DISQUS

W00t! w00t!

It does seem a bit much, but keep it, maybe we'll start enjoying it after a while.

As a short-term solution you can switch your feedburner account to the Atom feed I've been using:

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/feed/atom/

You also see to be able to get RSS with:

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/feed/rss/

so what do you mean?

That's a bit of a misrepresentation of economists. During the current rounds of exchanges many reasons why inequality is relevant have been provided, from different moral/political points of view (some more noteworthy than others--probably the purchasing of political pull is the most relevant, imo--and we should also remember that implementing libertarianism also takes political pull, not just slogans).

"Efficiency vs. equality" doesn't just come up, by itself. it comes up in the form of a trade-off, usually in the context of discussing taxes. Many economists use this trade-off to point that there are disadvantages to taxation in terms of efficiency. It's a relevant point.

The side-discussion on conspicuous consumption has also been rather productive.

So, I think, you're selling economists short simply because they're more plain-spoken than other academia.

The first rule of Writely is "You do not talk about Writely!"

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. :-) I'm not a member or anything.

It's not the Nobel laureates themselves but the people's perception of them. So Stiglitz did some extraordinary work on information asymmetry... does this mean he has more toes that other people? Is he wiser regarding international trade?

Are the people who get these awards more capable that those that didn't get them but have spent far more time on the issue at hand?

Nobel laureates are the new Michael Jackson :)

If something is possible and desirable from the perspective of a certain criteria, it doesn't follow that someone ought to or is legitimate to impose that outcome by force.

If, for example, there are other equally-valid criteria, what is and what is not legitimate is undetermined primae facie.

The assumption here is that hedonism is the only criteria by which to judge actions and with which to fundament choices. That's far from a certainty or a consensus.

To quote someone way more funny than me...

"Imagine everything just as it is, only DIFFERENT, instead of the same. What would it mean to want to say that, at a quite particular point in a chess game—just before you lose your queen, let us say—, we came to recognize that we lacked a special facial gesture for expressing precisely THIS kind of difference?"

This is a really great post... it puts into perspective your efforts on the study of happiness, which I had trouble following until you posted this.

Happy Birthday!

It looks good to me. Unfortunatelly I predict you are going to regret the switch. A while back I switched from MT to WP and my initial experience was positive, especially compared with specific MT quirks but after a while, when the problems of WP started creeping-in, I switched back to MT.

Anyway, as long as you have fun with it and manage to publish without too much hassle, it's not a problem. We come here for the content anyway.

Well, you see, you gave me an explaination of "interest rate" in English. My challenge was that you provide a series of experiences so that after an individual is exposed to those experiences, he would be able to infer/generalise the notion of interest rate. Isn't that was empirism in economics claims? That you can get the meaning of actions by simply observing a wide enough variety of them?... and then they want to do predictions.

I don't want to claim that there's something in the brain before birth (whatever that may mean) or that we learn otherwise than by watching, listening, etc.
Wittgenstein's idea is quite naturalistic... it's, in my view at least, anti-metaphysical, anti-ontological-realist and anti-idealistic.

People live their life by undertaking certain practices, that connect to the physical world in a complicated fashion which varies from practice to practice.
Austrian Economics is the study of scarcity-related practices, but since these practices are self-defining institutions (Bloor's 1997 work on a collectivist take on W. discusses this) then deductively extracting their implications is the only way you can really understand human behavior. (The fact that economics and many fields have embraced behaviorism in the name of naturalism is wrong... Wittgenstein gives us a naturalistic account of the mind that is not behaviorism and that doesn't postulate homunculi, theoretical objects, Forms or whatnot)

If I understand the Bloor/Wittgenstein/Long train wreck in my brain :-), then the fact that economics is a priori means that we don't have any criteria for judging the truth-value of our claims concerning it other than our own usage of it.

For example: we wouldn't call it money if it didn't work as money. Wittgenstein proposed a thought experiment in which wood cutters would "sell" wood but not by the tone but by the size of the base of the stack. He imagined showing them that a stack can be rearanged and not getting anywhere with them. In those cases, he concluded, while the 2 practices/games are simillar, they are different. What the wood-cutters are doing is not selling, nor a "wrong" from of selling, etc.

There's a lot of stuff I don't want to get into here. I think that Long's text says is better, or even more accurately.

Will, the "strong reason" for holding that some propositions/ideas have a gramatical certainty is that their meaning (and therefore truth-value) is exclusively the result of interpretations of human practices, not of their empirical observations.

To speak of "regularities observed in one's own and others behavior" means you take for granted a non-problematic mechanism for following rules and recognizing meaning. Just consider the differences in meaning given by a communist and a libertarian to economic actions. They both have access to the same observations. Meaning doesn't follow.

I'm unsure how you propose for a child to pick up the notion of "interest rate" by silently observing clerks at work, for example. The meaning of the numbers they write on paper is far more complicated than the act itself. (The same challenge can be made about "and", for example)

The relationship between language (and therefore meaning) and reality is much more complicated than a 1:1 connection or an issue of induction. I see the process more like us living in our own language-bubble and ocassionally bumping into reality because of the physical implications of our acts (This is how socialism fails... it goes against nature, not necessarily against our social practices.)

Regarding radical empirism, I have yet to see a radical empirist express himself in anything but natural language, and regarding the meaning of the symbols of natural language (how any symbol comes to have meaning) I hold that there is no empirical grounds for one meaning over another... not directly, at least.

Re: the a priori... Once, my idol :-), Ludwig Wittgenstien visited the Viena Circle and they asked him about his thoughts on the synthetic a priori. His mature work basically rejectes the distinction between the synthetic and the analytic, but when asked he said something like: 'By "synthetic a priori" do you mean that logical forms take also variables, not only constants?'

In other words, we know things a priori in economics because people are the kind of agents which prefer more to less, present consumption to future consumption, etc. This does not give us the ability to forecast prices to the cent, but it does keep Austrians busy.

I hardly see how you could apply a radical naturalist approach to money, for example. All empirical facts about those little pieces of metal are at best secondary, or completly irrelevant to our use of the notion. Money is what we use as money. Money is the kind of social institution which can't be understood by quantitative methods alone. You need the logic of this practice.

P.S. :-)

- Compare Mises's quote with Ayn Rand discussion of what's "rational" for a cosmic, undestructible, eternal space robot. If an entity's behavior's don't eventually envisage consumption or time-related issues, then we can hardly refer to it as behavior.

- Conjectures and Refutations ( http://conjecturesandrefutations.net/weblog/ ) had 2 posts attacking Austrianism from a Popperian perspective. Some of my comments there no longer reflect my current idea, but the discussion might eb interesting, re: falsification and all.

As a Wittgenstein-ian I had the same reaction to the first few chapters of HA. Even so, here are a few points I hope might interest you:

- Roderick Long of the Mises Institute has work on a Wittgenstein-ian interpretation of the a priori. It is qualitatively distinct from Mises, though. (I don't it's a translation but rather that it has an unique element to it.) If you are familliar with Wittgenstein, then you might think better of Long's work than you do of Mises's original remarks.

- An Austrian will tell you that the actions of a Buddhist will not escape the logic of action (i.e. the descriptive aspects of austrianism), but if they prefer less to more and later consumption to present consumption then they are not the kind of agents we have in mind when dealing with entire social systems.
Using the Austrian logic of action you draw the conclusion that fully lived-out buddhism will result in poverty, starvation and eventually death. That's certain. What value and desirability that has, it is not of any concern for the Austrian.

- Most Buddhist don't (and maybe can't) live-out their religion. You see them eating, going to work, etc. If they were to fully enact their vision then we can expect for them to be clinically dead in a matter of days. This is one of those cases in which evolution takes care of it so we don't have to bother thinking about it :-)

- I don't think that Mises thought that what made us human was acting human. Humans can act in many ways, some of which are characteric or accessible only to them. What does or doesn't follow from this is open to debate.

- The Austrian theory is based on a certain kind of agent. The degree to which actual people, like you and I, are such agents is something really interesting. I have my doubts regarding the complete overlap. Regardless, the agent of neo-classical economics is far worse.

Back off, mister! Mr. (is that Dr.?) Leiter is the "Neech", so he must have used his Staff of Value Transmutation (Pagan to Christian bonus, +2 creature comfort, unique) to transmute closet-Marxism into a positive system of economics, rather than the negativist, blind denial of capitalism which it is for us mere mortals!

I was just joking. Some of Mr. Leiter's commentary on Nietzsche is really good and proved to be very influential on my own thoughts on the issue. Just don't ask him anything about politics. :-(

Maybe you could put you junk treshold to -5 (tweak it for your particular circumstances) and then check the "Auto-Delete Junk". This way you don't even get to see much of the mountain of spam you get.

Notice that she isn't disputing that GWB is the proper Commander-in-Chief but rather that he, in that position, FUBARed the situation.

When an individual signs up for the military, he indeed forfeits some rights and accept the possibility of being exposed to combat. That's contractual and that's OK.
What I want to point out here is that in that contract, there are duties for the State also.

If someone signs-up as a soldier in an army, he does so under the assumption that the State will act in a certain way... i.e. engaging only in just and lawful conflicts, etc.

A lot of people are accusing GWB of precisely breaking his contractual duty as Commander-in-Chief, in some sense breaking his oath of office.

There's an entire field, abiogenesis, which studies the appearance of DNA-based life. It mostly does so with the help of evolutionary thinking (in terms of selection).

Also, evolution is not committed to DNA. It talk of natural selection and sexual selection in the context of inheritance and mutations. These notions can be, and have been, successfully applied to various fields of study, some of them non-biological.

And, on a final note... I hate to be Kantian, but if we "suffer" from that kind of "epistemological modesty" as to postulate a noumenal-phenomenal distinction, one cannot deny the possibility that our profoundly-phenomenal Quinean theories can tell us anything about the allegedly-noumenal role of God in stuff. I think this allows us to interpret the thinking of believers: they know the noumenal and may I be damned for claiming otherwise. :-)

On a personal note... Quine sounds very interesting. I read "the two dogmas", but can someone please suggest which of his books is best as an introduction?

There's a small typo: "improtance"

It could be said that any set of fixed rules, such as morality, is alienating, because life is a process of discovery and refinement. Living by axiomatic rules alienated from life, or at least denies the flourishing of life as a goal (along the lines of Nietzsche's critique of morality-as-against-life)

Another view might be that morality ought to be seen as an external restriction on Economics thinking (strategies) That it should be viewed like scarcity. A given. Equality would then not be in conflict with sound economic thinking, but a restriction (self-)imposed on it.

A quick response to Insiderman. I saw the comment and couldn't abstain:
Sociology is relevant because it talks of the values that can't be the basis for economic goods and services, such as respect. You can't trade respect, or any other genuine emotion for that matter.
If you are to believe Mises, that all Economics is to be deduced from the a priori concept of human action, then what stops us from making the same fundamentalist-deductionist claim about all other fields related to human action, such as history? The Economics paradigm of marginal thinking is widely-applicable but by no mean the absolutely superior one.

P.S. Most of my note on "Anarchy, State and Utopia" are in Romanian, so don't waste your time looking through the archives. Sorry. Meanwhile I switched to English, but not soon enough.

It's sort of weird to ask, but can someone pass this on to me too?! Thanks!

Regarding Weber, it was a bit of a disapointment. It's mostly about Protentantism and to a lesser degree about Economics. A good read and a valid perspective nevertheless. You don't *need* it to discuss politics (social science or political philosophy)

I recently read and commented on Anarchy, State and Utopia. I think that the language is clear enough that secondary literature is good enough. While the language is clear and concise, I really likes the phrasing. I'd love to be able to write like that. Read this one for the style. The ideas are good too... if you're into moral minarchism.

I agree. If we consider sex with different persons as different goods (since in basic terminology they are not interchangeable), then we have some sex that's very cheap ($10-$15 "anything you want" in some neighborhoods of Romania) to extremely expensive (sex with your ideal partner)

Since your ideal partner will probably want to have sex with you too (ideal matching, right?) then all the high cost must come from "hooking up".

I'd love to see some supply-and-demand deductions on this, in the style of G.S. Becker's "An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour"... or didn't he do that in that very book?

I like the way Cafe Hayek covered this.