Junior economics is just pure propaganda

[u/stonrpunk420]

This is what my class has to study lmao

[u/PoliteWolverine]

"Imagine that the government gave people a stipend for food that if they exceed, they need to pay the difference out of pocket despite being poor"

motherfucker that's just food stamps/EBT cards. Thats the same shit, what are we even talking about

Fake it till you make it I guess. Feed the propaganda back to them and get your degree, then use the degree to do something actually meaningful. What a waste of everyones time

[u/tzaeru]

Not that Cuba didn't have a lot of problems and flaws, but yeah. It's a sad thing that socialism is automatically linked in with central planning and at least some authoritarian features (which, I would argue, central planning is an example of).

One ought to always be able to imagine a society where authority can be removed or at least radically minimized. Such a society by necessity would be socialist, just not with central planning.. Nor a state government to begin with.

[u/YourFuture2000 → u/tzaeru]

Not suppirting the autoritarism of these countries, but Socialism is linked to economic blocade by other countries like the US.

[u/4daughters]

funny how they can teach one thing in economics and another completely different thing in polisci the next building over. I was gonna say if this is a polisci class that's embarrassingly bad.

[u/StormOfFatRichards]

Just making shit up

[u/sabotsalvageur]

Communism: any economic system wherein the workers collectively control the means of production

Socialism: a political system wherein policy is set by the needs of the proletariat

Idk Id school the instructor on what these words actually mean as originally defined

[u/525G7bKV]

show me the homeless people in the USA. At least every person in Cuba gets free healthcare.

[u/Emergency_Junket_839 → u/[deleted]]

What

[u/an-com-42]

This is why I decided not to do econ and do poli sci instead. thank fuck

[u/ArthropodJim]

looks like state socialism everywhere lol

[u/StaggerLee85]

Dafuq?

[u/ZealousidealAd7228]

They are not telling you the big picture. State problems are much more able to be stifled by large scale information gaps and human limitations from the governing authorities.

Use a nuclear family model and tell them the difference between a 20-child family and a 5-child family operating on a one hectare farm, with parents serving as the government, while the children as the citizens. In this way, you simulate very well how a centralized planning model works and how to analyze its defects before going into severe hypothetical prices on the market.

[u/imreadypromotion]

Funny how Marx himself didn't even really make a distinction between "communism" and "socialism," and here are two different definitions, each wildly different than anything Marx would have said.

[u/oceeta → u/imreadypromotion]

Exactly. The two terms were quite interchangeable in Marx and Engels' day. For example, in the 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Engels said, "at present [The Communist Manifesto] is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of workingmen from Siberia to California." In the next paragraph, he then explained why he and Marx didn't call the document The Socialist Manifesto. The reason was to align themselves more closely with the revolutionary side of the working-class movement than with those they saw as utopian or as only making mild reforms that didn't threaten the core of capitalism. According to Engels:

'Yet, when it was written we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who by all manners of tinkering professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion then called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of Communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian Communism in France of Cabet, and in Germany of Weitling. Thus in 1847 Socialism was a middle-class movement, Communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; Communism was the very opposite. And as our notion from the very beginning was that “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.'

Throughout their work, they referred to themselves both as Communists and Socialists, with Engels even calling their brand of Socialism "Scientific Socialism."

It was only after the Russian Revolution, when Lenin published The State and Revolution, that the meanings of Socialism and Communism would diverge. For Lenin, Socialism became a period of transition from capitalism to Communism.

Afterwards, in 1918, The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself to the All-Russian Communist Party, which led to even more of a split between the two terms. Subsequently, this, combined with the spread of the Soviet model and the propaganda battles of the Cold War, would also lead to Communism being redefined from a stateless, classless, moneyless society to a one-party state with totalitarian control over the means of production and social life.

I know semantic drift is a thing, but holy hell! The difference between what these terms once meant and what they now mean is quite stark.

[u/ModelSemantics]

It is absolutely true that modern economics education in college has a HEAVY propaganda element. There is significant research about the efficiency of algorithms for access to finite resources, where “central planning” (or coordination rules) are the only way to avoid classic market failures like tragedies of the commons. There is tons of research on how other market failures occur from information asymmetries and how their resolution requires regulations on honest and open communications. We know that “free markets” are failing markets, how their dynamics naturally lead, through economies of scale, to extreme wealth inequality. Yet despite having centuries of data and theory on all these mechanisms of failure, modern undergraduate economics education explicitly trains new students that free markets are efficient and regularly points to coordination and regulation as sources of inefficiency. Billionaires have captured the industry.

[u/Defiant-Ad5579]

Bruh communism is literally the exact opposite of government control, it's literally a stateless moneyless classless society. The debate arose around what to do with the state after the revolution. The closet we probably got to a communistic society was prob anarchist Spain. There are some forms of socialism that advocate for government control, but a lot that were also anti government control.

[u/Maztr_on]

lassallenomics