Anyone familiar with Mises's praxeology (a formalization of what Mises viewed as the accepted method and epistemology of economics) will be in sympathy with the following, although it ventures further afield and contradicts Mises's unfortunate rejection of the applicability of biology to his project:
"In the realm of living beings most processes are extraordinarily complex, and many special laws act together or interfere with one another. Thus “exceptions” to the laws result, and therefore we often speak of “rules” only and not of “laws.” However, we must not forget that, finally, most “rules” are effected by laws, the complicated interactions of which we often cannot analyze and the results of which we cannot predict in each case... "With absolute certainty we can suppose the existence of psychic phenomena, that is to say, sensations, ideas, feelings, etc., only in man (more exactly: only each Ego for its own self). However, it is an obvious consequence of uttermost probability that psychic processes also exist in animals, at least in higher ones. We are convinced that a dog or a parrot is not only a physiological machine but a being capable of seeing, hearing, remembering, feeling pleasure, etc. Hence psychic phenomena (awareness in its broader sense) surely did not arise suddenly in the course of phylogeny (for instance, in Pithecanthropus) as something which was absolutely new and peculiar." Rensch, Bernhard. 1960. “The Laws of Evolution.” In The Evolution of Life, 1st ed., I:95–116. Evolution After Darwin: The University of Chicago Centennial. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.The Radical Liberal
A presentation of ideas based upon and extending classical liberalism. The ideas to be found here will be seen by most as libertarian, but reject the moralism inherent in that ideology.
Wednesday, August 28, 2024
Sunday, August 18, 2024
The Cruel Twist of Fate: Imagination
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Mises, the Human Being
I just received a copy of Lionel Robbins's book, Autobiography of an Economist, and out of curiosity I looked in the index to find references to Ludwig von Mises. Here is the first thing I read:
The story begins in Vienna in the spring of 1933. My wife and I, who were on a visit to that city, had arranged one day to spend the evening with von Mises, when we ran into Beveridge, who was there on the last day of negotiations about the projected History of Prices in Central Europe with which he had an editorial connection. It was too late to change our commitment for the evening. It was agreed therefore that we should meet at the Hotel Bristol before going out to dinner and get von Mises to join us there. It thus came about that, as the three of us were sitting together exchanging impressions of travel, von Mises arrived with an evening paper carrying the shocking news of the first academic dismissals by the Nazis — Bonn, Mannheim, Kantorowicz and others. Was it not possible, he asked, to make some provision in Britain for the relief of such victims, of which the names mentioned were only the beginning of what, he assured us, was obviously to be an extensive persecution. This was one of Beveridge's great moments — his finest hour I would say. All his best instincts, his sympathy with the unfortunate, his sense of civilized values, his administrative vision and inventiveness, were quickened by the question. Slumped in a chair, with his great head characteristically cupped in his fists, thinking aloud, he then and there outlined the basic plan of what became the famous Academic Assistance Council — later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning — to which hundreds of émigrés even now living in the English-speaking world owe the preservation of their careers and, in some cases, probably there lives. (p 143-144)
Hayek saved Popper, and Mises, through the concern prompting his question that evening, may have initiated the saving of many more. I have recently seen the question, "Where is our Milton Friedman?"; but more importantly, where is our Ludwig von Mises?
Wednesday, March 06, 2024
Increasing Constraints by Higher Levels of Biological Organization
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Comments on "Evolution and Human Behavior" by Gordon Tullock
I just finished reading Gordon Tullock's essay "Evolution and Human Behavior," which is included in The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock, volume 10, Economics without Frontiers, and was surprised by his omission of the idea of valuing in discussing human behavior.
As Mises and Popper pointed out (see Mises and Popper on Action), action implies a valuing—a preference for a new state that may be achieved and is hypothetically better than the current one. Tullock, ignoring this fact, asserts that his landing on the beaches of "Normandy on D plus 7" was predicted by his genes rather than his values—he was, like his fellow soldiers, "genetically programmed to fight for their tribe" (p 168).
This assertion might be plausible for tribes, as they were tightly-knit communities in which all members were organically connected to each other, if not genetically through the common struggle for survival. If one person felt pain, everyone felt pain including the chief. In this position, a threat against one was a threat against all, and the willingness to fight would have been an asset.
Fast forward thousands of years and we have the environment of the nation state. Here, outside our family, we are alone. Our tribe is dispersed, and we rely for our existence on people we do not know that live far from us. Our State hardly knows we exist, although a failure to pay our taxes my bring us to its attention. The State is not organic—when we feel pain there is no pain felt in our legislature or the departments that execute the legislation that is intended to limit our actions. In this environment, how can we be convinced to risk our lives to perpetuate our State?
The answer may be quite simple. Perhaps it is to make us dependent—to produce a situation in which we believe that all we are and all we could become is dependent on the perpetuation of the status quo in our particular state. When we combine the social services State with the welfare State we have the ingredients of a potent cocktail to mold the values of citizens to make acting against the State a mortal sin and acting in its favor is a moral duty.
Returning to Gordon Tullock, we can imagine that he was taught, as was I, that our country, the United States of America, was prosperous because of our governmental system, and that we lived in a free country. Tullock was only 7 when the Great Depression began and would have been subjected at an impressionable age to all of the New Deal propaganda and may have even benefited from some of the programs. Even though he claims in the essay that he "wasn't even enthusiastic about the war," we can imagine that when he was drafted (Levy & Pert, p. 4) to refuse would have meant prison and/or dishonor. It wasn't his genes that made him ready to kill or be killed by people he had never met who were across an ocean and thousands of miles from his home of Rockford, Illinois—it was his values.
Now, I confess, genes may have an influence on values; but Tullock, although he had read Ludwig von Mises's Human Action (three times!) (Levy & Peart, p. 4), did not first establish that action depends on values and preferences and then speculate about how those values and preferences might have been affected by our physical evolutionary history as opposed to our psychological development.
2015 Levy, D. and Peart, S., Gordon Tullock and Karl Popper: Their Correspondence
Tuesday, January 02, 2024
Mises and Popper on Action
If two schools of thought seem to be not only right, but incompatible, there are only two choices: 1) one or both of them are wrong; or 2) their differences may be resolved through semantic reconciliation and the discarding of mistakes that are of minor consequence. Rafe and I have been on the latter path for some time and hope our work encourages others to take the same path.
Thursday, November 23, 2023
Reflections on Presenting at the Southern Economic Association/Society for the Development of Austrian Economics Conference of 2023
I believe this year's conference was the last one I will attend. It's not so much that it was a waste of time and money, but that I very much doubt that I have another paper in me. In fact, there was only a mass of paragraphs underlying my presentation, not a paper.
The title of my presentation was "Biophilosophy and Praxeology" in which I made many assertions that I expected would be challenged or at least would produce a request for elaboration in the Q&A period. As there was only 15 minutes for the presentation, you can imagine that many things were glossed over, including the apriorism that is surfacing in biophilosophy and the idea that Ludwig von Mises should have looked to biology rather than philosophy for the source of his apriorism. In fact, when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I would address the vast array of possible questions that would require deeper explanations of my thinly supported assertions.
At the very end of the paper there is a short example of how an a priori concept in biology, metabolism and the requirement of binding and releasing energy (Mayr), could lead to the creation of goods and the process of evolution that Menger described in development of money. For some reason, this example became the exclusive focus of questioning by the session organizer and then, in open discussion, by other participants. I was corrected from the floor that the definition of money is the generally accepted means of exchange rather than the most liquid commodity.
In addition, there was very little follow-up after the end of the session in which people like to engage in private discussion. Apparently, nobody liked it, and nobody hated it—a non-event. At the SDAE dinner one student said he liked the presentation and found it interesting.
Note that no one told me that I was rehashing old material that was more clearly or rigorously presented in the past or had misinterpreted the material I was citing. Perhaps it was the emphasis that this year seemed much more empirical than in previous years. Maybe there simply is no interest in rescuing the apriorism of the Misesian program of praxeology from the evolutionary empirical emphasis that dominates the Hayekian mind set.
It only remains for me to seek an alternative path, possibly through the biophilosophers. Do I have confidence of a different result in that direction? Who knows—pigs may fly!