Reddit reviews The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers, Seventh Edition

I'm going to put a couple passages from Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers here to try and answer you.

>[Marx] sets the stage. We enter a world of perfect capitalism: no monopolies, no unions, no special advantages for anyone. It is a world in which every commodity sells at exactly its proper price. And that proper price is its value—a tricky word. For the value of a commodity, says Marx (essentially following Ricardo), is the amount of labor it has within itself. If it takes twice as much labor to make hats as shoes, then hats will sell for twice the price of shoes. The labor, of course, need not be direct manual labor; it may be overhead labor that is spread over many commodities, or it may be the labor that once went into making a machine and that the machine now slowly passes on to the products it shapes. But no matter what its form, everything is eventually reducible to labor, and all commodities, in this perfect system, will be priced according to the amount of labor, direct or indirect, that they contain.

...

>How, asks Marx, can profits exist in such a situation? If everything sells for its exact value, then who gets an unearned increment? No one dares to raise his price above the competitive one, and even if one seller managed to gouge a buyer, that buyer would only have less to spend elsewhere in the economy—one man’s profit would thus be another man’s loss. How can there be profit in the whole system if everything exchanges for its honest worth?

...

>He finds the answer to the dilemma in one commodity that is different from all others. The commodity is labor power. For the laborer, like the capitalist, sells his product for exactly what it is worth—for its value. And its value, like the value of everything else that is sold, is the amount of labor that goes into it—in this case, the amount of labor that it takes to “make” labor-power. In other words, a laborer’s salable energies are worth the amount of socially necessary labor it takes to keep that laborer going. Smith and Ricardo would have agreed entirely: the value of a workman is the money he needs in order to exist. It is his subsistence wage.

>So far, so good. But here comes the key to profit. The laborer who contracts to work can ask only for a wage that is his due. What that wage will be depends, as we have seen, on the amount of labor-time it takes to keep a man alive. If it takes six hours of society’s labor per day to maintain a workingman, then (if labor is priced at one dollar an hour), he is “worth” six dollars a day. No more.

>But the laborer who gets a job does not contract to work only six hours a day. That would be just long enough to support himself. On the contrary, he agrees to work a full eight-hour, or in Marx’s time, a ten- or eleven-hour day. Hence he will produce a full ten or eleven hours’ worth of value and he will get paid for only six. His wage will cover his subsistence which is his true “value,” but in return he will make available to the capitalist the value he produces in a full working day. And this is how profit enters the system.

>Marx called this layer of unpaid work “surplus value.” The words do not imply moral indignation. The worker is entitled only to the value of his labor-power. He gets it in full. But meanwhile the capitalist gets the full value of his workers’ whole working day, and this is longer than the hours for which he paid. Hence when the capitalist sells his products, he can afford to sell them at their true value and still realize a profit. For there is more labor time embodied in his products than the labor time for which he was forced to pay.

So the "exploitation" that Marx would be referring to is the "surplus value" that the capitalist gets for selling stuff.

Now, to answer your initial question. The difference between exploitation as Marx used it and what OP is talking about is that immigrant workers who are restricted in such a way can be (and have been, IIRC) taken advantage of in ways that are more similar to what we would colloquially define as exploitation rather than what Marx would say. For example, their passports could be taken from them, they could end up being paid less than minimum wage, working conditions could be less than what they should be, etc.

This ended up being longer than I intended, but at least I can have the comment on hand for when people start talking about Marx.

EDIT: Removed some stuff

And with the glut of pop-econ books on the market lately, now has never been a better time to start studying.

I recently met Peter Leeson at a talk about his book The Invisible Hook:The Hidden Economics of Pirates who gives a fascinating(and accessible) study of what piracy actually was and the incentives behind it(for example they weren't racist, they were remarkably democratic, and there was a reason they fostered that rough and tumble reputation).

If that isn't your cup of tea there is also The Not So Wild Wild West(whose authors I've also met) about how the Wild West reimagined on the silver screen is hardly more than just imagination(during a 50 year period associated with the "Wild West" you could count the number of bank robberies on your fingers[no toes]).

If you are looking for something a little more general you can pick up any number of History of Economic Thought books. My personal favorites are The Worldly Philosophers and Teachings of the Worldly Philosophers. The former of which gives an overview of the works of economists from Smith to Keynes(you'll have to pick up another book for history after 1950) with quotations from the original works. The latter switches the ratios of summary and quotations(its practically an anthology of greatest hits of economists with brief introductions).

I didn't get to meet Heilbroner, but he has spoken at the same economics club I met the others through(though long before my time).

The Worldly Philosophers.

Upvote for The Worldly Philosophers EDIT: JM Keynes was a millionaire. Just sayin'.

There's a book called The Worldly Philosophers which has been through many editions and is a favorite among students of economics. Chapter 2 in the book gives a good, although brief, overview of Smith's background and his basic economic philosophies. The whole book is worth a read, if only to get a foundation of where modern economic thought began.

http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X -- great intro to the most influential economic thinkers.

If you want a book, read The Worldly Philosophers.

If you want a twitter, follow Beatrice Cherrier (@Undercoverhist).

From what I've been told even most economists don't really know much about these. They just don't spend much time with the old history of economic thought. They're taught certain ideas that originate from these schools of thought and stood the test of time, but they aren't really told they're doing so.

I'll try to give a quick rundown though of some of the terms in the meme:

1. Marxist Economics: IIRC people usually say Marxian in this context but w/e. This refers to the economic school of thought deriving from Karl Marx (duh.) I'll try to summarize them in a couple of key ideas. 1. They think crisis is inherent to capitalism, and that these crises will worsen until the system is destroyed, 2. Value is derived from labor hour put into a commodity, and 3. profit rate falls over time for firms (this ties into #2 and #1.) The latter two ideas are pretty much not accepted at all in modern economics. But on crisis he was one of the first iirc to really think of crisis as cyclical. There are modern marxians but they're pretty scarce and not really relevant outside of socialist circles.
   here's a little more reading from a non-marxian about what he contributed, scroll down to the econ section
   
   
2. Austrian school: Holy FUCK i love the free market. I'd say they're important for three big things. 1. They thought that the value a commodity has is subjective, in contrast to the labour theory of value. This is where marginalism comes from too iirc (i'd google that.) 2. The idea of opportunity cost. and 3. They battled with the marxists a lot, and laid down a lot of great theoretical criticism. Austrian economics didn't keep up with Keynesianism and nowadays isn't relevant, they're honestly more of a joke/meme than anything else. Probably the best known "source" is mises.org. You'll find their advocates being libertarians and anarchists.
   
   
3. Mercantilism: This is what old European empires functioned by, and old America somewhat as well. The idea was that trade is actively bad and your nation should be as self-sufficient as humanly possible. They backed their money with gold and silver and believed that the more precious metals you had, the better your economy was simply doing, hence the Über-protectionism. This was a big motivator of colonialism too which is fun stuff. This school is some old (15th-19th century) shit and you won't find any economists (really even at the time) claiming to be mercantilist.
   
   
4. Classical Economics: This was the original statement of market economics pretty much. It's big "origin" is Adam Smith and his book "The Wealth of Nations." It's very important because first and foremost it challenged mercantilism and asserted that trade is a good thing. They generally believed that the free market worked well without intervention (not always, though, they weren't libertarians.) And monopoly sucks and competition is fucking fantastic. This is where I'd say they're fairly unified. But otherwise, classical economics was veeery diverse.
   
   
5. Keynesianism: This is actually pretty hard to summarize since it's pretty much a "current" set of schools so I can just grab a few key ideas. I think the shortest way I can put it is that instead of focusing mostly on supply as classical economists did. The big revelation we get from Keynes is that in the short-run, fluctuations in aggregate (total) demand can affect economic output. People then go on and use this to justify government policy to inject stimulus into aggregate demand to bring the economy back to full output. You can split this into A. Monetary policy and B. Fiscal policy. Monetary policy means fucking with the money supply, actions done by the central bank (for americans, the fed.) Fiscal policy means government spending and taxation pretty much. There's a lot of schools claiming to be "keynesian" such as new keynesian, neo-keynesian, and post-keynesian. Neo-keynesian was the dominant school after world war 2 until the oil shock in the 70s. After that we got new keynesianism which is the most "current" mainstream theory and is a part of the new neoclassical synthesis. Post-keynesianism is a modern heterodox school of economics. I don't know much about post-keynesianism but IIRC it's considered a more respectable heterodox school than marxian or austrian economics at least.
   
   
6. Monetarism: People who really emphasize the role of monetary policy. Milton Friedman was a very important monetarist. For example he argued that the federal reserve's failures caused the great depression to be magnitudes worse than it could have been. This was pretty important at the time but is another thing that's pretty much taken for granted by modern economists.
   
   
7. New Neoclassical Synthesis: Pretty much any economist nowadays. This is the name referring to the synthesis of New-Keynesianism with New-Classical economics.
   
   
   I'm tired now and I probably could have done a lot more regarding classical -> neoclassical/new classical but that's an okay gist on some of them I think. I don't know anything about pre-classical economics or ancient economics so I didn't bring them up.
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Economic-Thinkers-Seventh/dp/068486214X
   
   You can check out of this book if you want to go a bit more in-depth. Note: I haven't read it. I just went to the r/economics sidebar to see what they had.

Don't confuse the existance of commerce with the existence of Capitalism as a socioeconomic system. Capitalism only came into existance when humans discovered they could use wealth to create more wealth (invest) rather than just consumption and display. I suggest you read Robert Heilbroner's Worldy Philosophers http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X.

The Wordly Philosophers a great book explaining how we came to think of economics today by looking at it's most influential thinkers

Stigum's Money Market a fundemental look at how modern money markets work

History of Economic Thought looks at economics throughout history, taking into consideration the unique historic and cultural context of different schools of economic thought.

Yeah a few people have mentioned it, but not in a main thread:

The Worldly Philosophers is just what you're looking for. TRUST ME!

I'll be buying that since you hold it in such high esteem.

Although I must say my favorite econ book is:

http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X

Yeah go ahead and laugh.

A good book that is fun to read and has tons of anecdotes about scientific history is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

In a similar vein, you can ponder the more mind-bending aspects of our Universe with Stephen Hawkings A Brief History of Time

Other than that you may find some interesting things in the works of Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins (I personally recommend Dawkins's The Selfish Gene)

If you are sick of scientific titles you can also check out Freakonomics or The Worldly Philosphers

These Books are all written for a general audience so they go down pretty easy.

Deciding which major in College can be tricky - I was lucky since I knew exactly what I wanted to study before I left High School, but maybe some ideas in these books will pique your interest. My parents always told me to go to school to study something I love, and not to train for a job. I'm not so sure this advice carries through in "recovering" economy. You may want to factor in the usefulness of your degree post-college (but don't let that be the only thing you consider!).

Good Luck, and enjoy!

hmm... this is tough are you more interested in theory or application? Political Economy can get very abstract/philosophical which I personally like but it turns some people off.


why nations fail: great overview of Institutional/development economics by two phenomenal economists, Acemoglu and Robinson.

violence and social orders Another great book, it was written as introduction to North's theories for non-economists. Very interesting work.

capital in the 21st century: I don't think this book needs an introduction. But just in case, Picketty examines the interplay between economic prosperity and income inequality. The book was written with non-economists in mind. The math will greatly help your understanding but it's not necessary to understand his general arguments

Capitalism a general introduction to socioeconomics that is concise and a variety of topics on capitalism that have puzzled (and sometimes outraged) sociologists since the 19th century.

Development as Freedom: Sen argues that open dialogue, civil freedoms and political liberties are prerequisites for sustainable development.

The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers: A history of economic thought/theory that really elucidates the intersection of politics,economics and philosophy.

A bit dated, but THe Worldly Philsophers is a good starting point.

Check out The Worldly Philosophers by Heilbroner: https://www.amazon.com/The-Worldly-Philosophers-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X

An accessible but really good read, it formed the basis of a History of Economic Thought class during my undergraduate degree.

Having studied psych, I understand what you've said very well. I guess that's one thing about economics that I do know: the idea that humans are rational thinkers is an utter myth.

And I knew I recognized that author from somewhere!

"The Worldly Philosophers" seems similar to that first book you mentioned. Just wanted to point that out, it was suggested higher up.

Also, I find it interesting when people switch to a different subject for grad school. Why did you switch? Personally, I've become disillusioned with psychology and have began wanting to know "the big picture", like studying culture, hence why I started reading Graeber.

Thanks for your reply.

I believe there has been some miscommunication, as I had never actually heard of George until you mentioned him. This is the book I"m referring to, which was neither written by nor mentions Henry George:

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Worldly-Philosophers-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X

That being the case, I won’t reply to the substance of your comments on George’s beliefs. The only thing I would say is that the idea of private property ownership as the problem is naive in its denial of the natural inclinations of human behaviour. There is a reason they say “possession is 9/10th’s of the law” - exclusive possession to the exclusion of all others is the foundational basis of our ability to trade with one another.

"As a science, the mathematics that governs all of economics is as intractable as the cure for the disease. But we don't claim that medicine isn't science. “

I would counter that astrology and numerology both use “the maths” but that doesn’t make them scientific. While I certainly lack the mathematical skills to know conclusively for myself, my own experience and impression was certainly confirmed by the mathematician in the link I posted.

"I would say that "full" employment can never be a goal, but that buoyancy can be. One simple problem with stating "full employment" as a goal is the intractability one - how would we measure full employment? What does it mean?"

Well, even if you say it can never be a goal, the fact of the matter is that it very much is part of the current Fed mandate. As for it’s definition, this is what I am referring to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment

As to the issue of buoyancy, you’ll have to forgive me but I am not familiar with the concept of buoyancy in economics, and my brief search only revealed the concept of tax buoyancy, which doesn’t seem applicable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_buoyancy

"However, a more important one is actually a purely mathematical one, that can be modeled mathematically: you simply can't have complete utilization of a resource as a goal. It's out of balance. When you achieve "full" employment something must give way. Growth of some parts of the economy must stop because there is no more of the labor resource to add. This means the value of adding investment (the marginal utility of capital) goes down. And when that occurs, you have negative growth. Negative growth cascades and you have recession.”

I won’t go into full detail on this paragraph as there are more important matters to discuss, but I don’t believe your logic follows. When you posit that “full” employment will result in shrinkage of other parts of the economy, you fail to account for the dynamic nature of the system and the fact that the free market should, over time, allocate this scarce resource (labor) to its most efficient and highest use, meaning that negative growth would occur in the least viable areas of the economy while positive growth happens in more economically viable areas - the marginal utility of capital doesn’t go down, it goes up!
"However, economic buoyancy can be a goal; and when you reach closer to full employment, you can throttle back. Buoyancy is, I believe, if we take the politics out of it not such a bad goal."

Again I am not sure what you’re referring to here.

"But as it turns out, the ECB's one mandate is the one that is good for the savers and the capital accumulators.
Two issues: First, this begs the questions of what is "good" and for whom (the conservative-marxist argument and the progressive resolution) but of what is buoyant. Second, if the ECB mandate were buoyant, why do they have recessions in Europe?"

First, to answer your questions, by “good” the ECB means a stable currency that doesn’t fluctuate up and down and “for whom” means people looking to invest their capital. Second, I have never claimed the ECB mandate is buoyant, nor have I claimed that their system will somehow prevent recessions. Far from it - in any dynamic system there needs to be adjustment both upwards and downwards, so it’s not the job of the central bank to prevent recessions.

If you want an explanation of why Marx was so very wrong, I can’t implore you enough to read this article. The issue is not “labor vs. capital” it’s a matter of “debtors vs savers” or people who want “easy money” vs. those who want “hard money”. It is the best introduction to the topic of “freegold” that there is (by the way, do NOT read the wiki article on freegold, it is a debacle”.

http://fofoa.blogspot.ca/2010/07/debtors-and-savers.html
"More aptly put: If we were simply to state buoyancy is good instead of entrenched growth or "full" employment would we then check and reduce the boom-panic cycle? History seems to indicate that the answer is yes."

I am not familiar with any historical instances of the boom-panic cycle being defeated or overcome. I do, however, subscribe to the belief that the Euro has been designed in such a way that said cycle will no longer bring with it damage to the currency - economies can crash, but the currency will be fine. More on that at another time if you’d care to hear me continue rambling.

An excellent book referenced in the first sentence of the article.

http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254746913&sr=8-1

Oh. Ok. There are two kinds of developmental sources I would look at: the mathematics and the early ideas. The math I believe comes from mathematician Frank Ramsey in the 1920s.

Some of the early ideas about utility come from J.S. Mill and possibly Jeremy Bentham. One source I would suggest for Mill and other early sources of economics is (yet) another Heilbroner: The Worldly Philosophers.

the worldly philosophers includes a chapter on adam smith that discusses the complexity of his thought. nice book.

The Worldly Philosophers

> The Worldly Philosophers is a bestselling classic that not only enables us to see more deeply into our history but helps us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideas -- namely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines.

The New Palgrave series from the 90s is pretty good for essays on basic economics, especially given the price tag.

If you're just getting into economics as an econ major (like I am), I recommend The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner. Heilbroner really helps to break down how each of the main economic thinkers perceived the issues of their day, built off of or on the ideas of past thinkers, and how their ideas are perceived today.

The Worldly Philosophers - Heilbroner http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X

Modal Logic for Philosophers - Garson http://www.amazon.com/Modal-Logic-Philosophers-James-Garson/dp/0521682290/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311026075&sr=1-1

The Emperor's Handbook - Aurelius http://www.amazon.com/Emperors-Handbook-New-Translation-Meditations/dp/0743233832/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311026100&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Worldly-Philosophers-Lives-Economic-Thinkers/dp/068486214X

Read The Worldly Philosophers it is a great book and helped me get a better understanding of how a bunch of genius motherfuckers helped develop and improve upon an economic system in a world where technology had so rapidly created such a crazy influx of supply without any idea of how to manage it that we had 10 year old children working 14 hour days for next to nothing. I'm all for being "down with the man" and all that but when I look at it historically I see capitalism creating an overall improvement in the living conditions of the nations that have adopted it. Of course, you might say that the only reason we have managed to attain such improvements through capitalism is because we crushed and stole from weaker nations like those in the middle east and Africa and there your argument would not go entirely unjustified. But remember, previous to the world wars the united states was a successful nation that practiced a decent amount of isolationism and other countries as well have maintained relative success with isolated capitalistic economies. Does that mean they are perfect? absolutely not. we still have much to learn and fucktards like many major corporations CEO's and the politicians they employ don't help. But, as it stands its the best we got and hopefully we can improve upon that