Friday, June 7, 2013

Now my wife is busting my balls

Posted by dkuehn at 10:55 AM
On Marx.

She writes: "how can you skip someone whose writing impacted 30+ years of international politics and understanding the context of the entire former soviet union???"

11 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 7, 2013 at 11:14 AM

    She is correct. I have no love for the man, but if you're going to be doing a history of economic thought, then surely he must be included. Granted, I consider his work less than or other than economic, but he certainly had a dramatic impact on economic thought.

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  2. AbsalonJune 7, 2013 at 1:29 PM

    In science, even failed experiments can be important.

    Marx's greatest importance is probably that for a while he and his followers scared the crap out of the rich in the West so the rich acquiesced in the development of social programs like Social Security and Medicare to try to head off the Marxist threat. As the Marxist threat has receded in the West, the wealthy have taken steps (ongoing) to dismantle social programs.

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    Replies
    1. CurrentJune 7, 2013 at 5:00 PM

      I think the changes you discuss have much more to do with Democracy. In Britain, for example the Welfare State got going because Labour won the 1945 general election.

      The welfare state is hardly receding, look at Obamacare, or at the level of government spending on the welfare state compared to the past. Lefties like yourself are disheartened because you have won any major victories recently, but equally, you haven't suffered any defeats.

      Delete
  3. Andrew BossieJune 7, 2013 at 2:54 PM

    It depend on the goal of you class. If you just want to talk about what you want to talk about--which is a legit way to run a class--then skip Marx. However, if you think the point is for students to have a well rounded introduction to HET then it really isn't legitimate to toss Marx to make room for Austrians.

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  4. The Libertarian Standard BearerJune 7, 2013 at 3:00 PM

    The main problem with Marx is that he wrote so much that you can pretty much anything you want to find in his writings. Ex. toward the end of the Capital Vol. II Marx explicitly states that capitalist nations might escape his dialectic by a combination of Schumpterian growth (he doesn't call it this, but you get my point) and welfare legislation. You might consider instead teaching how people applied Marx to their particular historical settings, because that is ultimately where "Marx" counts more.

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    Replies
    1. The Libertarian Standard BearerJune 7, 2013 at 3:06 PM

      If you're curious, I took an entire undergraduate course dedicated to reading the works of Marx. By the time it was over I wanted to jump off some tall object. ;)

      The me the best general introduction to the way Marx thinks about the world remains _The German Ideology_ (1846). The language is as usual insufferably dense and tortured, but it does have the virtue of being (relatively) short.

      Delete
  5. AnonymousJune 7, 2013 at 4:25 PM

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    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. HedlundJune 7, 2013 at 10:59 PM

      This is the best comment so far in this post.

      Delete
  6. Bob MurphyJune 7, 2013 at 11:04 PM

    If you give in to this, she will run your whole marriage.

    It's just too bad she's right.

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete
  8. WillJune 8, 2013 at 6:18 PM

    I do think that Marx fits rather awkwardly in the narrative that such classes necessarily convey. The usual ways of putting him in context are three. First, he can be presented as taking the classical theory to its logical conclusion, and therby killing it (Henry George can be cast in this role more easily, as he's a less challenging writer). Second, he can be portrayed as a foil for the marginalists (as Bob Murphy suggests). Third, he can be presented as posing problems to which Keynes found the solution (as Heilbroner does -- however, it sounds as though Daniel envisions casting Malthus as the proto-Keynes).

    The problem is that the non-Ricardian/non-Smithian sources of Marx's economic thought -- mercantilists, the Banking School, earlier crisis theorists -- are absent from the narrative, as are most of his more interesting interpreters and followers later on. Of course form itself requires exclusion, but then Marx is too famous to exclude, and so he is left in the narrative as something of an orphan.

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