Why Are Economics 101's Usually So Awful?

[Seldokopor]

I mean, has anybody else noticed this where the sort of Econ 101 videos always come off as kind of...Well disturbing? I mean, granted, of course 99.9% of them are basically just saying "here's some bourgeois theory for ya, we're gonna tell ya why the market esh gewd!" but like, the people in them always seem to be in a state of utter and complete inauthenticity. It's as if they don't even wanna be there, and beyond that, apart from Kapitalism 101 and David Harvey's impeccably long lecture series, we don't really have a "Explaining Marxist Economics" series on YouTube or...Anywhere yet, really. I mean, the vast majority of the videos about Marxism that actually get views seem to just be shit like The School of Life's garbage, or some impeccably vague hippy shit that tries (and fails) to explain Marx's concept of alienation, which, honestly, not that important to the ideology itself in the manner the explain it (I.E., the hippyish "state of psychological consciousness" shit that doesn't actually explain the material reasons for that state). Back to the lecture at hand, most of these videos and series' about "explaining" economics just leave me more philosophically in a gape-mouthed daze than knowledgeable. For instance, I remember in the CrashCourse series on econ, the first episode tries to explain opportunity cost by saying shit like "Wanna decrease the cruel treatment of elephants? Well, just euthanize all elephants!" or "Wanna decrease the rate of people incarcerated for murder? Well, just decriminalize murder!" I mean, granted, obviously, I get what they were doing, but it's like, incredibly alienating for the audience to cheerfully crack jokes about people trying to find solutions to the number of death row inmates or animal cruelty in order to "make a point" when they could, y'know, actually just explain the goddamn point or, hey, even better, use a more normal example! I dunno, what do y'all think about the various series' which try and, well, usually fail to teach econ?

[Q]

Moved from /intro to /learning. Welcome!

[Chomskyan]

Economics isn´t the most confusing thing. It´s about commodity production and why to produce x commodity instead of y commodity. Capitalism (bourgeois economics) requires that profit is the primary factor by which commodities should be produced and distributed. Therefore, it´s necessary that capitalists supply a product that generates demand, or that capitalists find a demand in x market, and supply that demand or in the third case, which does happen, they create artificial demands vis a vis advertising, for example.

The goal is to supply a product that is demanded to a consumer, in a way which is profitable.

Now, the problem we as Marxists would have a problem with, is that profit under capitalism isn´t simply an outcome that occurs as a result of commodity production which satisfies a market demand and generates a profit.

In fact, capital itself and profit itself becomes paramount due to the central role it plays in how commodities are produced and sold in a capitalist economy. Due to this, the tendency of capitalism is to not simply exist to produce commodities (this goes back to The Wealth of Nations btw,) but also to produce capital itself, and to accumulate profits as a matter of principle.

What happens as a result is, as Marx understood, the centralization of the large capitalists over and against the small capitalists, exploitation of the working class, dismantling government social policies/laws that cost businesses and (as Lenin realized) imperialism.

That´s because capitalism shifts and evolves from (a) being a matter of commodity production for profit, into (b) a system that exists to produce capital and profit.

Therefore, if a capitalist can profit off of exploitation of workers, imperialism, destroying small businesses, rigging the economy, the laws and the State to support large firms rather than small ones, etc. Then that´s the route they will take.

Capitalism begins as a form of commodity production, which exists to generate capital. It ends as a system that exists solely for the accumulation of profit and capital. The whole development of the bourgeoisie as a separate class and the role of the State in capitalist societies isn´t really about the economics, more like the sociology of capitalism.

Anyway, that´s my economic rant. It´s 5:17am here, so I´m really tired. If I said anything that isn´t amenable, then I made a mistake because I am so damn tired.

[Verneinung]

I mean, has anybody else noticed this where the sort of Econ 101 videos always come off as kind of...Well disturbing?...what do y'all think about the various series' which try and, well, usually fail to teach econ?

I remember being an atheist prior to being a leftist, so my first introduction into Marx was from Christopher Hitchens. And one of the first things I heard him say that started changing my views was when he said: "The essential contention of Marxism is that anyone who says 'the economy', is stupid. To redo a well-known recent saying 'it's the economy, stupid'. If you say 'the economy', you show you're stupid. There's no such thing as the economy."

That is when I started thinking that economics, as a science, was not a serious science. And the basic assumptions, about how things do operate and ought to operate within our society, are wrong.

And you mentioned David Harvey. I'm sure in his lectures on Capital, he mentions how political economy -- which like most subjects, and science in general, back in the day was tied with philosophy -- started becoming economics after Marx, when people had to sort of find new ground upon which to perpetuate an ideology that Marx shook, as well as formulating ideas outside of the standard metaphysical framework and in the more analytic (logical) framework.

I think this can show up some in why Marx considered himself a historical materialist with the explanation in that footnote from Capital:

It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.

But, as far as the videos, they are bad. It is, however, almost a generalized problem with a lot of different subjects. Most of the videos are more for entertainment purposes and general knowledge that is obviously going to reflect conventional ideology.

I liked David Harvey's videos (not just the videos on Capital). Richard Wolff also has videos on these issues, and he comes from an economic background. Chomsky's videos address a lot of issues related to economics. Zizek's videos sometimes include bits on Marx. But, there isn't really any thing on the left to rival the quick, pop, liberal types of videos you were addressing.

So, on the left, you have to go the right way, which really isn't a bad thing. Get educated on the issues by reading, and don't expect someone to do the work for you, which never works as well, regardless. You have to go through the horrible experience of watching a potentially boring, long-winded but legitimate intellectual, talk for an hour, after spending hours reading, as opposed to an actor getting paid to convince you that you can understand how the world works in five minutes.

[Recuperation]

Those videos, specifically the crash course series you mentioned, are generally intended to help a student pass a university econ class. That class will have the same 30 or 40 arbitrary points that students are expected to be able to regurgitate back to their instructors regardless of the institution they're enrolled in. They don't represent the high point of bourgeois economic ideology, they're simply cliff notes for the internet. If anything they say more about the state of the modern University as an institution rather than liberal economics specifically.

One should not have the expectation of gaining a thorough understanding of anything from simply watching youtube videos...

[RedMaterialist]

This is my theory, take it for what it is worth:


The OP mentions "opportunity cost." This, in my view, is a good example of why econ 101 classes are fundamentally exercises in false consciousness and, therefore, so "awful."

Opportunity costs are usually described something like this: you have $10 and spend it to go to a movie. When you pay for the movie what is the cost? You say $10. The bourgeois economists say, no, the cost was $20. How is that possible? Well, when you paid the $10 you had the opportunity to buy something else for $10, therefore you surrendered that second opportunity to buy the movie ticket. That lost opportunity is an additional cost. But, you say, I started out with $10 and I never paid any more than the $10. True, they say, but opportunity costs are economic costs and are not accounting costs. They are, in effect, imaginary costs, involving imaginary money.

So why do the bourgeois economists introduce an imaginary concept into their supposedly very hard-headed economics? The basic problem is that they cannot explain the origin of profit. For a long time they claimed that profit originated in the market. They have mostly given up on that theory.

Marxists have always known that profit or surplus-value originates in the process of production. When a product comes off the assembly line it already contains the surplus value which later, but not always, is realized as profit.

So, the economists have shifted the analysis of profit to the process of production. But that makes sense only if profit derives from a production cost of some kind. The economists already know what the other costs are: wages, supplies, raw materials, etc. And it must be a cost which is not actually paid for, a cost which is not accounted for. And with the theory of opportunity cost they have a perfect solution. It is entirely false, imaginary, and unreal, but it works. Profit is simply based on opportunity cost: It comes from that extra $10 when you went to the movies. (The theater owner could have invested his money in another business opportunity, therefore, that lost opportunity is subtracted from his real costs of doing business. The IRS, by the way, does not recognize opportunity costs as a deduction for determining profit.)

What they still refuse to admit is that there is a very real source of the surplus value: the labor power of the working class put into motion which produces commodities. The capitalist does not pay for the additional value created by the workers, he simply sells it in the market at its true value. And they only pay a wage, which is a fraction of the final value of the product.

When you pay the $10 for the ticket you are paying for its full value; but it costs the movie theater only, say, $5 to "produce." The additional labor is taken from the working class; but they are never paid the $5 for the additional labor.

[Alet]

[...]

You are confusing a lot here. Opportunity costs are not about explaining the origin of profits. Instead, the point is to evaluate the use value of one's potential investment. So for example, when a company has to decide whether it let's its office on a lease or makes use of it itself, the company will choose the option with less "opportunity costs". Or on the level of political economy, it is used to explain Ricardo's comparative advantage. In your example, therefore, it doesn't matter that the theater owner gets 10$. What is of interest is the decision of the consumer - he could have spent 10$ to buy a book to study, so that he successfully finishes his degree, gets a job, earns a lot of money, etc. At least I've never heard someone talking about opportunity costs to explain profits.

[RedMaterialist]

What is of interest is the decision of the consumer - he could have spent 10$ to buy a book to study, so that he successfully finishes his degree, gets a job, earns a lot of money, etc. At least I've never heard someone talking about opportunity costs to explain profits.

When the student buys the movie ticket it costs him $10. He could have spent the money on a book. So, what is the cost to the student of the ticket?

Here are the economists talking about opportunity costs and profit:

Implicit costs also represent the divergence between economic profit (total revenues minus total costs, where total costs are the sum of implicit and explicit costs) and accounting profit (total revenues minus only explicit costs). Since economic profit includes these extra opportunity costs, it will always be less than or equal to accounting profit.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_cost

What they do, in my opinion, is add an imaginary cost to their real costs, thus resulting in profit "always less than or equal to accounting (real) profit." If a firm has a profit of 1M on total costs of 10M, where does the 1M come from? Does it come from unpaid labor? Of course not. It comes from the foregone imaginary opportunity to spend 1M on something else.

This only applies to the owner of the firm. If an employee were to say that they worked 4 hrs at $10 per hour, but the remaining 4 hrs were spent on foregoing the opportunity of earning $20 an hour and the employer therefore owed the worker an additional $80, well, the employee would be looking for another job.

[MathAndMarx26]

Introductory Economics in University are pretty much awful too, or as I read somewhere "Capitalist propaganda". So i guess that it follows that any Ec101 vids attempting to explain it to university students are bound to suck as well. In my case I have to study "Principles of Economics" by Mankiw... a very uncritical and pro-capitalism approach at economics. An example of the bs when he writes that communism inefficient and is a command economy where the government dictates everything. Its scary how a lot of students' first serious encounter with economics is through this book.