the_dunk_tank

15988 readers

1 users here now

It's the dunk tank.

This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.

Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.

Rule 2: If your source is a reactionary website, please use archive.is instead of linking directly.

Rule 3: No sectarianism.

Rule 4: TERF/SWERFs Not Welcome

Rule 5: No ableism of any kind (that includes stuff like libt*rd)

Rule 6: Do not post fellow hexbears.

Rule 7: Do not individually target other instances' admins or moderators.

Rule 8: The subject of a post cannot be low hanging fruit, that is comments/posts made by a private person that have low amount of upvotes/likes/views. Comments/Posts made on other instances that are accessible from hexbear are an exception to this. Posts that do not meet this requirement can be posted to [email protected]

Rule 9: if you post ironic rage bait im going to make a personal visit to your house to make sure you never make this mistake again

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Redditors gather around to cry about jason hickel's article on unequal exchange. Lot of genius scientist economists chime in to deboonk all the bad science. (www.reddit.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

88 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Some genius takes:

The whole Global North/South split is a pet peeve of mine as a social scientist working in development policy. It's a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for 'white/the good Asians' and 'not white'. It doesn't hold up to any rational examination. South Africa was part of the Global North until white rule under Apartheid ended, and now they're in the Global South. southern nations.

Real educated economist chimes in:

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist (read: not economist) and degrowther. Despite having no background and seemingly almost no understanding of economics as a field, he somehow continues to get 'economics' papers published in reputable journals despite their obvious low quality. But to anyone with a cursory understanding of economics, it should be entirely unsurprising that exports from developing nations to developed are more labor intensive than vice-versa. This is not a novel conclusion and is not 'appropriation', but is entirely explained by a concept in economics called comparative advantage.

Another genius owns the article epic style

This paper is a demonstration of why input-output (IO) models are bad for economic research. IO models were used by the soviet central planners to allocate resources. IO models are bad for research for the same reason the are bad for planning. The authors look at “embodied labor” (adjusted for human capital), the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value (btw, this “labor theory of value” goes back to Adam Smith, and was later promulgated by Marx).

Other facts that the authors’ framework will struggle to explain: why is it that the poor countries that most integrated with global trade networks became rich (s korea, Japan, Singapore) or are otherwise growing quickly (china, Panama, Vietnam)? Why is it that countries with severe barriers to trade with the global north struggle to grow (n Korea, India for second half of 20th century)? That’s very hard to explain if trade with the global north is fundamentally exploitative.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

Take India, a large part of the agriculture is not mechanized to this day, so of course it is 10-100x less productive.

Okay but even if we operate within the constraints of this framework, we have to ask some questions. Firstly, why does India not simply mechanise their agriculture while continuing to pay comparatively low wages, as such would result in higher profit than continuing to use non mechanised agriculture? Secondly, in such a case as illustrated in the first question, wouldn't a ton of agricultural production move to India to maximise profits? Lastly, given that neither of the above has happened, with the distribution of agricultural technology being what it is, and the division of labour that results from that, we have to ask if this is compatible with equal exchange?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

The wages are often too low to make it cost effective to mechanize. Also, you have to keep in mind that India is not a rationally planned economy. India as a whole would enormously benefit from mechanization of agriculture, but capitalists and landowners have different interests.

I agree that intellectual property law is creating unequal exchanges, but I suspect that this is still quite a small effect relative to the total global economy. I welcome an investigation into that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

From a review of a recent book on copyright law

While the United States, they tell us, earns about $80 billion per year from licenses for its intellectual property, Afghanistan raised just $335 from licensing fees in 2020

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

That is a lower bound though, since they also make enormous amounts of money from using the intellectual property to not have competitors. Still is pretty small in the scale of the whole economy, I would expect.

load more comments (1 replies)