the_dunk_tank

I've always hated reddit. Like, I used to be Angry Online about the existence of reddit before it was a normie hotspot - i know hexbear is running a similar system, but aglo driven discussion hierarhcy is literally discourse poison and at volume everyone is so stupid that what's popular will inevitably be really dumb - I love that the thread is filled with people throwing "degrowther" out like a slur, because it's really telling in the worst way that they worship Number Go Up and the upside of this is you can assume everything downstream in their book-length post is pure ideology and cope - and if you're smart enough to already know they're the court soothsayers whose main job is justifying American hegemony by exalting the virtue of Number and doing the equivalent of parlor tricks with numbers to categorize sub.Number.x-y in such a way that comports to their worldview and has, if not a moral justification, a "rationalized" one - something that a dumb person or a sociopath can go "hey it sucks but that's just the way It Works"

A traditionally trained Astrologer will literally have a higher predictive hit rate than these people for any matter they ostensibly went to school to "understand"

It would be funny if these people weren't a big part of how this massively unjust thing we all live under justifies itself.

(it's still pretty funny)

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

so... not really arguing against Unequal Exchange as a concept, just against the name that makes you uncomfortable

"He's not an economist!" Yeah, good. Fucking junk-ass non-science.

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).

Challenge: read the first chapter of Capital

Difficulty: impossible

the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value

when you definitely understand the labor theory of value

comparative advantage

hahahahaha so this is what taking psychic damage feels like

Okay this is not the nazcom guy, this is some anthropologist.

Economists shouldn't throw around accusations of "almost no understanding of Economics as a field" around near anthropologists or we'll pull out all the papers explaining why "Economics as as field" is a religion with at best a tenuous relation to any actually existing economy. You're on watch Economists don't fuck with us.

Okay back to whatever y'all we're doing.

I’m so confused by that last bit, do they think countries can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become perfectly developed without any trade? They’re literally saying “dang isn’t it weird that embargoes and harsh sanctions work” to prove their point. Yeah no shit you need to be integrated with global trade networks to gain access to resources you can’t extract/create internally. That doesn’t mean that trade deals with great powers are fair and not ruthlessly exploiting the different market conditions. Just because you get some benefit from a bad deal you’re strong armed into taking doesn’t make it not exploitative (labor). What a shock that becoming a puppet state in strategic location leads to more foreign investment, clearly this proves neo-imperialism is actually based and good for everyone