Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Start here . You can work backwards from that post to earlier ones in the conversation, if you would like to do so. What to make of all this? First of all, philosophically speaking , Mises is correct: acts of valuation are not measuring anything. If I part with $40 for a steak dinner, I have not "measured" the value of the dollars or the dinner. I have made a judgment that I prefer the dinner to the $40, but a judgment is not a measurement. (I can of course, make judgments about measurements: "I think Bill is twice as tall as Joe." But that is not a measurement itself either.) In fact, I think we can go further, and declare we have no particular reason to endorse Mises' claim that acts of choice place "all values on a single scale." Consider Socrates, sitting in his cell awaiting death, with the opportunity to escape before him. Mises' claim seems to imply that if Socrates had merely been offered enough olive oil and retsina, he would h...

"Conditions which have become 'economic' have ceased to be material. They are motives, interests, means to ends." -- The Philosophical Theory of the State , p. 300 All of the idealist philosophers I have read recognized the "praxeological" nature of economic life.

Today's neoclassical mainstream tends to look at the economy as a series of shifts from one equilibrium state to another. Of course, all of the best neoclassicals recognize this as an idealized abstraction, but they largely think of it as an abstraction that largely captures what really occurs in an economy. Keynes, in common with Austrian economists, saw that while the market process generates a tendency towards equilibrium, it is never, or almost never, in an actual equilibrium state. Market participants do not have before them a neat little supply-and-demand diagram telling them just what the new equilibrium price will be when supply or demand changes. Instead, they must engage in a discovery process searching for the new "correct" price. Keynes's "vision" was based upon his realization that, in such uncertain conditions, buyers and sellers would be likely to make quantity adjustments as well as price adjustments to the new situation. (In contrast to ...

Austrians often get a lot of grief for Mises' "extreme a priorism" and his notion of "praxeology." In fact, much of mainstream microeconomics is just praxeology done with mathematics: it is working out the logic of optimizing decisions. Now, if Austrians were more cognizant of that fact, it would help them to not get so much grief: They'd realize that Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Krugman, Stiglitz, Becker, etc. are all neoclassical economists. None of the above should be taken to mean that there is no difference between the Austrian neoclassical approach and the more mainstream one.