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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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The paradox of value is that things that are more useful than others as a whole, like water, have a lower price than other scarcer things like diamonds.

Replace water with cleaning ladies and diamonds with software engineers and you get exactly the same situation as above

My point was both of these are just cases of normal supply and demand curves intersecting. Which also occur in every single market of which a cleaning lady isn’t in any way special compared to every other market. Nobody says the market for jeans is special and cleaning lady’s are similar to that market.

We don’t go around calling every market a paradox of value but ya clothes are valuable or I’d freeze. Oxygen is interesting because it causes death quickly when you don’t have it but the supply curve for the earth is unlimited quanitity at zero costs on earth.

Paradox of value is not a market, it's a phenomenon that can appear in any market: some things have a higher price than others that seem more necessary. It's something that must be explaned by the theory, and every economical theory (eg theory of labour value) has tried to explain it.

Supply and demand cruve intersecting is just a possible explanation of this phenomenon in marginal utility theory. Perhaps someone one day will come with a better theory and a better explanation, but as long as it is an economical theory it will have to provide an explanation for the paradox of value.

Seems like you are debating the entirety of Econ theory the stuff everyone agrees with that’s taught in intro to micro.

No I'm just explaining you the difference between the facts (the explicanda of the theory), like the price of diamonds and water, and the explanation of those facts (the theory itself), like supply and demand. It is true, however, that the theory is always more precarious than the facts

As someone whose read probably about a 1000 Econ textbooks I have no idea what you are talking about.

Supply and demand curves aren’t some theory. You can actually derive them thru studies and experiment on them.

Authority argument are bad arguments, especially when they are about yourself.

A lot of theories (like quantum physics and evolution theory) derive from experiments. How does that make them non-theories? And because they are theories, they might be replaced by something better one day. However, the fact they explain will remain the same (excepted if we prove they were illusory). Things like that occured when subjective theory of value replaced objective theory of value, or when Einstein replaced Galileo.

But some specialist are unable to see the difference between the theory they learned and the fact it's supposed to explain. Most of the time they are the last ones supporting the old theory when everyone has moved on.

Lol. So I’ll put it at a .001% you are Einstein and all the Econ textbooks are wrong. And the reverse that their results are correct.

When did I say I have a better theory? I just said one day it might be replaced by something else.