Kenneth Arrow?

[infraxotl]

Defining value as "socially necessary labor time on a societal level" is just begging the question.

There is no magic way to get from subjective use-value to calculable objective value a priori beyond voluntary individual revelation of that subjective use-value. This is why Marxism is a joke to modern economists.

Apparently Kenneth Arrow won a nobel prize for proving Marxism wrong, but I've never heard of the guy. I'm not an economist, so I'm in the dark when it comes to neoclassicals. For a guy that allegedly decimated the left, he doesn't seem to be talked about much here, either.

[x371322]

And Barack Obama won a Nobel peace prize. The same guy keeping the U.S. in how many wars now? Good job Nobel people, you clearly know your shit. :thumbup1:

My point: Nobel Prizes apparently don't mean much.

[Paul Cockshott]

Apparently Kenneth Arrow won a nobel prize for proving Marxism wrong, but I've never heard of the guy. I'm not an economist, so I'm in the dark when it comes to neoclassicals. For a guy that allegedly decimated the left, he doesn't seem to be talked about much here, either.


On the contrary this is just why the labour theory of value is a scientifically testable theory and the subjective theory is not. One can subject the predictions of the labour theory of value to empirical statistical tests - and it does pretty well when you do it. You can not do empirical tests on a subjective theory of price since any observed price structure can be held to be compatible with subjective prefences.

[mikelepore]

Kenneth Arrow's big discovery (which I consider trivial and useless), is a mathematical proof that no voting system can operate perfectly, even if we try to improve its ability to measure our desires by asking voters to rank their second choice, third choice, etc. There can be outcomes that the majority don't approve of. A system of having runoffs can fail to converge on a solution that the majority approve of.

I'm not too impressed. I always thought it was obvious that there's a chance that a voting system won't converge on a rational solution.

When I was a little kid I thought of a dilemma that went like this:

Suppose the number of voters is a multiple of 3; one third of the people say their first choice is A, their second choice is B, and their third choice is C; another one third of the people say their first choice is B, their second choice is C, and their third choice is A; and the last one third of the people say their first choice is C, their second choice is A, and their third choice is B. If that happens, no system of runoffs can converge on a solution. It would be like a computer program in an endless loop. The probability of it happening is also negligibly small.

[infraxotl]

I saw that on his Wikipedia page, but I'm not sure how that is relevant in a discussion about value. The person I was talking to also said something about him proving that humans cannot be boiled down to the collective because their individuals, which troubled me since I had absolutely no idea what his point was.

Maybe I was trolled.

[mikelepore]

A lot of people say that someone has "proved Marx wrong." That has been going on for a century and a half. It has no meaning unless they refer to a particular assertion that Marx made, which may or may not be wrong. It's not even meaningful to a say that any person's life-long writing career is wrong.

***


Kenneth J. Arrow shared the Nobel prize in 1972 with another exemplary scholar, John Hicks, for his "pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory".

copied from http://homepage.newschool.edu/het/profiles/arrow.htm

[Agnapostate]

Ah, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem? It was cited against me once in a debate that I lost because I couldn't think of a sufficient response. But has he actually claimed to "destroy Marxism"? I don't see that the Marxian critique of capitalism has anything to do with his work.

Don't get me wrong; Arrow's brilliant, and I was interested to discover that his sister married Paul Samuelson's brother...and produced Larry Summers.