The complaints of inflation are insane.

That's no radio, eh?
 
Hygro said:
I’ve read much of treatise in money on that subject, it’s good but not totally comprehensive. But it is good. It has enough history and ties is very solidly to theory while making fun of other economists for being wrong, the trifecta. And of course a bit of Polanyi but not on the origins of money so very seriously point me in the right direction.
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Just read The Great Transformation. I forget which chapter it is but it isn't long. I have a .pdf of it if you need. The origin of money point comes in when he identifies money as one of the fictitious commodities, along with land and labor (fictitious in the sense that they are not goods produced for market but capitalism treats them like they are). More specifically, the international gold standard was the institution that did this - but as Polanyi points out, money is in fact state tokens designed to facilitate tax payments.
 
Lexicus said:
That hasn't stopped bourgeois-ideology economists from ignoring all the evidence and continuing to put the barter fairy tale in economics textbooks, of course.
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That's because the mainstream ruling political class still to this day heavily relies of "Whigish History". A specific mode of historical thought which serves as classically liberal (but really any kind of liberal including progressive and neoliberalism as well) propaganda with a sort of established "Western Canon"

Starting with Mesopotamia/Egypt, followed up with pagan/plus later Christianized Greek & Latin literature parallel to and alongside the Bible, general disdain for the middle ages with comically non historical depictions of the era which over exaggerate how backwards everything became (to justify the Renaissance & later Enlightenment and crap on the previous royal/noble/priestly Catholic classes which were the historical arch rivals of the classical liberals), followed with total glorification of the Renaissance & Enlightenment and the very revolutions which brought the liberal political class into power (who ends up creating this very narrative), then immediately transitions into one's preferred modern European or North American (plus Australia & New Zealand) nation state and why it's so glorious, culminating with the fusion of all technological/social progress through additional glorification of the industrial mode of production created by capitalism, the world wars and cold war creating a nice break from all this while lampooning leftist thoughts of the time plus oversimplifying them, and finally finishing in a bit of future speculative doomerism speaking about such things spiraling out of control like the war on terror, human rights being denied/overturned, climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, income inequality, etc. Then immediately offers a glint of hope to the kiddos by suggesting that big tech & wall street will solve all of these problems they just "need you" to be recruited and "be active" and "finish the rest of your studies" in order for you to do your part and help Lord Zuckerberg & Lord Bezos save the World!
 
Lexicus said:
Reminds me of the bit in The Simpsons where they're driving to Itchy & Scratchy Land and the radio is nothing but different guys going "the seven signs of evil"
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I'd laugh, but if I shared how similar I think the radio sounds to the east or around Rockford, I'd probably be "being racist" of some sort or other.

Man, poor Rockford. They've been getting it worse than me for a long while, now.
 
Joij21 said:
That's because the mainstream ruling political class still to this day heavily relies of "Whigish History". A specific mode of historical thought which serves as classically liberal (but really any kind of liberal including progressive and neoliberalism as well) propaganda with a sort of established "Western Canon"

Starting with Mesopotamia/Egypt, followed up with pagan/plus later Christianized Greek & Latin literature parallel to and alongside the Bible, general disdain for the middle ages with comically non historical depictions of the era which over exaggerate how backwards everything became (to justify the Renaissance & later Enlightenment and crap on the previous royal/noble/priestly Catholic classes which were the historical arch rivals of the classical liberals), followed with total glorification of the Renaissance & Enlightenment and the very revolutions which brought the liberal political class into power (who ends up creating this very narrative), then immediately transitions into one's preferred modern European or North American (plus Australia & New Zealand) nation state and why it's so glorious, culminating with the fusion of all technological/social progress through additional glorification of the industrial mode of production created by capitalism, the world wars and cold war creating a nice break from all this while lampooning leftist thoughts of the time plus oversimplifying them, and finally finishing in a bit of future speculative doomerism speaking about such things spiraling out of control like the war on terror, human rights being denied/overturned, climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, income inequality, etc. Then immediately offers a glint of hope to the kiddos by suggesting that big tech & wall street will solve all of these problems they just "need you" to be recruited and "be active" and "finish the rest of your studies" in order for you to do your part and help Lord Zuckerberg & Lord Bezos save the World!
Click to expand...

I guess it's tangentially related but specifically we're talking about the theory that people were bartering everything, until they eventually noticed that gold was valuable and relatively compact compared to, say, barley, and starting using gold to stand in for everything else, then eventually the state standardized these units of gold with stamps, inventing coins. This was known to be completely false by the 1930s at latest. In principle neoclassical economics still conceptualizes the economy as a vast barter network that is only mediated by money with credits and debts only functioning to allow transactions to be delayed in time.

All of this is false and it is why most neoclassical economists believe that financial crises are black swan events unpredictable by anyone.
 
Lexicus said:
This is a bit of a simplification. Incidentally, Graeber's argument here follows pretty closely Polanyi's in The Great Transformation. The barter-origin theory of money was blown out of the water by the deciphering of mesopotamian clay tablets which clearly demonstrated that money and credit had existed and been used for thousands of years before the invention of precious metal coins. That hasn't stopped bourgeois-ideology economists from ignoring all the evidence and continuing to put the barter fairy tale in economics textbooks, of course.

As I recall he doesn't really advance a theory of the origins of cities, but whatever one's position on that matter it is rather difficult to imagine turning back the clock on agriculture and urban civilization at this stage.
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Yes, it's a simplification, but not much of one I think. Still you can see from the line I draw to his position on cities that I can perceive a whole argument there. But I admit that's my projection, he probably didn't waste time on the "where did cities come from" question likely for the reason you stated.
Hygro said:
Crezth I wish you were here regularly to have read my posts from like 2013-2017 you would find it so amenable!
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Well... maybe that can be something to look forward to, even if we don't know it yet.
 
Farm Boy said:
That's no radio, eh?
Click to expand...
Ok you aren’t literally homeless, that’s struggling eh?

Of course struggling is struggling. And of course 90% static across the frequency modulated spectrum is a collapse of radio.

The remainder is the most agreed upon music, the greatest guitar solos and anthems in the pop charts, the last bastion. Everything else folded. Just like Apple is not going anywhere, neither is Journey. But we don’t just measure by the fewest biggest winners do we?
 
Lexicus said:
Briefly reading through the essay again, it looks to me (assuming you read the same essay) like you got triggered by it and then went fishing on Graeber's wikipedia page for stuff you could use to attack him. I wouldn't describe the essay as brilliant but your interpretation of it is silly.
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Yes, after I read the rant, I thought I should at least find out more about him before I remarked. I missed that he had died. I did not go to Wiki, but to his own page. It has his story in his words.

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullfeathers-jobs-a-work-rant/
 
Hygro said:
Ok you aren’t literally homeless, that’s struggling eh?

Of course struggling is struggling. And of course 90% static across the frequency modulated spectrum is a collapse of radio.

The remainder is the most agreed upon music, the greatest guitar solos and anthems in the pop charts, the last bastion. Everything else folded. Just like Apple is not going anywhere, neither is Journey. But we don’t just measure by the fewest biggest winners do we?
Click to expand...
I frequently say I have it pretty good. But I'm still sore and have trouble paying for heath insurance. I'm tired of comparing tax rates. I'm just pooped. If you're comparing people who are on some anti work garbage brained place on reddit, I don't think I even know what to make of them.
 
Lexicus said:
All of this is false and it is why most neoclassical economists believe that financial crises are black swan events unpredictable by anyone.
Click to expand...

More likely because of the tail end of Whigish History which teaches that progress through industry and new technological methods, byproducts of capitalism, will self rejuvenate the system and progressively make it better whereby regular market crashes of the business cycle will become less and less severe until eventually they won't happen anymore or simply be a "non event" from the perspective of the individual who's middle class or lower. Even going further by proclaiming that other negative side effects such as income inequality and climate change too will be solved by capitalistically funded increased "tech leveling".

In other words Elon Musk will quite literally save us all.

This is the basis of the entire public education system throughout most of the West by the way. With big tech & financier messianism being the West's ultimate forward thinking outlook on reality. 😉
 
The assumption that money reflects barter and automatically adjusts to correctly price all the real goods and services available precedes discussions of capitalism as a system let alone the even later of referring to "the economy" as a singular unit, let alone distinct technology as the reliable driver of the growth of the economy.
 
Nick723 said:
Sorry, but everyone knows money originated when the first civilisation researched the ‘currency’ technology.
Click to expand...

I like to view the "currency" tech as representing your civ achieving a single standardized unit of exchange (that's tiered via increasingly higher denominations like a penny, nickel, denarius, etc.) rather than individual merchants creating their own seals and specialized weights, or a reliance on a valuable foreign currency which the localized merchants all prefer over their own colloquial weights and units.

In other words it represents the ancient/classical state exerting more centralized power and authority via reforms that create a state imposed standard of currency units in order to more efficiently track domestic values of goods within the domestic economy, which then in turn allows for easier taxation methods (hence the market building made available from the tech in civ 4 yielding increased wealth/tax % in the early game), finally resulting in more logistical supplies from the increased more effective tax collection method to create ever larger armies for the state to then further increase it's power (both of its own people, since soldiers acted as cops for the state in ancient times, and those of the periphery)
 
Lexicus said:
Kalecki argued this, not Polanyi afaik. Kalecki argued that social democracy with full employment etc would be more profitable for capitalists but capitalists would prefer to maintain their position of social superiority than make more profits thus eventually and inevitably leading to crisis.
Click to expand...

You're correct, I confused the two names. It's in Kalecki 's Political Aspects of Full Employment.
 
image0.jpeg
 
Add lunch and double the savings.
 
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