heptagrammaton’s Reviews > The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works > Status Update

Robinson pointed out that the neoclasical 'production function' [...] lacks a satisfactory understanding of the units in which capital can be measured [...] it rests on a tautology. But as Robinson notes, before the economist gets round to querying this, 'he has become a professor, and so sloppy habits of thought are handed from one generation to the next.

[cont., emphasis mine] The anarchist-Marxist distinction indeed makes little sense today.

To attribute economic crises to scarcity in nature, as did Malthis, is to confess an inability to adapt technologies, cultures and social and economic forms to metabolic relations more adequate to capital's (or our) requirements. The concept of scarcity is no natural but a product of capital's marketing practices.

... The question of what kind of city we (and capital) build is not independent of what kind of people we want to become.

. . . The more the workers struggle to fashion a reasonable life for themselves, the more capital concludes that this is because capital has been too generous and that a general reduction in wages is in order.