>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 09/02/99 12:46PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>Since, capitalism is not about to be unfair ,doesn't demanding that
>it be fair, that we not use GDP, seem liike a step in bringing along
>people who don't quite realize yet that capitalism is not about to
>be unfair and GDP is being used to hoodwink them ?
Hoodwink? Capitalism is about the accumulation of wealth in money form.
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Charles: Could capitalism accumulate wealth if most people knew more than they do ?
GDP, and its associated measures, is one account of that process. Capitalism, like the national income accounts, doesn't give a damn about poor people. How is that hoodwinking?
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Charles: Are you saying that the vast majority of people understand how capitalism works, accumulating wealth through exploiting them, but they just go along with being exploited as the source of that wealth accumulation ? Hoodwinked would mean, most people don't know how it works, and this lack of knowledge ( a hoodwinked state of mind) is key in the continued accumulation of capitalism.
No hoodwinking. No wealth accumulation.
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It's not unscientific either, in that it's done according to rigorous definitions using tested, disclosed, and reproducible techniques. It measures what it sets out to measure.
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Charles: This is only part of the definition of science. Science includes telling the WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH (but not so help you God). The unscientific aspect of GDP is that it mixes truth with falseness. Specifically, it implies that measuring part of the economic transactions of society demonstrates something regarding the whole of the economic transactions.
I could meet all of your criteria above in measuring what happens in a building, but only look at five floors of ten. I wouldn't be distorting the facts of what happen on those floors, but if something different is happening on the other floors, it is an unscientific look at what is happening in the building.
Similarly, GDP purports to look at the whole of the economic transactions in some sense, but by ignoring some of them it is unscientific.
> Doesn't Chang's interrogation of GDP make a good step forward for
>those without socialist consciousness, and who would not pay
>attention to more "sophisticated" understandings and critiques of
>capitalism ?
GDP isn't a measure of human happiness. In fact the GDP can rise as people are made worse off. No one's denying that here, right? What's problematic are the assertions that it's an unscientific fraud. Past life therapy is an unscientific fraud; national income accounting isn't. It's bourgeois social science.
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Charles: See above. Much of modern science has been a mixture of science with unscience. There has been plenty of mixing projects that meet your criteria above with projects that do not. Racist theories in biology or social science often mixed accurate facts with unscientifically derived assertions.
Marx's critique of classical political economy is essentially that it is partially scientific and partially unscientific.
I wish this thread would give some consideration to the language barrier that Chang is climbing over. What would we sound like if this discussion were in Chinese ?
Charles> Do most people come to oppose capitalism by reading Marxist
>analyses or critical analyses using bourgeosie concepts ,such as
>interrogating "GDP" ?
Doug: Dunno. What do you think?
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Charles: I think most people start out going through left liberal and reform critiques that are not in Marxist or revolutionary terminology or not much. They consider contradictions and fallacies in bourgeois concepts such as GDP, and start looking for something different.
>
>How well would you do in an e-mail discussion that was all in
>Chinese ? All of y'all ?
Terribly, at least in my case, since I don't understand a word of Chinese. But this isn't a language problem, it's a point problem. We've heard the same undeveloped assertion several times; I for one would like to see it developed a bit more.
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Charles: I hope Chang will elaborate. I have tried to pull out some of the elaboration. However, it seems clear to me that there is a language/culture element to this cognitive dissonance.
I think we should have more appreciation for someone who tries to reach across such a wide language/cultural divide. Afterall, I am in U.S. culture and I can obviously sense the difference of style in the frequent repetition of the same words and formulations. Chang is doing more of the work of the translation than all the English speakers put together.
Live long and prosper,
Charles Brown