
Can Low Interest Rates Hold Off Recession? (With Richard Wolff) - effie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJCXnqR6wU8
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anm89
This guy has never once published in a respectable journal in his entire
career and would get laughed out of any room of economists.

By doing the podcast rounds and being vocal he's creating the impression for
the uninformed that his views are respected within the field whereas in
reality you could count on one hand all of the economists who take heavy
influence from Marxism in all of US academia.

Marxism is an absolute joke in economics circles and has nothing interesting
to say about modern economics.

I would be much gentler on Marx as a sociologist, I think he had some good
insights, but he did not contribute anything to economics.

~~~
effie
Prof. Wolff may be a Marxist and outsider in "economics circles", but this
does not discredit him. Just read on him here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Wolff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Wolff)

Macroeconomics is not exact science, all theories there are quite weak when
compared to exact sciences. Given the increasing inequality and wage
stagnation in the West and life quality increase in China in last four
decades, I think listening to him is not a waste of time.

~~~
anm89
So your argument is that because the whole field is junk credibility doesn't
matter anyway?

Economics may be far from a science but that doesn't mean all ideas are equal
within it.

Marxist economics happen to be one of the few ideas that is so obviously
ridiculous that it fails to meet basic tests for applicability to the real
world that other theories meet even if they are all unprovable and subjective.

As an aside everytime it has been tried at scale millions have died awful
deaths.

~~~
effie
My argument is that orthodox economics and its application in the West have
shown their limits so other ideas cannot be easily dismissed.

Yes, failures of the Soviet Union are known. Totalitarian state murdering its
own people, systemic corruption, weak exports and weak consumer goods, and of
course, the arms race, made the quality of life in SU fall beyond that in the
West significantly.

Not that it proves anything about marxist ideas. In the beginning, marxist
ideas were incredibly successful in Soviet Union. Prof. Wolff account of the
history of Soviet Union is more informed and more interesting than "millions
awful deaths".

Also, in China we have an example of how big socialist state can work
economically, those mistakes about consumer goods and exports were fixed.

