| > Saying "economics reject the LTV" is in my mind a bit like saying that physicists reject Newtonian mechanics. No. It is not rejecting it in the way that physicists reject Newtonian mechanics. Instead it is that most modern day economists reject Marxian economics in the same way that astronomers reject flat earthers. The labor theory of value is just completely bunk. Source: https://voxeu.org/article/marx-and-modern-microeconomics "Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics" "Economists, looking back, have not found much to admire in Karl Marx" That is what I mean. Economists just don't take seriously much of anything that Marx has to say on the actual field of economics, on the same level as that of flat earthers. His only insights are maybe into politics. But not the actual field of economics. When economists are saying that he "flunked" economists, as quoted from the article, it is intended to imply that basically nothing that Marx had to say, on actual economics matters at all, and is so ridiculous that we should compare it to conspiracy theories, or flat earthers, or something else that is equally nonsensical. |
the thesis of the article you quote is literally identical to the thesis of my posts -- that Marx is in fact influential on modern economics. Again, I don't want to be confrontational, but... did you read the article you're quoting? The thesis is literally the opposite of what you claim it is.
> "Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics"
The rest of that paragraph reads as follows:
But this column argues that Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labour in the firm is an essential insight for understanding and improving modern capitalism. Indeed, this insight is incorporated into standard principal–agent models of labour and credit markets.
So the article you are quoting for support states that Marxist ideas are incorporated into standard models. Not directly, of course, but there. Kinda like how Newtonian ideas are in some sense incorporated into standard model...
Let's continue.
> "Economists, looking back, have not found much to admire in Karl Marx"
And then the entire next paragraph makes literally exactly the same argument I'm making here -- that Marx is obsolete and even what he was trying to do in terms of "generalized models" is obsolete -- but that he none-the-less does effect modern economics:
These assessments are based largely on our current – and correct in my view – understanding of Marx’s labour theory of value as a pioneering, but inconsistent and outdated, attempt at a general equilibrium model of pricing and distribution. But there is another aspect of his work that has been strongly vindicated by theoretical advances in recent decades: the idea that the exercise of power is an essential aspect of the working of the capitalist economy, even in its idealised, perfectly competitive, state.
TBH, it looks like the best source you can muster for your claims is making substantively exactly the same argument I'm making.... Marx's theories are flawed but clearly continue to effect work-a-day economics to this day.