again, marx didnt see it as a fixed pie. thats the whole reason behind his idea of absolute vs relative surplus value, is that the pie isn't fixed. he absolutely saw the (at his time) modern capitalist economy as a revolutionary, dynamic force that brought about a great increase in the absolute amount of productive capacity and wealth in the world
It absolutely does, and the fact that now 2 marxists (which I can see from your comment history) have a total inability to offer any actual rebuttal, does not surprise me.
theres nothing to rebut. you made an assertion thats false on the face of it and posted a link to something totally unrelated. it's so wrong i dont even know which part you're misunderstanding.
but one of the core ideas of marx's conception of history is that human needs, wants, and human nature itself are constantly in a state of change and that those needs and desires are in large part a product of the environment in which you live, and further that humans and human society in turn change their own environments which in turn change human nature itself
well, china also has gigantic northern and western regions that cannot be forested. the us doesn't have an equivalent of the tibetan plateau or the gobi desert
> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?
yes. the soviet union was wildly successful for most of its history. it went from a backwater poor agrarian country to an industrial superpower near peer with the US in a single generation, while simultaneously going through multiple brutal wars and crushing nazi germany at immense cost. despite all that, the soviet union had the fastest and greatest economic and quality of life rise of any country in the 20th century.
of course it had problems that led to its collapse but you cannot be serious and say it was never successful at any point
this article is trivial nonsense. of course he's technically correct, but the article contains no useful information and boils down to just saying that people (including doctors) aren't looking at literally only 5 year survival rate charts.
like the colon cancer thing. he talks about how it would only be more effective to catch colon cancer early if you assume we have treatments for it that would work early. but we don't need to just assume blindly. we already know we do have those treatments!
Agreed. I think his blog title, "Probably Overthinking It", is appropriate named.
Essentially every assertion in the article is either an oversimification, cherry picking a random niche situation to highlight, or just flat out factually inaccurate.
Let's take this paragraph for example:
"Catching cancer early is beneficial only if (1) the cancers we catch would otherwise cause disease and death, and (2) we have treatments that prevent those outcomes, and (3) these benefits outweigh the costs of additional screening. This table does not show that any of those things is true."
To address these one by one:
1. Obviously cancer causes disease and death. The same graphic he references makes that abundantly clear. Sure, there might be some rare exceptions (elderly patients with slow growing colon cancer for example), but we're talking about the general population.
2. All cancers have treatment options available in some form (could be chemo, radiation, surgical resection, etc), so this assumption doesn't even make sense to include. Let's assume for a second though that treatments might not be available. Even if that were true, there ARE treatments that can help treat cancer symptoms, and but may not affect the tumor directly. Often these are specific to the specific type of cancer.
3. This assertion is dumb - is the author really trying to argue that providing symptomatic or other relief to a cancer patient isn't a sufficient benefit to warrant additional screening?
I could go on, but you get the point. Some people just like arguing for the sake of arguing I guess.
there really are far fewer homeless people in china than there are in america. it's not just that they're out of sight, it literally is much less of a problem to begin with. you can't try to equate these things
This is a ridiculous statement on so many levels... on the one hand it's true that culturally folks are more likely to look after their family members. But there's plenty of people who have not had kids and severe alcoholism as well. I've seen plenty of homeless on the streets of Beijing and many years ago too.. more importantly there's hundreds of millions of people who live precarious lives.
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