| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Free to Lose uses neoclassical economic models to assess both Marx's concept of exploitation and his endorsement of socialism. From within this framework, Roemer makes a valuable, often brilliant, contribution to Marxist economic theory. -- Debra Satz Economics and Philosophy During the past decade, John Roemer has established himself as one of the foremost interpreters of Marxian economic analysis, and his writing has been much read and discussed not only by economists, but also by philosophers, political scientists, and historians. In the present work, Roemer attempts to systematize his 'reconstruction' of Marx' ideas on exploitation and class. -- Louis Putterman Journal of Economic Literature
About the Author
John Roemer is Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics, Yale University.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Roemer light, 14 July 2003
By Michael Greinecker - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Free to Lose (Paperback)
John Roemer is an economist who has put some work into translating some ideas of Marx into the language of mainstream economics. His writings are generally very technical, which makes them accessible only to a small audience. Here he has written a book that is readable with minimal math (some linear algebra) and is still able to convey some rather deep ideas.The main theme of the book is exploitation. Roemer rejects the classical marxist concept of explotation, which is based on the labour value theory, on the grounds that the underlying economic theory is wrong and by showing that one can get perverse results on who-exploits-whom with the classical theory. He proposes a different concept of exploitation, one that traces exploitation not to work relations but to the distribution of productive assets. The way he conceptualizes exploitation doesn't even require a labor market. He also defines classes over the groups that arise in his models (who is a net seller of labor etc.).
Since exploitation, defined in Roemer's way, stems from an unequal distribution of productive assets, the question of the immorality of exploitation can be reduced to questions of distributional justic, a topic Roemer adresses then from several angles. He concludes that a emphasis on exploitation is misplaced and one should discuss distribution of property directly.
Roemer also adresses historical materialism and several "utopias". One could argue that this book fails to deliver what it promises; it is certainly not a introduction to the work of Karl Marx. On the other hand it is an excellent introduction to criticism of capitalism. Wether one agrees or not, the arguments are clear and rigorous. Hence five stars.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Nearly useless, 13 April 2006
By Walt Byars - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Free to Lose (Paperback)
As the previous reviewer pointed out, this is most definitely NOT an introduction to Marxian economics. Roemer was one of the most prominent of the "analytical Marxists" who supposedly attempted to reconstruct Marxism on the basis of methodological individualism. Frequently, they ended up in hilariously strained defenses of official Soviet Marxism (the tenets of which are mainly intellectually indefensible, unlike real Marxism). G.A. Cohen's book on Marx's theory of history is a good example of this. The analytical Marxists regarded classical Marxism as nonsense, because they never took the time and work necessay to understand it in systematically.After a misguided criticism of classical Marxism, Roemer spends a large portion on his book developing economic models which as far as I can tell, are irrelevant. He shows that if people with unequal amounts of wealth engage in production and distribution engage in exchange, patterns of inequality are maintained and accumulation may magnify them. This unsurprising result also holds if there are only credit markets, only labor markets, etc...Couldn't he have explained all of this in 2 or 3 pages?
The one redeeming feature of this book is the discussion of theories of justice and desert. Romer utterly demolishes those who defend the distribution of wealth under capitalism (Even a potentially more egalitarian capitalism) on the basis of desert.
There is a chapter on historical materialism. It is just a defense of Cohen's awful book.
If you really want to read analytical Marxists on economics, see Roemer's "Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory." At least it derives some interesting welfare properties of capitalist economies.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Economics
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Management
- Books > Business, Finance & Law > Professional Finance
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Government & Politics > Political Science & Ideology
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Philosophy > Introduction to Philosophy
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
