nathan tankus wrote: > a few things: the idea that money has value because it can buy things is > subject to the problem of infinite regress (I'm reminded of trying to figure > out how god could exist in 2nd grade and saying "well what if a god created > god? then who created that god?). Why do people sell output in state money? > because other people sell output in state money? That's silly.
a lot of people believe that, though I don't. It's not totally silly (though it's close). A common view is that non-commodity money has exchange-value because of social convention, where what people do now depends on what they and others did in the past, so that it's recursive in time. The problem with this is that social conventions can and are broken, especially in a dynamic system such as capitalism. The social convention needs a backbone. It's not natural scarcity (as with commodity money), so it's state-imposed scarcity or what Marx called the forced circulation of it. > ... Re:empirical work and SNLT: I'm of the opinion that energy and biophysical > resource analysis is easier to do empirically and avoids endless stupid > arguments over value theory. It's much easier to show an energy surplus > being generated then convince people surplus value is a valid concept and > get them to understand what forms surplus value takes. It's not perfect > obviously (you need to figure out ways of integrating raw materials, human > knowledge and human skill in well), but I personally see it as a fruitful > avenue. Marx's value theory is about relations among people: who does the work and who benefits from it? An energy surplus is about technology and nature. Those topics are interesting, but it's important to understand social relationships in order to understand which technologies are developed and how they -- and nature -- are used by human beings. Economists often want to measure "value," but if the point is to talk to people about social relations, they've done the measurement for us: they have an idea about how much work they do and the like. -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
