Explaining economics simply

If the first sentenced  was amended to read, "You are given £1 a week because the people who 'imagine they' look after you think that's fair."  It provides a simple explanation on how class conflict comes about but the article requires further development on explaining value within capitalism.As for bringing the end to value in socialism that's for another thread.

Nice one!  Now have a bash at explaining value within capitalism – simply – and if you can follow on from where Robert Preston left off by simply explaining the value of labour power it would be great.  Or is it necessary to explain use and exchange value before we head down that road?By the way don't worry about proofreading I'll take care of that.  Lol.

And in the blue corner, the Guardian presenting the case for capitalism… http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/jan/06/capitalism-bright-future-innovation-hope?CMP=fb_gu

Yeah, thank god we have your concise and clear expositions on both 'value' and 'science', twc.

Yeah, you're right, but that happens because the 'audience' doesn't understand the terms/phrases/concepts that are being used to explain 'value', for example (but this applies to all of Marx's ideas). So, they 'split hairs', or introduce 'complex concepts' (but these are often simpler, in fact, for the audience) in a (usually) forlorn bid to try to understand what they're being told.IMO, it's better to start with concepts/ideas/things that they are already familiar with, and once they've got the jist of the method and its underpinnings, then move on to introduce the more unfamiliar Marxian concepts.After all, anyone can understand that if their telly is in bits scattered across their living room floor, then the picture reception by their TV will be terrible!These examples from real life can be given endlessly [please try this for yourselves at home, at this point, comrades], until we generalise from these to give them more 'complex' names: 'bits' are 'components'; telly is 'structure'; and 'picture reception' is an 'emergent property'. After lots of example of all sorts of bits, things made of bits in a particular arrangement, and the effects they then (and only then) produce, we will have prepared for the $64,000 issue.It can't be predicted that hydrogen and oxygen, when combined in a specific chemical relationship, will produce wetness for humans. We could tell the story of the bourgeois firefighters who didn't believe in 'components/structures/emergent properties', and simply poured hydrogen and oxygen onto the raging house fire. We will even predict that the fire didn't go out. This example will go with a bang.Then when we say commodities are related to each other within a socio-economic structure, and this specific structure produces the dangerous emergent property of 'value', they will at least have a chance of getting a 'hook' into what we're saying.

Yes, they are simpler, because they are part of the obviousnesses of everyday life. To take a non-economic example.  Someone had to invent the paragraph.  If you told people that it was the joint work of Bob Para and Andy Graph, they'd be confused, since paragraphs are so natural to anyone used to reading or writing.  So to if you pulled out a copy of Locke and showed them the very sentence that introduced to the world the concept they cite as if they thought of it for themselves, they'll look a bit confused.  That they might not understand the sentence from Locke, or see how it relates to the concept they've just expressed is neither here nor there.that's what I meant by 'complex ideas' some very complicated economic theories are widely held (if not thoroughly understood), and appear natural. Sometimes we can't get our ideas across by simplifying them, because they conflict with these widely held beliefs: both sides of an exchange gain (so exchange isn't equal) people exchange naturally.  I own what I create.  I own myself (bleagh).  Supplly and demand.  People just pay what they believe it is worth. etc.What everyone can understand is the slice of the cake analogy.  That's why liberal ideologues like to deny that there is a cake.

Yes, “The Alternative to Capitalism” by Adam Buick and John Crump [now available on Amazon/Kindle] is the best comprehensive book-length introduction to capitalism and socialism, and says all that is necessary about Marxian economics at the introductory level.However, I was thinking of the body of Marxian economics itself, as encapsulated in Capital, for which there is ultimately no genuine alternative but to dive into Capital, and then, from that springboard, read as many popularizations as you can, as critically as you can, until you’ve had a surfeit.David Harvey may save some students from drowning.BeginningsIt is not that Marx was unaware of the difficulty that confronts the student at the beginning of any science, since it is precisely at the beginning of a science [as Hegel was first to demonstrate to the world] when indeterminacy rules supreme.  All of the scientific categories are here newly born, freshly minted, and they commence their life’s journey as abstractions, not besmirched by actuality — all potential and none actual.That potentiality, the tiny acorn that will eventually grow into a spreading oak, is what makes the beginning of science so fabulously unsullied.  Pristine science lacks, in its naive purity, the concrete determinations that only come with its maturity. If you can, you should never cheat yourself of that scientific baptism of fire — that journey into the unknown that takes you on the thrilling ride from the abstract to the concrete.  For that journey is but the journey of every process, from birth to death or to renewal in an other, just like that of our own lives.For Hegel, as for his avowed student Marx, that journey — from pure abstract potentiality into impure concrete actuality — is the life history of a science, developing its abstract self out of its concrete other, ever building upon its abstract foundation by concrete determinations, converting the indeterminate into the determinate.  That is Hegel.  That is life.  Grasp it!To develop science otherwise, is to want maturity before childhood — to demand the science before the science.  Worse, it is to confront the science as a fixed and static thing, that can be grasped in its immediacy, and so mistake the science for something complete at birth [ab initio].To develop the science on Hegel’s lines is to consciously recognize science as a process.  Closure, if it comes at all to the science, cannot be already in place at the dawn of morning, or we have no living process.  As Hegel poetically put it — Minerva’s owl [wisdom] only spreads its wings at the dusk of evening.Marx was openly conscious of the difficulty of all beginnings, just as the Socialist Party is openly conscious of the difficulties it faces at the dawn of the activity needed to bring about socialism — where all its activity appears abstract and still unformed because it is as yet unpropitious to realize its abstract theory as something formed in actuality.  That’s why we need science to comprehend our still abstract position.Marx expressly warns his reader of the difficulty, stating in one of the prefaces his agreement with the geometer Euclid [according to Proclus] who is supposed to have said something like — “My dear Pharoah Ptolemy of Egypt, I’m afraid learning is going to be as difficult for you as it is for everyone else: there’s no royal road to learning”.Learning is ActiveIn vulgar terms, there’s no substitute for head down and bum up.The medieval geometers considered that, by the time a student showed that he comprehended Euclid’s fifth proposition [the opposite angles of an isosceles triangle are equal] — the pons asinorum or bridge of asses — the student had grasped the necessary rudiments of how to think geometrically.  That is the precondition.What Thomas Kuhn clarified to the world is the generality of this process of learning.  By working through a science’s paradigm examples, the student learns how to think in that science.  That is the precondition.Simplification!My opposition to developing Marxian economics differently from Marx, either methodologically or terminologically, is that we thereby indulge the fantasy of someone who can’t comprehend Marx in Marx’s own terms.The earliest “simplified ” re-interpretation of Capital was provided by the Russian Dmitriev [1897], who was implicitly hostile to Marx, although that significant observation somehow got lost over time.Dmitriev successfully re-interpreted Capital mathematically along input–output lines, as later adopted by Leontief, whom Adam rather admires.So far, at the beginning of Dmitriev’s re-interpreted Marxian science, well before it has worked out its mature determinations, the Russian’s simpler re-interpretation of Marx lurks deceptively innocent — so insightful and so helpful.But Dmitriev’s re-interpretation of Marx develops into maturity over the next century, and takes on a life of its own, based upon its own simple-to-understand Marxian foundation.Dmitriev influenced overtly hostile Bortkiewicz [1906–07] who influenced totally sympathetic Sweezy [1942] and Sraffa [1961], who influenced the great historian of the labour theory of value Meek, and through controversy, Samuelson, who influenced Steedman [1977] who influenced a whole generation.  The rest, as they say, is history.That simple innocuous easy-to-understand re-interpretation of Marx exploded into a powerful maturity that proved conclusively thatMarxian value was, at best, a redundant economic category, because physical input-output quantities suffice to specify prices and that values actually came out in the wash, sometimes embarrassingly as negative quantities;Marxian value was incoherent because the rate of profit could be positive when the rate of surplus value was negative, etc.When Minerva’s owl eventually flew at dusk, not much remained of Marx’s Capital.  Dmitriev had dropped a cuckoo into the Marxian nest, and the Marxians kept on feeding it.We really need to tread carefully when simplifying Marx — reducing him to us rather than extending our reach to him.Whenever we find ourselves in violent disagreement with Marx, we might pause to consider the possibility that the error may be our own.  Come back to him tomorrow.  Marx thought long and hard about capitalism [and, of course, socialism] more deeply than most of us are ever likely to.At the very least, Marx demands to be understood before he is dismissed or simplified.