows that sentence by declaring that “it makes sense why Mao was a Marxist and pursued his version of Marxist policies.” But this is also a book that venerates Paul Volcker and Henry Kissinger and runs from the shadow of political polarization, so, well, I don’t mean to say that Dalio is a Marxist in prescriptive terms.

>Rather, I mean that Dalio is something of a Marxist in diagnostic terms—that is, how he sees history unfolding in response to the contradictions of capitalism.
https://davidphelps.substack.com/p/ray-dalio-marxist