Value and Productivity
The famous "water-diamond" paradox has to do with the discrepancies between these two "values."
What are "use-value" and "exchange-value?"
This measure of annual household income, currently $32,150 for a household of four, is used to determine eligibility for programs like Medicaid and SNAP.
What is the poverty line?
“The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”
Who is Friedeich Hayek?"
What is neoclassical economics?
This perspective holds what is called the "loanable funds theory of interest?"
What is neoclassical economics?
Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx thought this was, ultimately, the source of value.
What is labor?
Matthew Desmond argued that poverty in the US was, fundamentally, not about a lack of income or assets or education but a lack of this.
What are options?
“By "uncertain" knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty...About these matters [of uncertainty] there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.”
Who is John Maynard Keynes?
This perspective has a subjectivist, rather than just individualistic starting point, meaning that while they focus on the individual they do NOT think that there are certain ways humans think and behave that are consistent enough to be used in models as “laws” that help us make predictions about future economic behavior.
What is Austrian econmics?
This theory holds what is called the "liquidity preference" theory of interest.
What is Post-Keynesian economics?
Institutional economists, following Thorstein Veblen, often describe economic actions pursuing these two different kinds of values.
This term refers to benefits programs that are simply given to everyone?
What are universal benefits?
“The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.”
Who is Karl Marx?
This perspective has been especically concerned to point out that there are not JUST a "productive" and "consumptive" regions of the economy but also an area of economic life comprised of re-productive activity
What is feminist economics?
This approach thinks that markets are important because they are the best way we have of translating the unknowable preferences of individuals into a readable aggregate (i.e., prices).
What is Austrian economics?
After the marginalist revolution in the early 1900s value came to be seen as a matter of this rather than something derived from production.
What is consumer preference?
This term refers to benefits programs that target specific populations, often based on income measurements.
What are means-tested benefits?
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”
Who is Adam Smith?
These two traditions or perspectives are concerned with things like climate and sustainability but have differences. One tries to figure out how to use existing market structures to incentivize sustainable economic activity while the other believes that such structures are in part responsible for environmental crises and we should not bind ourselves to operating within them.
What are environmental and ecological economics?
In 1930, Keynes gave a lecture describing possible economic future of people in 2030. He thought it might be possible that the productive and technological advancements made possible by market economy would allow us in the future to only work 15 hrs/wk and still enjoy a comfortable life. THIS perspective would say that Keynes did not take into consideration conspicuous consumption and commodities with relative value.
What is Institutionalist Economics?
Mariana Mazzucato (and many feminist economists) have criticized modern mainstream economics for assuming that anything that fetches this on a market must be economically productive and value-creating.
What is a price?
One of the major claims in Matthew Desmond's book is that poverty in the US is not merely an unfortunate necessity but a phenomenon that endures because it is profitable for some. As an example of this dynamic, Desmond points to the billions of dollars produced from this service which people who don't have online banking require and this penalty which people are hit with when they don't have enough money in their checking account.
What are check-cashing services and overdraft fees?
“The rate of interest is not the ‘price’ which brings into equilibrium the demand for resources to invest with the readiness to abstain from present consumption. It is the ‘price’ which equilibrates the desire to hold wealth in the form of cash with the available quantity of cash."
Who is John Maynard Keynes?
This perspective begins by assuming that a market economy does not necessarily move towards equilibrium and full-employment and we therefore need a "general" theory of economics which helps us even in conditions less than full-employment.
What is Post-Keynesian economics?
For classical economists, economics was the study of wealth. Today, the dominant approach to economics sees it as the study of this? Hint, it is what economic actors AT THE MICRO-LEVEL are faced with.
What are choices?