However, this phenomenon is understandable. Why is this? Since the reform and opening up, we have learned a lot from the west, including some of my students in our group, and they have also learned a lot about public management from the west. However, after learning these, you will find that all these western theories have many shortcomings. These shortcomings just can't satisfy some puzzles we face. So after learning a lot in the west, everyone may be interested now. Let's go back and see what is said in the classic works of Marxism-Leninism.
Personally, I may have encountered this confusion 20 years ago. I just got my doctorate in finance at that time. I am a doctor at 1997. Before that, I studied mathematics. When I was a Ph.D. student in finance, I had to study the theories of western economics first, because the prevailing finance at that time was still some western theories.
After studying western microeconomics and macroeconomics, I find these hard to accept. Why? Because I study mathematics, I can't accept the utility axiology of western economics. Western economics believes that the price of one thing is higher than that of another thing because the utility of this thing is higher than that of another thing. However, the problem is how to measure the effectiveness of a thing, which is an impossible task. Then western economics suggested that I don't need to measure the utility of this base, so I made a comparison. For example, the utility of this set of goods is higher than that of another set of goods. As for how high, I don't care. Then, I can draw a so-called indifference curve for the goods that I think are almost effective. Use this ordered utility curve for further analysis. However, the most important point of the western utility theory of value is that he wants to talk about marginal utility, which involves the difference between the two utilities. However, we know the ordinal utility and there is no way to calculate the difference. Why? Because the so-called ordinal number is the first, second, third, fourth and so on. We can say that for the cardinal number, three MINUS two equals one. But there is no way to say how much the third minus the second equals. Therefore, the western utility theory of value, I think, can not be established in measurement from the beginning.
Therefore, I will consider whether this problem can be solved by Marxist theory. Because of Chairman Mao, all of us have been exposed to Marxism since primary school, but unfortunately, traditional political textbooks, including teachers of political courses, do not fully explain Marxism and are hard to convince people. However, after reading the classic works of Marxism myself, I was deeply impressed by Marxism. I was mainly reading Das Kapital. As we all know, das Kapital says that socially necessary labor time determines value, and we know that labor time can be measured.
I noticed an interesting question in Das Kapital, that is, the British Prime Minister once asked British bankers what a pound was and what a dollar was in our words today. However, I found that all western textbooks didn't make it clear what a dollar was when talking about money.
Nowadays, western textbooks say that money is a generally accepted trading medium. Today, some self-righteous Marxists try to innovate and say that money is a right. But no matter how you define it, there is no problem of quantity in these definitions. But I study mathematics, so I am particularly sensitive to measurement. So, if you say that money is a right, then you should explain what the right of one yuan is, what the right of two yuan is, and how do you measure power?
I found that only the labor theory of value can answer this question. The measurement of money is to play this role as the measurement of value. Therefore, to explain what monism is, we must return to the labor theory of value. Other theories about this problem are unclear.
Later, my tutor let me read many western English periodicals, because when we were doctors, including later postdoctoral period, we were all required to learn from the west and strive to publish articles in western periodicals, so we should at least read this western paper. But after reading it for a long time, I found that western papers use a lot of mathematics, which is my strong point. Starting from this long term, I found that many mathematics in western papers are actually meaningless in mathematics.
I have taught advanced mathematics to undergraduates in the School of Management of Peking University, and the assignment for them is to find out the problems in mathematics in the magazines of authoritative journals such as Economic Research in China. Later, I synthesized their homework and wrote an article criticizing the application of mathematics in economic research. Before that, I also taught probability statistics to graduate students of Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. The assignment I gave them was to find an article in an authoritative journal of western economics and then analyze the mathematical problems in this article. About 30 students found 30 articles, and we found that each article was untenable in mathematical reasoning. Therefore, I soon abandoned the western academic system. Because it is inconsistent in mathematical logic, and according to Marxist historical materialism, it is also inconsistent in historical logic and realistic logic.
As time is limited, I won't go into details here. I have a lot of achievements in this field. You can search online. You can see that I have works on microeconomics and macroeconomics. Last year, I published another article about the criticism of econometrics, and I finally found that the application of econometrics has great defects.
I study mathematics and treat Marxism and western economics with the same standards. Although our traditional education is Marxist education, this preconceived education does not have much influence on me, because I examine them from the self-consistency of three logics. After I saw that Das Kapital began to accept Marxist theory, I began to read the original works of Marxism. Therefore, I read all the works of Marx and Engels, not just Capital.
So, I found more things. For example, Marx pointed out that Britain is a country with a trade deficit. As we all know, an important reason for the trade friction between China and the United States today is that China has a huge trade surplus with the United States, in other words, the United States has a huge trade deficit. Britain and the United States are the most powerful countries in the world today. They all have a trade deficit. Obviously, there is the same reason.
An official view of China-US trade surplus is that "the surplus is in China and the profit is in the United States". It is said that China is processed and assembled with this material. We assemble Japanese and Korean products in China and then sell them to the United States. Then the price of this product is all on China. In fact, this trade surplus between Japan, South Korea and the United States was transferred to China. But in fact, "the profit is in the United States and the surplus is in China." At that time, Britain made profits abroad, and then brought back these things that did not pay the equivalent, that is, the surplus value representing exploitation, to Britain, which showed a trade deficit. Now the United States has made a lot of money in China, so when they want to take the money back to the United States, they can't get back RMB, but they can only get it back in the form of a trade deficit. However, what is the result of Sino-US trade negotiations for so many years, that is, China continues to open wider to the United States. This means that the United States will make more money in China. And if you bring more money back to the United States, it will inevitably bring a bigger trade surplus. The cause of Sino-US trade negotiations was originally to reduce China's surplus, but in the end it was to expand China's surplus, which was the result of violating the basic principles of Marxism.