Questions tagged [economics]

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Looking for Marxist or Frankfurt-style critiques of advertising

There is undoubtedly a great deal of cultural criticism of advertising, but I'm looking for a certain angle on the topic. For Marx, the commodity is the primary "atom" of capitalist society ...
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What is meant by Georg Simmel’s philosophy of money?

I am reading a book about how money works that contains a brief summary of Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money: “Published in 1900, German sociologist Georg Simmel's book The Philosophy of Money looked ...
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Help understanding Marxist critique of capitalism

According to the Wikipedia page on Marxist economics, one criticism Marx had of capitalism is that the capitalist model of employment creates a difference between the value the workers create and the ...
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Is the extraction of surplus value sufficient for the necessity of revolution?

Is the extraction of surplus value sufficient for the necessity of revolution? As I understand it, the extraction of surplus value is: the essential component of the "immiseration" of the ...
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Understanding Inflation at philosophical level?

I came across this sentence at random "The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $23 billion in ...
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Isn't socialism a form of democracy?

When looking at the opposites of socialism, it was pointed out that democracy is an opposite. If socialism is a system advocating that the means of production and distribution be owned or regulated by ...
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Is socialism only one half of a dichotomy? [closed]

If it is only one half of a dichotomy, you could say the other half is capitalism. But is there a midway between the two? Or are there part socialist, part capitalist philosophies?
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What determines the value of money?

The value of money can be defined as the cost to produce it. It costs, say, 1, to produce 10 000 000 coins or notes, while digital money costs virtually nothing. Of course, it can also be that it ...
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-1 votes
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Is society deliberately limiting opportunities for a segment of the population to provide workers? [closed]

Whether deliberate or not, given that society needs people to do unpleasant jobs, there must be a way to induce people to take such jobs. People who do such jobs do not make enough money to educate ...
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Was John Locke an intellectual father of "economic growth" as a social goal?

I am researching on the origin of the "economic growth imperative". In this book it says: A central theme of Locke's political teachings is growth; a theme which will not only be central to ...
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What is production [closed]

In ecological economics production means "process of transformation energy/matter into another energy/matter". So What is production in philosophy ?
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Is Economy people's lives?

If we see Economy as a system of making and trading things of value (goods/services), can we correctly affirm that it is human life? I can see that, making/trading those values depend on human life, ...
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Epistemology, Scientific Method and Formal Theory, Economics

Why is Economics considered not to apply the scientific method in its pure form, nor develop scientific theories and how so? Trade and Government policies(For political economics/positive political ...
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Philosophers on alternatives to capitalism and communism

Philosopher Karl Marx envisioned an economic system called communism to fight the abuses suffered by working class people during the industrial era. The exploitation of man by man and the excessive ...
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3 votes
2 answers
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Might Marx's argument in Das Kapital be less about justice and exploitation than it is about disenfranchisment?

Might Marx's argument in Das Kapital be less about justice and exploitation than it is about disenfranchisment? I specifically mean his analysis of work, the falling rate of profit, and movement of '...
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2 votes
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What is the strongest link made in the philosophical literature between privacy and civil liberties?

What is the strongest link made in the philosophical literature between privacy and civil liberties? In particular, an analysis which eschews 'democracy', or separates out democracy from 'civil ...
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3 votes
4 answers
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Can the affirmation "All taxes are theft" be considered an a priori truth?

Hans Hermann Hoppe is a popular Economist from the Austrian School whose central ideas seem fundamentally right. However, I see him as having very poor argumentation skills and more than once I read ...
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Marxism - primary contradiction of capitalism

After writing a long post, i decided to keep only the summary : I understand that in the marxist framework a mode of production is constituted by : the relations of production the productive forces ...
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A universal game [closed]

In this question by "metagame" I mean a game which functions to create the rules of a sub-game. Is there a universal metagame that would allow to create any game (including itself). Such game would ...
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Which philosopher first claimed that social impatience is ethically indefensible

Partha Dasgupta's book Economics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007) contains a chapter on sustainable economic development. Dasgupta here writes that, Philosophers have ...
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Did 20th-century Marxists acknowledge that the "social science" predictions of Marxism were wrong?

In this video, starting at 5:36, Stephen Hicks claims that there are three central "social science" Marxist predictions, which I would sum up as follows: Over time, in any capitalist society, The ...
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Who Are the Most Prominent Modern Socialist Thinkers?

Who Are The Ten Most Prominent Modern Socialist Thinkers? (Big Tent: Social Democrats, Socialists, Communists, etc. are all acceptable).
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Source for history of thoughts with their historical and economical context

I recently took an introductory history course and there we visited a lot of modern philosophers and thinkers and briefly studied their influence on the society and the influence of their life ...
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Laissez-faire capitalism does not work ... so why do some "philosophers" ascribe to it [closed]

On topics such as ethics and how a society should be structured, many "philosophers" (Objectivists, etc) propose a laissez-faire system with little to no government intervention and a largely free-...
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It is posible a Resourced Based Economy? [closed]

When I refer to a resource-based economy, I refer to the proposal of the groups of The Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/
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Would an universal basic income eliminate exploitation (a la Marx) in capitalism?

Marx's argument in the theory of exploitation is that capitalists do not need to sell their labour power in the market in order to live, whereas workers need to do so. As such, workers are not really "...
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Ownership of the commons

A recent article from The Guardian explores the ambitions of the Luxembourg government in developing commercial space activity in the country. This move was partly enfranchised in the law. As the ...
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Time dynamics of probability (from a game theoretic point of view)

Many commenters on this question about a property of a random 2x2 matrix seem to assume that there is no such thing as a random 2x2 matrix. We are talking here about a matrix with integer or rational ...
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2 answers
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Authors who think Capitalism encourage psychopathic behaviour? [closed]

When morality and ethics is a problem to a great deal of people is it safe to assume that capitalism rewards those individuals with no empathy or remorse who are good at emulating to have them? e.g....
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6 answers
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What is Money, (not money)?

Money plays a major role in our experience and I find that very few people explore the idea of what it is. This question concerns Form. Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally ...
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Ethical problems related to trading for profit

Let us for the sake of clarity define making of a profit as being the trade of that which is given being of lower value than that which is demanded and received. In general, and not withstanding ...
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How does Marx show that capitalism is a kind of slavery?

indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on ...
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Does capitalism have an end goal?

Occasionally I find that things such as "incentives" in a capitalist economy are as if they would be directed to a certain outcome or certain outcomes. E.g. that profit incentives matter only in so ...
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Is it unfair for the rich to pay more total taxes ( not by percentage ) than the poor? [closed]

Is there a compelling ethical argument why the rich ought to pay more in income taxes than the poor? For the purposes of this discussion let's assume "the rich" legally earned their wealth through ...
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What should the value of a private sector company tell us?

This question bridges both philosophy and economics. Please see original question on the economics website, it includes extra comments and discussion. Looking for critique and reading suggestions: ...
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Are there philosophical arguments for moral risk avoidance?

It is observed that often, people tend to dislike risk (economists say that people tend to be "risk-averse"). For example, consider two Gambles X and Y. Gamble X involves a prize of $1 with ...
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5 votes
1 answer
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Libertarian "thought experiment" about planned economy

I once stumbled upon a text from a libertarian (I believe it was a philosopher) setting out a thought experiment to show that even a planned economy run by "omniscient bureaucrats" would produce ...
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Philosophy of Chankya/Kautilya [closed]

I have heard and also read a little that in 500 B.C. an Indian genius Chankya, caused the fall of Magdha empire, and made a street guy The king named Chandragupta. He was an exceptional strategist and ...
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Why does the concept of the division of labour put forth by Adam Smith continue to be analytically significant?

Is it because the modernity is defined through the extent of division of labour? Also, how tightly has this concept integrated with our current society and how is it affecting it? What measures can be ...
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The culture industry and division of labour

The division of labour is the specialisation of cooperating individuals who perform specific tasks and roles. It is thought of as perhaps supremely alienating by Marxists, though I never found out ...
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6 votes
5 answers
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What is an example of human labour being the exclusive source of surplus value

Marx's labour theory seems to define surplus value as being produced exclusively from human labour. One discussion of this concept stated: Machinery, and tools of production do not create surplus ...
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How to approach the study of PPE for the non-academic layman?

I'm a non-academic type (I left school at 16) who is also dyslexic with attention deficit problems. I've recently become interested in the study of philosophy, politics and economics (To answer ...
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Why is taxation opposed by libertarians?

I have recently learnt that taxation is opposed by libertarians and that they the cite the principle of self - possession to justify this, an interesting argument along these lines equated taxation to ...
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Economics, State and Violence

I think it was the continental sociologist Weber who defined a State as that organ of a nation that has a monopoly of violence. Economics, at least what minute fraction I know, appears to ignore ...
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The mass surveillance of price and the invisible hand?

In Hayeks Road to Serfdom, he distinguishes between central planning & decentralised planning. And states that decentralised planning makes the most sense, since the available information is too ...
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Whats the difference between fixed and constant capital?

Rosa Luxembourg in The Accumulation of Capital describes & investigates the constant and fixed capital of Marx & Smith respectively. With Marx, she says Constant capital is the value ...
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Does this count as a critique of Marxs Labour theory of value?

Marxs theory of value uses the input of Labour as determinining Production Value. But what if we can do away with Labour? For example, consider a perfectly automated factory producing mugs. This ...
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What responses have there been to Mises' theory of praxeology?

In his treatise Human Action, Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises attempts to establish economics not as an empirical science, or a mathematical theory, but as a synthetic a priori endeavor he ...
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What are the Moral Sentiments of Capitalism according to Adam Smith?

Despite his legacy as the father of capitalism and authority on jurisprudence especially toward the end of his career, Adam Smith is usually known in ethics and philosophy classes by his classic The ...
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