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!

Comments on "Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm" by Naomi Beck and Ulrich Witt

A few weeks ago, on February 1, 2023, after reading "Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm" I sent an email to Dr. Ulrich Witt with a copy going to the lead author, Dr. Naomi Beck. Dr. Witt replied promptly, indicating interest and a desire to respond pending a two-week absence starting the following day. After waiting over a week beyond his projected return I reminded him of his interest but have had no reply. The text of my original email follows:

Dear Dr. Witt,

I have just finished reading "Austrian Economics and the Evolutionary Paradigm" and feel compelled to write you about it. I am addressing you, specifically, while you are not the leading author, because it appears that Dr. Beck has moved on to other endeavors and may no longer be as engaged as yourself. It is clear from the vast body of work that you have produced over the years that you are committed, as am I, to the examination of evolution's relevance to economic thinking. I hope that you find my comments of interest, if only in exposing a different view of the problems addressed.

On pages 213-214 you discuss the problem of "the emergence of novelty" and corresponding "epistemological constraint." Here I think it best to turn to Popper who stated in "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind," his Darwin Lecture at Darwin College, "I think that scientists, however sceptical, are bound to admit that the universe, or nature, or whatever we may call it, is creative." Popper also suggested that "All life is problem solving" and "All things living are in search of a better world," exhibiting a metaphysical or axiomatic approach to the understanding of life and evolution. When you wrote that "a preference for experiencing the thrill of novel stimuli… may even be innate" you were hypothesizing that such a preference may be axiomatic or—dare I say it—a priori. And here we have arrived at where I find the greatest difficulty with your article.

Before continuing it is imperative that I emphasize my belief that Mises made mistakes, specifically in attempting to isolate economics from the other forms of knowledge, especially biology. I say it to assuage your fears that I am simply a disciple of Mises rather than someone who has critically read his (and, I must say, Karl Popper's) work.

Unlike you, I think Mises's apriorism, rather than being an obstacle, is the only path to an Austrian economics that is compatible with evolution. The apparent inadequacy of Mises's work comes not from his axiomatic approach, but from the lack of axioms from biology. For an attempt to identify biological axioms, see Mahner, M., Bunge, M. (2013). Foundations of Biophilosophy. (Germany: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.), which incorporates at least one axiom that is more fundamental than biology—that of realism (p 5). Unfortunately, the book does not include those axioms or a priori concepts that Mises smuggled in when he referenced human action. On this point Barry Smith was quite right when he wrote in "The Question of Apriorism":

Consider… the concepts causation, relative satisfactoriness, reason, uneasiness, valuation, anticipation, means, ends, utilization, time, scarcity, opportunity, choice, uncertainty, expectation, etc. The idea that one could simultaneously and without circularity reduce every one of the concepts in this family to the single concept of action, that they could all be defined by purely logical means in terms of this one single concept, is decisively to be rejected. (p 4)

Economics has previously had a significant impact on biology, with Malthus's work on population inspiring both Darwin and Wallace. Mises also recognized the effect of economics on biology when he wrote in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1966/1974, Translated by J. Kahane. London: Jonathan Cape):

The division of labour is a fundamental principle of all forms of life. It was first detected in the sphere of social life when political economists emphasized the meaning of the division of labour in the social economy. Biology then adopted it, at the instigation in the first place of [Henri] Milne Edwards in 1827. (p 291)

Unfortunately, Mises did not seem to see the importance of the fact that a law discovered in a more complex field of knowledge would then apply to, and in turn be derived from, one of lesser complexity (see Karl Popper on reductionism in The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, p 149). Mises missed the fact that what we might discover in ourselves would then apply to life in general. I think that many of the concepts of economics including action, property, profit, marginal utility, and the laws of supply and demand will be found to have biological, largely a priori, origins (on action, property, and profit see Gladish, B. and Champion, R., Evolutionary Economics: An Austrian Approach (unpublished)).

In the end it matters little whether biology establishes laws that are introduced into economics empirically or axiomatically. In either case, economics, and Austrian economics in particular, is not required to argue for their applicability, just as chemistry does not need to argue for the existence of atoms in a discussion of molecules.

There is, of course, more to say, especially about Popper's ideas on metaphysical research programs and their applicability to the empirical status of economic theory. I hope that I will have a chance to discuss them with you.

Regards,

Brian Gladish

If Dr. Witt responds I will be editing this post to reflect that fact.