What do you think of Capital and Ideology? Piketty posits some theories/hypothesis with caveats throughout and has a lot of data for certain countries and time periods, 75% of the book is history through the lens he is examining.

Very fascinating. I had never heard of Capital Factory. Since it is based in my hometown of Austin, TX, I may have to check it out, if I can get my startup in a competitive state by next years application deadline.

So funny to see you mention Joshua Baer's Capital Factory. I've done some work for them in the past.

I think many economists want to discredit him because he points out how many of them are paid by special interests.

BTW, I liked Capital in the 21st Century - a good dead.

There sure is: Capital by Karl Marx.

(wonder if down-voters have actually read this, or if it's just a boogie-man to them?)

Since Piketty's 'Capital' was published, there's been a lot of interest in the relationship between 'r', the return on wealth and 'g', the growth rate of the economy, and how this relationship is influenced by the tax system. The ProPublica story provides obviously relevant data to this discussion. It is not, as Arnold would have it, "bullshit".

I'm in the midst of reading Capital after realizing I'd never read any Marx, but only heard second hand stuff. It's surprisingly different from what I expected. It's a behemoth of a book, but I'd still recommend it.

There's a book called Capital, by a guy named Karl Marx which explores this concept fairly deeply. I highly recommend "Reading Capital with David Harvey" which is a lecture series recorded this year that breaks it down and provides modern examples to illustrate the concepts.

The topic is relevant, but the article is extremely vacuous. There is literally no content other than random opinion polls.

For those interested in some of the facts underlying this assertion, please read Capital by Thomas Piketty, or watch Paul Krugman give an excellent summary of it [1].

1. http://billmoyers.com/episode/what-the-1-dont-want-you-to-kn...

Absolutely.

Popularity and taste rarely coincide because most people have no taste.

(Me covets a The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell first edition.)

The other thing is to read books that are important, not just ones that are preferred or pleasant for a wider perspective:

- Mein Kampf

- Capital (Das Kapital)

- Technological Slavery

- The International Jew

- A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. 1-6.

- (ones by ideological opposites)

- America: The Farewell Tour

- Sorrows of Empire

Also, people who don't own any books, paper or Kindle... that's a big "nope."

The novel Capital by John Lanchester is a great look at a London street that was historically lower middle class but over time has become upper class.

Austin is great, lived there for 4 years, and I think it's healthy to have alternatives to Silicon Valley - both geographically and taxation-wise.

My observation is that while there are plenty of startups - helped by Joshua Baer's Capital Factory and Techstars - it seems that most of the big tech companies are more taking advantage of the state's business-friendly tax laws and cheaper labor force than anything.

A lot of companies - Apple, Oracle, etc - are more using it as a customer service and sales team base than for engineering, R&D, etc.

Of course there will be plenty of counter-examples (HomeAway, Dell, BazaarVoice, RetailMeNot, Indeed), but that's just a macro observation to keep in mind.

If it only cared about control then why wouldn't it just be doing what North Korea is doing? Why would it be working so hard to improve things?

It's not a strawman it's very pertinent.

I think you need to read Capital (Marx), before judging whether they are communist/socialist, either way they call themselves that.

refer to Capital in the Twenty-First Century

yikes, no thanks, keep it academic.

My understanding was that someone would prevent me from owning private property or acquiring capital? I've read both The Communist Manifesto, and Capital, and they both left me with the impression there was going to be a violent revolution with people like me as the target. I'd be happy to be wrong however.

Edit: I'm sorry someone is down-voting you. While I'm not sure I get it yet I want to hear your side.

>If someone invents a tool and sells it for a profit - who was exploited?

Nobody, and Marx doesn't say that anyone is in such a case.

>Is it not possible for everyone to be richer than they started and also create wealth??

In some way, it is possible - after all, the worker is richer than he was before (he has more money thanks to his wage) as is the capitalist (who has made money from the sale). Now what wealth is created? Arguably, social wealth in the case of new technology being developed, for example. But Marx doesn't deal with this concept of "wealth" or even immediately money, he deals with the concept of value, which works at a different level of abstraction to money. The value-form only becomes the price-form, they're not identical.

I'd suggest looking up theories of exploitation as they have been figured in Marxisms that don't rely on a labour theory of value. It's too much[0] to summarize in one HN comment, but you don't need to read Capital either (though it would be helpful).

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/

Capital by Karl Marx.

Understand labor exploitation and avoid being a victim of it.

This is not accurate. Piketty has continued to refine the data and add more as it comes available. The main point was that capital flows are interesting and that is beyond contest at this point. The book Capital has some tentative analysis at the end but doesn't make any strong conclusions and avoids taking the focus away from measuring flows of capital.

Because it is possible to use this data about capital to come to conclusions that are politically unpopular among some subgroups people have piled on this false critical narrative emphasizing supposed errors and gaps in the data and keeping the focus on some brief remarks at the end of a very large work that has a range of applications.

I don't think critics of Piketty did this on purpose. They just pushed unreasonably hard on the data they wanted to find fault with.

And what, exactly, is a "trained Marxist"? Can they quote chapter and verse of Capital and The Communist Manifesto from memory?

Having spent a few years on the Fediverse, I've found that "the left" in the US consists mainly of book clubs and struggle sessions.

The book clubs just read and debate theory ad nauseum. They're a joke, and if you gave most of them an AR-15 they'd shoot themselves in the foot.

The struggle sessions look for people slightly less poorly off than themselves to bully. If they can't find a right-winger, they'll happily go after somebody who's only 99.999% on board with their program. Failing that, they'll pick one of their own at random, accuse them of insufficient ideological purity, and bully them. They're a joke, too, only not quite as funny as the book clubbers.

Probably. I’ve only read parts of Capital, it’s too dense for me to make good headway on.

I’m also heavily informed by the Anarchist Sociologist David Graeber’s book of “Bullshit Jobs, a Theory”. He points out that a significant percentage of jobs—he estimated 40%—don’t even serve an economic purpose, let alone a moral or social one. This is something that capitalism in theory should not allow, which is why I think we’re trending to somewhere else.

First, read http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm . It's only a few pages so it doesn't even count!

If you only want one book, that book is Capital I. I suggest David Harvey's lectures along with it, they'll help out quite a bit. If you have read Smith and Ricardo, that'll make it much easier, too. For bonus points, read the short "Wages, price, and profit" by Marx, it's a bit easier of an intro than the book's.

If you can fit in a second, I'd suggest "the State and Revolution" by Lenin.

Marx identifies a problem and a crude solution, and Lenin provides a good solution. Those two will give you the most of it. Wikipedia, especially on the historical/dialectical materialism stuff, is helpful.

A more full list is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/wisiw/basic_marxi...

Also, /r/communism101 is very good and there to answer questions, if you Reddit.

I just read "The Worldly Philosophers" by Robert Heilbroner and I can recommend that. I now have a tab with Marx's "Capital" open and I'm about half way through Joseph Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy."

For finance, reading the Market Wizards series by Jack Schwager is a great idea because you get really personal and in-depth insights into how successful traders think.

I also recently read "Commodity Conversations" by Jonathan Kingsman which is similar to Market Wizards, but tailored to commodities and I can recommend that as well.

"The Secrets of Economic Indicators" by Bernard Baumohl is also an interesting overview to macro indicators.

I have no idea what constitutes an undergrad level of economics education, I don't recall my economics class being nearly as stimulating as everything I've just listed.

Good luck!

I didn’t see it addressed in the article so I’ll slip on my tinfoil hat for a moment...

Could this be related to growing income and wealth inequality? Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes. Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food.

The article notes 1970 as the critical turning point, which is the same year Piketty identifies in his book Capital as the inequality turning point in the U.S. and Europe

Iirc, even old man Marx back in the day considered central planning a stop gap measure for the transition, not a end goal.

That said, while most people seem to barely know about his writings in Capital Volume 1, Volume 2 and 3, published by Engels after Marx death, went on to point out that while there was a struggle between the factory owning capitalists and their workers. There was also a struggle going on between production capitalists and finance capitalists. And that the ultimate culprit of capitalism was likely to be finance.

IIRC, Marx even noted that in the long run it would likely be better for production capital to ally themselves with the workers against finance. But that production capital was more likely to squeeze the workers as they themselves got squeezed by finance (with landlords and other rent seekers lumped into finance).

> Karl Marx noticed this phenomenon, but was unable to understand the role of Capital(and yea I know he wrote a whole book on this concept). To him, careful inspection revealed a 'conspiracy theory' among the capitalists which he dubbed as class struggle and class interest.

You possess an either infantile and misinformed understanding of Marx, or you're just being ideological here. Have you read Capital? It's not just one book. Marx very well understood the concept, role, and agency of capital. His careful inspection did not reveal a conspiracy theory; instead, it elucidated the ways capital influences our material existence. There was no conspiracy among capitalists, only naturally flowing consequences of capital's impact on the material bases of society.

The line of thinking here deserves expounding. The discipline of economics is very important, but there needs to be some care about trusting the opinions of economists.

The opinions of an economist are worth very much, because listening to them sets up situations were it is easy for someone with an economics degree to push an agenda. But economists do have a lot to offer with observations like "this is very similar to the [suchandsuch incident] of [1887] in [Somewhere]", which is worth listening to. The limitations that surround economic 'experiments' are so severe it should be treated more like history and less like physics. Thomas Piketty with Capital in the 21st century is a great example of what I'm thinking - more history and data than theory, but some theory to provide structure to the data.

If science has a measure of quality, then that quality is the accuracy of its predictions. That ties in very closely to the ability to conduct experiments and collect accurate data. Economics as applied is a highly political process, which hampers both the perceptions and reality of how fair the experiments are.

There is a strong case to be against relative inequality.

What happens when the next difference is not yatchs, but something substantially different like access to longevity medicine, bionic instrumentation, genetic engineering, armament, whatever.

The great problem of some people being subdued to others clearly stems from the difference in power between them. Marx accounts that an English capitalist of his time could command 3 thousand servants, and as soon as he took them to america, literally all of them scrambled because they didn't have a dependency on him any more.

Not only that, but, there is a big question on why is this happening at all. Is it because the upper classes are better at tax dodging? Is it because its just how capitalism normally works and provides the best results? Is it because we have a crushing difference on how the State benefits one over others?

These are open questions, even Capital by Piketty doesnt have clear answers.

> Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table.

That’s exactly Marx’s point when he discusses his theory of Surplus Value. I know that that theory has been “debunked” and “proven” to be false, but I’m just reading now about it in its “Grundrisse” (I had read its Capital I some years ago) and it’s frightening about how right he was about subjects reguarding capitalism way back in the 1850s (in this particular case about capitalists’ dependence on their workers’, well, surplus work; if you look at the issue under this light it makes perfect sense why capitalists would insist on their workers not decreasing the number of hours they spend working). I’m no socialist nor marxist (even though I think he’s one of the best social and political thinkers ever) but if we want to really understand how things reguarding humans work we should not be blind-sided by political allegiances.

A new set because history has developed in such a way to generate new contradictions - but yes, the new class structure is at least partially a result of changes in technology (though some Marxists disagree with me on this).

Contradictions doesn't mean internally inconsistent in dialectical sense; Marxism is famous for its application of dialectical logic, in which opposites oppose each other while maintaining unity which must resolve itself, rather than a binary opposition (i.e we must have one or the other) or a binary inclusive-or (which has no potentiality for resolution).

The point of contradictions isn't to say that society will fall because of them (that would be a vulgar reading of the concept and a scientifically untenable one) but rather that any new society must in some way answer to the contradictions, or arise out of their development or increase in intensity. For instance, the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is only heightened with capitalism, but the contradiction between capital and labour is obviously new with capitalism. By specifying contradictions, they can be thought of (philosophically speaking) and potentially overcome (practically speaking). One such contradiction which has been present in all societies thus far is between freedom and necessity, which Marx claimed would be resolved with the advent of Communism.

I can't speak for the impression Marx wanted to give about the downfall of capitalism from his word choice, but I can say that the dialectical mode of presentation was admitted by Engels to have been rather outmoded even by the time Capital I was published. Contradiction in the dialectical sense doesn't imply inconsistency, it implies the functioning unity of opposites. At best, Marx's use of contradiction implies the possibility to overcome, but I don't know about the necessity. Herbert Marcuse, a renown dialectician, didn't seem to think that the contradiction would be resolved, and Adorno didn't seem to think that the contradiction would resolve positively.

Either way, I'm not going on the defensive here, since Marx's commitment to the scientific method should be reflected in Marxism's ability to be self-critical. Few other "sciences" would be so happy to cast doubt on the logical axioms under which they operate.

Check out Capital Factory - http://www.capitalfactory.com

We host a number of startups and meetups in the space. You can learn a ton just by hanging around the co-working space.

This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new. The major points of their work, and especially of Piketty's monumental _Capital for the 21st century_ still stand: that capital is a positive feedback loop in a way that labor is not; that mid-20th-century laws that put brakes on this feedback loop have been removed; that a variety of data sources are confirming growing inequality and market capture particularly in the UK and US; and that the only reasonable solution for this is a tax on owned capital (not on income or cap gains) and the political chances of this happening are slim, etc.

And in the end this article is another one in their house style: not particularly informative in the details, they're not arguing openly or forcefully against Piketty, but instead bring up enough different nitpicky papers that it starts sowing doubt in the mind of a reader who hasn't actually read the book.

But then again The Economist has had it out for Piketty (and Saez) for a long time now, they very clearly hate Piketty's Capital and keep sniping at it, but can't stop themselves from bringing it up all the time. :)

At least they are very open about their biases: they promote a view that the solution to all ills is lower taxes and less regulation. However, Piketty's analysis and proposed solution directly contradicts that.

It's really a shame that more people don't actually read 'Capital,' or at least the first three chapters of Capital I. While I ultimately disagree with Marx, I think he does a much, much better job of analyzing the problems we have than most people. Hence Simon's distinction between 'diagnostician' and 'clinician.' It was Lenin and Mao that really tried to be the clinicians, anyway.

It's a Sunday, if you've got some time today, check out "Value, Price, and Profit," which is sort of the beginning of Capital I but in a little bit easier language, and much shorter. It's only about 40 pages. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-...

Care to give an example of where do you think I'm wrong? What does "X" mean? Do you contest the influence of guys like Marcuse on today's public intellectuals and academia? What do you mean by "background research"? I did read a lot of Marx (his youth works, Capital I, half of Grundrisse) and I did read some Marcuse (couldn't make that much out of it, but I can certainly say that his works had no direct relation to Marx's works).

I also really do believe that today's public intellectuals are ignoring the blight of the majority of the people inhabiting this planet, being they men or women (like I said, we have no Zola of our time). I'd be happy to be proven wrong in which with case I'm eager for book recommendations.

Honestly, I'm pretty taken down by comments such as yours, with general statements that point at nothing in particular (again, what does "X" mean?) in response to a comment like mine that directly mentions two or three things included in TFA (Peterson, Zola, Marx and public intellectuals generally speaking). I expect better from the HN public.

My manifesto, roughly. I've never heard of this suggestion as inflation as a remedy, but that seems a bit like chemo, quite a wide-ranging medication:

1. Replace stamp duty with a progressive wealth tax (this is the hardest one politically I think. Really you'd need coordination with other EU states, this is discussed in Capital by Picketty)
2. Light rent controls (just can't be raised by more than X% over 1 year 2 years, to prevent people getting spiked)
3. Expand renter protection - whatever the agency there currently is we triple it in size and give it teeth
4. Include all houses in capital gains, at the same rates or higher than you'd get on stocks. I guess you have a rolling exemption so that people aren't totally blindsided. This would hopefully be counterbalanced by removing stamp duty.
5. Specific tax pn land banking by builders
6. A small land value tax
7. No school catchment areas, open application and decision by ballot.
8. There have to be more details on how we change the rules about who can build what where. It's very heavily regulated (down to minimum sizes of bedrooms, amount of space for leisure etc). I dunno if the point is to remove the regulations, more like shine more light on them and maybe reconsider some of them and add others. For example, I've spent 10 years in London in rooms that were below the minimum room size allowed for new developments and so have most people that I know, so that one should be removed.

Not to speak for or against Marx's law of value,

>The fact that labor theory of value is nonsense is easily established by observing "value" created by someone digging a hole and filling it in - any number of times, so as to put in arbitrarily large amount of labor

Is rubbish. In fact, if you read less than the first chapter of Capital Vol. 1, Marx specifically rebuts this argument on the third page, in which he restricts himself to 'socially useful' labour performed at the rate necessary to complete it. Not even anti-Marxists use this argument any more because it simply doesn't hold for Marx's theory, nor even Smith and Ricardo's. Mises himself doesn't use this argument.

This whole entire argument is pretty strange to me.

It's upper class people from Europe debating with upper class people from the US where it's better for "middle class" people.

If you've read Picketty at all, it's pretty clear there is no middle class. And the only place in the world a true and sizeable middle class ever existed was the post WWII United States from like the 50s to (maybe as late as) the 90s.

Life sucks for lower class people everywhere. I suppose it's slightly less shitty for lower class people in Europe.

According to Picketty, the capital / income ratio had been substantially higher in Europe for the last 20 years than it is the US -- and at the time of writing Capital in the 21st century, it was still higher in Europe. That is to say, social mobility -- as depressingly low as it is in the modern US -- is (and has been) MUCH worse in Europe.

America's biggest flow truly is it's greatest strength. This is the most hopelessly optimistic group of people on the planet. Most Americans truly believe that one day they'll be successful.

You know why they believe that? Because for 40 years, this was really the only place in the world where that was plausible for an average Joe. It's still one of the few places where it's even slightly statically likely.

I think most people would trade hope for a slightly less shitty life.

I think that's why Americans don't really care that much why life for lower class people in Europe is slightly better than it is for people in the US.

Wrong. Oh so wrong. Please read Marx. Violence is only necessary due to the violence from the rulers. There is no reason to take up arms against them if they do not take up arms against us, and they already do. If when the workers take the wealth that is rightfully theirs they are not attacked then there is no reason for violence.

And thanks for letting the oppressed and exploited know what is morally right for them to do.

You claim he is not a Marxist, yet if you read Capital you get this:
"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society. They generally share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power andwealth within a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through a system ofexploitation. They argue that this creates an unequal society that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential."

I am a Marxist. And I am not a pacifist.

I guess some simple (probably too-simple) possibilities are:

1. They aren't just trying to beat inflation. *

2. Viable ways to make money change depending on the scale of the money you're trying to tie up. A lot of things don't scale (or, maybe better said, scaling them requires additional competencies and may ruin the margins that made it worth doing).

3. You aren't the only one out there competing for opportunities. There's a lot of money out there seeking return.

* I'm shooting from the hip, based on my (potentially flawed) understanding of some reading I've done over the past few years on the body of Capital as Power (CasP) theory being built out by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler among others.

When they frame Capital as Power, one of the important implications is that it isn't an absolute quanta--it's a relative measure (i.e., power describes a relationship--one can have power in some relations, and not in others).

By framing it as a relative measure, they also suggest that attempts to increase one's capital are less about trying to beat inflation than they are about trying to gain power relative to others. I'm not sure I can unpack this in a very concrete way, but some implications are like:

- You could just beat inflation in a high-growth sector for a decade or two and still lose large amounts of power relative to the big players in the sector, and effectively end up transitioning from having enough power to check the other participants to having too little to keep them from pushing you around.

- You could lose money (absolutely) in a crisis, but still significantly increase your power relative to others.

Economist here.

I disagree that if someone wants a broad introduction that by picking up Samuelson or MWG will be able to figure out the field from first (mathematical) principles.

New Ideas from Dead Economists is a fantastic, broad introduction into the philosophy of economics that you appears interested in.

Works by Keynes, Smith, Marx, Robinson, Hayek, and Ricardo do a fantastic job laying the groundwork for modern economic theory.

If you're looking for the quantitative side of economics, Mostly Harmless Econometrics, Freakonomics, and (on the very theoretical side) Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics are must reads.

Capital by Picketty is currently being debated, as the underlying evidence towards his theories are compelling but not necessarily testable.

Game theory is also a fun field within economics, and has overlap in CS and (occasionally) statistics.

Eh, maybe. Marx's idea of the socially necessary labour time fits into this quite well, as he wrote in Capital vol. 1:

Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

However it's worth noting that Marxian economics does not propose that people are paid according to the value they produce, but rather the amount required for the worker to reproduce his labour-power commodity (this is what he actually sells), so the question of payment at least from the Marxian perspective becomes moot.

>Capitalist means absolutely nothing in terms of philosophy. Its just a word used by marxists to express their annoyance with a vague concept

This is patently (excuse the pun) false. One of the largest economic texts it Capital by Karl Marx; in this book his only objective is to critique classical political economy, and by doing so set out what constitutes capitalism. It's not vague, Marx defines capitalism in very concrete terms. Her refers to the capitalist mode of production, which consists of production to maximise exchange value of commodities, the private ownership of social means of production, and the primacy of wage labour.

>and they obviously have no problem with value

This is false. Communists do have a problem with value, their qualm is with exchange value ruling production, which is almost a unique quality of capitalism. It results in shoddy goods, goods not made to be used, but to be exchanged in a money-commodity circuit.

>end up in the hands of the peasants

Not even Communists argue for this; the Communists argue for the means of production to be put into the hands of the people, who can, within themselves, elect leaders who are qualified for the task. This is democratic rule, rather than autocratic rule (which is what there is now) of a particular firm's productive capacity within an industry.

>russia was not "capitalist" for a long time, and still suffers the consequences.

You're right, it had the feudalist mode of production for that time. With the advent of the USSR, it had the state-capitalist mode of production. On what basis do I declare this? On the basis of Marx's definition of the capitalist mode of production.

>which is the idea that they are still somehow the core of the USSR and have to restore that thing, instead of trying to fix their real issues.

What issues are you talking about, in particular? I think the requirement to sell one's labour to a class of property owners is a rather big issue.

>People seem to forget that there are janitors at microsoft who drive ferraris.

That doesn't mean that they are not exploited; janitors driving Ferraris has nothing to do with the problems of capitalism.

No true Scotsmen fallacy.

I read Capital and some other bugs. Problem is that Marxism defined as 'class struggle' is essentially hate movement, they are defined by their enemy. Once they come to power and the 'class struggle' is solved, it does not have any more solutions. So it needs 'constant revolution'.

> For one, a dictatorship of the working class, such as direct democracy, is a cornerstone of communism but clearly did not feature in Soviet states.

It did. But 'working class' was defined as factory workers, but 90% of people were working in agriculture. Marxist solution was to convert everyone into factory worker and kill rest.

> It was a distortion by Stalin, I believe, since it's also called Stalinism.

Stalin was not distortion, there were other leaders similar to him, who would take his place if we would not exist. Also other countries followed similar fate (China, North Korea...)

I try to alternate fiction and non-fiction when I can. Having recently finished Capital Vol 1, I've started Q by Luther Blissett this week. Q seems to be well regarded, but I'm going in blind. After Q I'll likely go back to Capital Vol 2 which I understand to be on the drier side.

During iso I've set aside Wednesday nights as reading nights. The schedule gives me something to look forward too, but it doesn't preclude reading during the weekends if I'm feeling into it.

As a disclaimer, I only made it through a few chapters of Capital before I gave it away.

This distinction was not invented by Marx. In fact a lot of Marxism was invented by Marx; most of it was an extension of the prevailing classical economics. He read Smith and Ricardo.

The key problem with original Marxism, as it was with classical economics, was relying on the labor theory of value. Marx runs with that to come up with a theory that says some people are systematically skimming the value generated by others and that a series of cyclical crises will cause the total collapse of capitalism at some future date.

Every time there's a market crash or a recession, Marxists bestir themselves to tell us all "I told you so!". The problem is the same as the Rothbardian Austrians blaming it all on the Federal Reserve or Keynesians saying it's a slump in demand. Too simplistic. (I'm a Hayekian, an economist who put "I can't explain particular examples and neither can anybody else" at the centre of his theory of economics).

Complex, chaotic systems naturally move around their phase space, often with large oscillations. That's the bottom line. You can't eliminate the boom/bust cycle. It exists in every industry and always will. Sometimes bigger industries go through the cycle and everyone feels it.

The DAO of Capital by Mark Spitznagel, it basically talks about an investing approach where “one gains by losing and loses by gaining.”, it is very insightful because it explains a strategy and effect I have seen work everywhere. Where people who suffer hardship early on, become stronger to deal with things, whereas people who do not suffer hardship early on get wiped off when real hardship arrives.

His whole strategy is about how to do things in life by not trying to take the greedy algorithm [1] strategy where you choose the most logically beneficial outcome at each step and hoping to find the global optimum. Rather he talks about how various organisms in nature take a less than optimal step in the short run, but in a roundabout way they win big.

Spitznagel runs a billion-dollar hedge fund based on the same strategy, and his investment approach is to make less profit in the immediate future, only to make a humongous profit in the long-term future. He has demonstrated this strategy with his fund in 2015 when the market flash crashed and he made billions.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_algorithm

Why finance? Finance was the major viable option for people with your background but that's not the case anymore. Every industry needs people with your background -- more than ever!

However, if you're hell bent on going into finance and you're going to read one economics book, read Thomas Piketty, "Capital for 21st Century".

These are the classic economics tomes that you'd read over a lifetime:

Karl Marx, "Capital"
Adam Smith, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"
Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"
FA Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"

When Karl Marx wrote Capital in 1867, he said capitalism would never be able to get rid of credit bubbles, financial crises, high unemployment etc. He said that over time the problems would get worse and worse with greater and greater financial crises. Here we are about a century and a half later and you just have to look at the housing bubble, the bank crisis, TARP and the government bailout, unemployment in the US and Europe and the Arab countries which helped cause the Arab spring to see how prophetic he was in this respect.

Marx and Engels wrote that the world has seen five economic systems. Each system collapsed due to internal contradictions. The first system was hunting-gathering, then Babylonian/Greek/etc. style slavery, then feudalism, and then capitalism. They saw the Paris Commune as the harbinger for the next economic system which would replace capitalism.

The central contradiction in capitalism Marx spells out clearly in Capital, although its a little too much to explain in a comment. Basically workers create $240 of wealth every eight hour work day, but are only paid $200 a day. The $40 goes to profit, to get more capital, to make more commodities. But what is happening here - the worker is shorted $40 a day, and what happens with that money is commodities are made. Who are going to buy all these commodities when workers are not getting all the wealth they create? Well credit fixes that in the short term but creates a bigger long term problem.

The communist manifesto says "the commercial crises that by their periodic return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly". I certainly feel this way. So apparently does Stratfor. On this point, the left and right are in agreement.

Piketty's Capital in the 21st century would be an example of something in between. His main hypothesis is that unless there is some intervention wealth accumulates until almost all of it is concentrated among just a few. He uses lots and lots of statistics to support his theory. He tells us that it happens but is unable to tell us exactly why.

> analysis of who this new nobility actually is and what the real power structure really looks like

https://twitter.com/alexia/status/522517041983393793

> I've seen bits and pieces of that, but they always strike me as kind of superficial and conspiranoid-tinged

The main left-wing, non-superficial analysis of the 2008 financial crisis that I know of is this -

http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-...

It has plenty of data, as well as an analysis of the data from their viewpoint.

Eleven years after Marx died, Engels published the third volume of Capital from Marx's draft and notes. In it he lays out the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_... ), and other such things.

The Monthly Review article links to the US government's Bureau of Economic Analysis of US GDP growth. In the 1960s it was 4.4% a year, in the "stagnant" 1970s it was 3.3% a year, in the 1980s it was 3.1% a year, in the 1990s it was also 3.1% a year, and from 2000-2007 it was 2.6% a year (if it has been extended to 2008 and 2009 it would have been lower).

One of the best things to come out of so-called “big data” is the slow destruction of the human ego.

I read an interesting joke few months back (not sure where, might have been in Capital Minded), the gist of it was basically:

If 99% of people who buy corporations for a living can't beat a monkey throwing darts over time...why do we believe people who run corporations for a living are any smarter? They're both looking at the same corporate balance sheets and industry trends!

I mean, it makes intuitive sense. For a fully scaled company in a legacy industry, what would really change if we removed the CEO and replaced him with the Janitor? The business will still be subject to the greater trends of the market and its industry. It doesn't take a Harvard MBA to take a data input like: electric cars are the fastest growing automotive segment therefore...my auto company should probably invest in electric cars?

Edit: where I think this could fall apart is in frontier industries like tech. The decisions require much more specialized expertise and the industries are much less mature (ie. Say ridesharing).