- An appreciation of Rob A. Bryer, a Marxist scholar of accounting.
- I stumbled upon a You Tube channel and web site for the International Marxist Tendency. I do not know what I think about variants of Trotskyism.
- Alessandro Roncaglia contrasts theories of crises in which tendencies exist in competitive markets towards equilibrium and in which such tendencies need not exist.
- Some have YouTube channels trying to explain the strange ideas that mathematicians have come up with:
- An Infinite Series episode explaining the existence of an infinite number of different size infinities. This PBS show was actually finite.
- Numberphile on the same topic.
- Josh is clear that we have to define how to extend our notation when talking about infinity.
- Bri the math guy on the Saint Petersburg Paradox. He is very much about encouraging the student.
- Not so serious.
- Grant Sanderson on Newton's method and fractals.
Posts
11 years ago
2 comments:
«An appreciation of Rob A. Bryer, a Marxist scholar of accounting.»
As accounting and especially cost accounting are one of my pet peeves I have been considering for a while to object to some of the arguments there, but unfortunately for posterity :-) I am going to skip. However I was just catching up with the posts of a TDS nutter who is mainly a leftoid philosopher who happens to claim to be marxist, and some of his posts are somewhat interesting, for example:
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2023/10/work-for-next-generation.html
«In my paper “The Future of Socialism” I presented a little hypothetical example designed to demonstrate that in the modern Corporation it is impossible, according to the canons of cost accounting, to allocate unambiguously the costs of the Corporation to the several divisions producing different commodities. The implication of this fact, I argued, is that decision-making within the Corporation has become, in its logical structure, increasingly like the political decision-making engaged in by government representatives and can no longer be portrayed simply as determined by market forces. My point was, rather simple mindedly, that something akin to socialism was developing within the womb of capitalism.»
«I had identified for the very first time a fundamental problem in Marx’s account of capitalism – the fact that all of the propositions he asserted about labor value could be demonstrated for corn value, iron value, or wool value. John Roemer, the most mathematically sophisticated Marxist in America, pointed out in a comment to the Journal that Josep Vegara, a Professor of Economics at Barcelona, had published essentially the same theorem in 1979 in a book entitled economía política y modelos multisectoriales.»
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2023/10/work-for-next-generation.html
«In my paper “The Future of Socialism” I presented a little hypothetical example designed to demonstrate that in the modern Corporation it is impossible, according to the canons of cost accounting, to allocate unambiguously the costs of the Corporation to the several divisions producing different commodities. The implication of this fact, I argued, is that decision-making within the Corporation has become, in its logical structure, increasingly like the political decision-making engaged in by government representatives and can no longer be portrayed simply as determined by market forces.»
He rather spoils the argument by continuing:
«My point was, rather simple mindedly, that something akin to socialism was developing within the womb of capitalism.»
Having written earlier:
«In the world of Karl Marx, capital mostly took the form of companies privately owned, companies that were in many cases managed by the individuals who owned them. It was relatively easy to see that the world was divided into landowners, entrepreneurs, capitalists, and workers. [...] As Berle and Means argued in their classic 1932 work The Modern Corporation and Private Property, ownership of private corporations in America has been substantially divorced from control and management of those corporations.»
I find strange that a marxist seems not to realize that the bearded guy himself had mentioned several times the rise of joint stock companies, socialized capitalism, and the incipient movement to management-controller companies, and had based on that his argument for the transition to social capitalism first and communal capitalism later.
«Alessandro Roncaglia contrasts theories of crises in which tendencies exist in competitive markets towards equilibrium and in which such tendencies need not exist»
That would not be so new or notable as written. But given how difficult it is to get "sponsored" Economists to talk "dynamics" instead of "statics" or "comparative statics" perhaps it is a small mercy.
So I have also considered commenting on some points which to me look questionable, but I will probably spare this blog yet another comment.
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