Comments 9

马克思和土耳其机器人

Mar 31, 2014 J. Bradford DeLong

伯克利—经济学家奈都（Suresh Naidu）曾经对我说，马克思经济学有三个大问题。首先，马克思认为增加的投资和资本积累会减少劳动力对雇主的价值，从而降低工人的议价能力。其次，他没能充分领会工人阶级实际物质生活水平的上升可以和利用率的增加齐头并进——也就是说劳动力收入占比越来越小。第三，马克思太纠结于劳动价值论。

第二个和第三个问题是巨大的分析错误。但是，尽管马克思相信资本和劳动之间存在替代而不是互补关系，但这是一个时代错误，从一个多世纪的今天来看，或许算不上错误。

可以这样想。就工作而言，人类有五种核心能力：

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J. Bradford DeLong

Writing for PS since 2002
193 Commentaries

J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was Deputy Assistant US Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, where he was heavily involved in budget and trade negotiations. His role in designing the bailout of Mexico during the 1994 peso crisis placed him at the forefront of Latin America’s transformation into a region of open economies, and cemented his stature as a leading voice in economic-policy debates.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 10 in all 10 Comments on this article

Gerald Silverberg Apr 16, 2014

Brad is barking up the wrong tree here. Machines automating human supervision go right back to Watt's governor and Roberts' self-acting mule, nothing new here with digital computers. See my blog "Brad DeLong: The Mechanical Turk Was a Fraud, But the Watt Governor and the Roberts Self-Acting Mule Weren’t!" at http://silverberg-on-meltdown-economics.blogspot.co.at/2014/04/brad-delong-mechanical-turk-was-fraud.html
G. A. Pakela Apr 9, 2014

You can only get rich if you can produce something that other people want or are willing to pay for your services. My guess is that the dissolute rich who have inherited their wealth is very small in the U.S., although perhaps not insignificant in 19th century Europe. If you got rich by being an entrepreneur, you likely created more jobs and generated more business revenue that in total, dwarfs the income received by that entrepreneur.
John McDonald Apr 5, 2014

Of course Marx was right. Just look at Maoist China, the USSR, North Korea, Communist Eastern Europe, Cuba, pre-Thatcher UK, pre-Reagan US, and...
Well you get the idea.
- Harland Brown Apr 7, 2014
  
  Marx was a historian, not a politician. That is like confusing Adam Smith with Ronald Reagan. The academic may serve as a justification for political action, but they are operating in fundamentally different areas.
RE Mant Apr 5, 2014

Of course Marx was right, the shame was that few others saw the mechanism of the industrial revolution.
Tom Walker Apr 4, 2014

So, Brad DeLong's understanding of Marx's "mistakes" is based on something Suresh Naidu once remarked to him. Too bad Brad didn't bother to read enough Marx to realize that this second-hand account was dead wrong about what Marx supposedly believed. thought, could not grasp or was fixated on.

But I wonder also if DeLong's account of what Suresh Naidu "once remarked" to him are accurate.
Marc Laventurier Apr 2, 2014

It's indicative of the scope and quality of the conventional economist's mind that it misses entirely the philosophical and revolutionary tenor of Marx's work. While scholarship demands a close and critical reading of the lot, Marx really begins just where Brad leaves off...what are you going to do about the social order that supports, at best, distinct inequality and, at worst, exploitation and deprivation? Scholarship indicates that Engels and Lenin, but not Marx, wrote that existing democratic institutions provided the easiest path towards a robust socialism (and I'd add, a system not built on a crumbling foundation of self-reinforcing financialization and artificial, game-theoretic incentives requiring such absurdities as infinite Demand and eternal Growth.) The transition from such late capitalism to a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as described in the Communist Manifesto was predicted to be violent, and be followed by a classless society, a workers' paradise. Other scholarship has suggested that what Marx really had in mind was something like the Nordic welfare state model, probably the most viable known because it doesn't hide structural incentives for short term business profits in public and private deficits, keeping society in thrall to the money game that is capitalism.

(For a treat, check out this brief tune by Randy Newman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GxNZ4FY_sY )
Peter Blok Mar 31, 2014

But what if future labor will consist of knowledge, owned by the rising class of knowledge workers, as the most vital part of this knowledge is tacit? Couldn't this lead to a whole new conceptualisation of Marx' principles?
Val Samonis Mar 31, 2014

RE: engaging in social reciprocity and negotiation – remains limited.

Rather UNLIMITED, as the Internet tends to reduce transaction and collaboration costs to zero and therefore produces unlimited opportunities for the explosion of global entrepreneurship.

Val Samonis
Vilnius U and Royal Roads U
james durante Mar 31, 2014

Marx was not wrong on any of these points. What he WAS wrong about was his idea that the state was completely captured by the bourgeoisie and incapable of delivering any relief to labor. DeLong and all the ortodoxos on this site zealously omit history from their analyses. Incomes and wealth became more evenly distributed roughly from 1920-1970 because of four primary factors: violent clashes between unions and agents of the ownership class (pinkertons, state forces, etc.); the development of labor parties that enacted reforms; a tremendous public commitment to reconstruction after ww ii; and a deep distrust of the employer class following on the devastation of the great depression along with a broad political consensus about social welfare. Now that those are disintegrating or gone inequality is returning with a vengeance and will only be exacerbated by the technical changes coming online.