How Many Types of Economic Activity Are Their?

Answer: One. The only form of economic activity is exchange. There are two types of exchanges that we engage in throughout our lives.

1. distribution - moving stuff around and/or passing it to other people

2. production - changing things by applying labour and capital to them

These two types of exchange have already been discussed on this blog a little bit. There are several ways to organise each process in terms of the specific exchanges taking place themselves or in terms of the legal framework dictating what exchanges are and are not allowed.

Examples of the former would include the market mode of distribution and the guild mode of production.

Examples of the latter include the political philosophies of liberalism and socialism.

And so on, and so on. There's always more to say.

Comments

Iain McKay, Bryan Caplan & the Case of the "Anarchist" Anarchist

In the past I have written blog posts disputing claims contained in the online document called An Anarchist FAQ principally written by Iain McKay. I spent those posts trying to contend with Iain's claims re the ancap question and the mode of production called capitalism . McKay has a bee in his bonnet re anarcho-capitalists' insistence on referring to themselves as anarchists, that much is obvious. Every reference to ancapism runs something along the lines of "an"cap or "anarcho"-capitalism. I find this very amusing because 'anarchist' or 'anarchism' are words (articulate mouth-sounds) first and specific concepts second. Ditto 'socialist' and 'socialism' friends. Speaking of socialism... In the comment section of one of his videos the Youtuber called StatelessLiberty responded to a criticism by linking to Caplan's work on the Anarchist adventure in Spain in the 1930's . The critic shot back with a critic...

Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism

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Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

AynCrap

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