Talk:Commodity
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[edit] Old discussion
I recently added the first two paragraphs of the article. They need some refining. Some of this material may belong in another article, any suggestions? User:Ike9898
I really don't agree with a new statement in the article, " Like all markets, they quickly respond to changes in supply and demand to find an equilibrium price." This isn't true. Only true of efficient markets. Here's a colorful example: Some people collect first editions of Stephen King books. For a long time, many of these books traded at a substantial price, let's say $100 for a first edition copy of Cujo. But this this book was a best seller -- there were hundreds of thousands of copies of these first editions out there, and only a relatively small number of collecters. Trouble was that the market was inefficient -- it wasn't well organized to match willing sellers with willing buyers. Along comes Ebay, and people all over the country are putting their unwanted stuff up for sale. Suddenly, in in a much more efficient market place, and the price of a Cujo first edition drops dramatically -- because these books really aren't very scarce relative to the number of people looking for them. The more efficient the market, the more quickly it will respond to a change in supply or demand and reach a new equilibrium price. User:Ike9898
I don't understand the Marxist definition of commodity. Could somebody who understands it try to make the section clearer? David.Monniaux 23:00, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
Which economists?
Some economists advise redefining commodity and product markets as a service market, wherein state inspections, market regulation, property rights enforcement, and other services previously assumed under to be the domain of the state, could be charged for. If this advice were followed, the term commodity would still apply in human life analysis, or narrow domains such as relatively safe food goods, or industrial inputs (oil, screws, wireless spectrum) where quality is more or less standard globally, and there is little risk to life of any failure.
Roadrunner 08:38, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Realitly has become a Commodity
I don't think this is true. Currency dynamics are irrelevant in many international commodity markets (such as oil) where everything is priced in dollars
- Globalization has largely obsoleted the older "thing-based" definition in which commodity status was derived from the nature of the good itself. The property right in that "thing", the standard of quality expected, and the right to sue if standards are not met, tends to vary widely across even the most developed nations. Accordingly there is now more emphasis on contract, and on insurance in modern commodity markets. Currency dynamics has also become very important to international commodity markets.
Roadrunner 08:50, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Munging Marxism
I feel that some of Roadrunner's edits munged up the marxist commodity. RR was right to point out the relationship between price and value (better explored at labour theory of value anyway). But the debate on value is not specific to marxism. Throughout the 19thC both left and right wing political economists sought to relate value (expressed in terms of labour inputs) to price (market fluctuating). The American economists gave up, and started on scarcity based stats analysis (and did good work). Solutions to the relationship between labour value and price have only really been advanced in the 2nd half of the 20th C. I hope my edits reflect this.
On the good side, most of RR's writing was clear (if not as precise as a marxian would like :) ).211.26.143.159 22:12, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC) jhhjsf safkjsaf sdf sdfksdafkasdf ksdafksdf ksf k sdfkasfkasf l lksdfkdasfasds
Š== Marxism - is the use relevant? ==
The concept of "commodity" has a special meaning within Marxism, i.e., a good or service produced for sale on the market.
It seems from this that it must be for sale, but the use is irrelevant.
A chair created by a hobbyist as a gift to someone is not a commodity. Nor is a chair a commodity (as a chair) if its only use would be as scrap firewood (unless one purchases a chair specifically to chop it up for fire wood).
"As a chair"? So now the use is relevant. Brianjd | Why restrict HTML? | 05:52, 2005 Apr 8 (UTC)
The use-value was relevant all along. In this context, it's only the general fact that the chair has use that's relevant to it being a commodity, not the specific use-value. Jim 23:24, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] References/External Links
How can the only references be to Marx / Marx-related articles? Commodity is such a general term these days, there must be a contemporary perspective on "commodities" from, really, any government/financial expert. Darkhawk
[edit] Marxist Nonsense...
Why is the definition of commodities by a long-discredited, failed, fake economic theory designed to support a tyrannical government system being exhaustively explained in this article? It would make far more sense to have it explained by, well, almost anyone who actually understood trade or capitalism, from Smith through Friedman. Not that power-mad word twister Marx.
You may as well use the Nazi electoral techniques of the 1930s to explain how democracy works. --Kaz 02:52, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
- People are free to define words however they wish, and any definition that gains sufficient currency (no pun intended) is worthy of note by Wikipedia. See for example the remarks on the web-hosting-related usage of the term Bandwidth, which is incorrect from an information theory standpoint. --81.168.72.184 08:46, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
- Marxian economics have not been disproven, and I have no idea how one can call it "fake" unless they are a complete shill or utterly ignorant. I would guess that you don't understand the subject yourself all that well if you make bizarre claims like these. Deleuze
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- Rightly or not, Marxism and other forms of Communist economic theory have been discredited in that every single country which has claimed to adopt such policies has ended up in a bad way economically. Russia, China, Vietnam and many other countries all spent decades trying to run their economies along Marxist and/or Communist lines, but all of them have now adopted capitalism. If there is any value to Marxist economics, it seems that it is impossible to get at this value because every attempt at implementing it has gone disastrously wrong. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 212.146.47.250 (talk) 23:41, 11 January 2007 (UTC).
Still, I don't understand why the Marxist stuff is so prominent--the fact that Marx used the German equivalent of the word commodity in an odd way shouldn't bear more than a passing mention. Most people who come to this page are almost certainly looking for either the technical economics definition or the common usage definition. Look at the page on Capital, which mentions how Marx uses this word without totally digressing.
- Most of Marx's definition of commodity is straight from Smith and Ricardo; calling him a "power mad word twister" is complete nonsense. His critique of political economy is quite rigorously faithful to the very theorists he criticized. To bring Friedman into this is laughable; Adam Smith and Karl Marx actually understood and tried to explain the economics of their day; Friedman is simply an ideologue.--csloat 10:25, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
"long-discredited, failed, fake economic theory designed to support a tyrannical government system" Classic Marxism is none of these things. There are many reasons to potentially be angry about Marxism, but I feel like you haven't really read Marx at all, because these are not those reasons. It is impossible to discredit, or prove fake/failed his theory until significantly far into the future from now. His communism applies only when capitalism reaches the point of being naturally overturned in an efficient way, which requires very specific, global conditions as a result of capitalism reaching certain thresholds that it has not yet reached, and as a result of technology being produced that has not yet been produced. (advanced robotics, cheap and free energy, cybernetics, etc. would all help toward communism) Therefore, the "tyrannical government[s]" that you describe were actually not at all supported by Marx. He would immediately have argued it to be far too premature for a communist revolution. No country is at that point yet, and to be truly effective, every country needs to be ready for communism at once for it to work, so we have a long way to go before Marx will turn out to be right or wrong. Either way, his words carry large import if true, so they are quite posisbly worth discussing here beyond a passing mention. Smurfsahoy March 18, 2007
- Smurfsahoy, I doubt Marx had in mind what you describe. Even if he did, the kind of situation you describe is extremely unlikely to happen within the next 100 years if ever, and free energy will definitely not happen because it contravenes the laws of physics. It also seems likely that the more energy we're provided with, and the lower the price goes, the more we'll use it, and there will never ever be enough to satisfy us. We will simply find new ways to use the resources we are given, especially if technology manufacturers have anything to do with it.
- You're talking very much like the nuclear energy enthusiasts of the 1950s and 1960s, who thought atomic power coupled with electronics would lead to a "leisure age" where people would be free to develop their intellect instead of worrying about money (as seen in utopian fiction from the period such as Star Trek). It never happened, it never even came close to happening, because the new technologies simply brought new kinds of problems and required new kinds of workers. Atomic power never came through with the limitless cheap energy either, partly because the environmental and military consequences of such an energy source created huge additional costs on top of the actual electricity generation.
- The sweatshops you see in many developed and developing countries today are things like tech support call centres, where people on minimum wage are made to work long hours in relatively poor conditions. These people's crummy jobs aren't going away due to technology, they were created by technology, because all technology goes wrong and someone somewhere has to pick up the pieces.
[edit] French translation
Produit de grande consommation may be more accurate than produit de base, but I'm not sure I grasp precisely the meaning of commodity yet.
[edit] Request
If in any way possible, it would be a good idea to rephrase the Definition paragraph to one less confusing. Just a though 217.60.160.60 08:22, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Section on Marxism
This entire section duplicates information given in the main article on marxism, using different wording and presentation. What happens is that when the main article is changed, the changes will not filter down into this article. Secondly, as it is right now, the article devotes about 4 times more space to the Marxian view, as opposed to the business veiw, clearly POV pushing. I will trim the section accordingly. Readers wanting more information can follow the link. Dullfig 00:14, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Music??
How is Music a commodity exactly? Surely as something that is IP based or created, it is the exact opposite of a commodity. From the article: "music (an intellectual property) can be bought and sold through many formats especially digitally". This does not make it a commodity, please can someone more expert than I edit accordingly or explain further. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.69.54.182 (talk) 19:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC).
- I've removed music, it should never have been there, as you say it's the very opposite of a commodity! Most music is bought ENTIRELY on the basis of its quality, and there's often NO difference in price between a low-selling and high-selling CD or iTunes track. If music were a commodity, the lower-priced albums would sell more than the higher-priced ones, but in reality the opposite is far more common. Think about which albums you see going into the bargain bins first: they're never the ones at number 1. There's more demand for music judged to be of higher quality so the price of quality music goes up.
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- Well it seems that removing music is somehow controversial and should be discussed, so someone has reverted my alteration within seconds of me doing it. Would anyone care to explain why music, which is bought entirely on quality and not on price, could possibly be a commodity, which is bought entirely on price and not on quality? Anyone? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 212.146.47.250 (talk) 23:48, 11 January 2007 (UTC).
- I suspect what's happened here is that someone's confused the way commodities are often traded (where a physical product never changes hands even if it changes owners) with the actual properties of a commodity. By that logic, a pop concert ticket is a commodity because no physical material changes hands (the ticket is a receipt, the concert is the product), and people only go to pop concerts with the lowest ticket prices without paying attention to who's singing.
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- Music is most definitely not a commodity. If it were, people would say things like "I need 50 minutes of music, now where can I get it the cheapest?". (Much like you might say, "I need a months worth of power for my house, now where can I get it the cheapest?" In fact, you care very much about the differences between various sources of music! (4 minutes of Hank Williams is not interchangeable with 4 minutes of Eminem) Please remove this reference. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 165.236.176.66 (talk) 16:34, 31 January 2007 (UTC).
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Done. Apologies if I'm mistaken, but there doesn't seem to be anyone opposed to the removal. Does anyone disagree with this edit? If so, please do speak up. Just as general advice, for content disputes, it's always best to refer to the dispute resolution process when it doesn't feel like you're making progress, and do remember to try and cite some reliable sources (usually helps convince other reasonable people). In any case, I anticipate the page will be unprotected before too long, and you guys can hopefully sort this out on your own. Feel free to contact me if I've taken out too much, not enough, or if you disagree with the edit requested. Cheers! Luna Santin 08:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Interwiki, and other remark
The French equivalent is not "marchandise" (a general word for goods) but "matière première". Can the change be made? My other remark is that this article is too much sociology-oriented for something that is just a commonplace economic and business topic (well, I'm afraid that some French articles are invaded too by sociologists and even ideologues who see their exalted opinion as relevant whatever the topic ;-) --Pgreenfinch 18:08, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
