Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"[For Hobbes] the state is charged with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy... Human beings are thus, by nature, nonrelational creatures, separate and autonomous." -- Patrick Deneed, Why Liberalism Failed , 32 Proto-liberals like Locke and Jefferson and modern liberals like Mises and Rawls all start from a similar place: we are first and foremost human atoms, who only need enter into social groups in so far as it suits our interest to do so. Our original state was as free individuals, who "contracted" into social groups because we saw it was to our advantage. As Deneen notes, "Even marriage, Locke holds, is finally to be understood as a contract whose conditions are temporary and subject to revision..." (33). Or, as Mises put it: "The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart human cooperation. "Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and p...

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...

Here : During the Second World War the city of Geneva had allocated garden plots along the line of the vanished city walls to citizens wishing to grow their own vegetables in a time of food shortages. This use of public land turned out to be popular; the city continued the allocation of plots after the war. Röpke heartily approved of this undertaking, which both enabled people to obtain independently part of their own sustenance and provided the satisfaction of healthy achievement outside factory walls. When Ludwig von Mises came to visit Röpke at Geneva, Röpke took his guest to inspect those garden plots. Mises sadly shook his head: “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” “But perhaps a very efficient way of producing human happiness,” Röpke told him. Perhaps needless to say, I am with Röpke here.

Mises held that labor is (almost) always something to be avoided in life, that it has disutility , and that the only point of it is to be able to purchase consumer goods. Interestingly, he recognized an exception: himself. He didn't dislike his work; in fact, he lived for it. So he created a separate category of human being to explain this: the creative genius . But the truth about labor is that life is incomplete without it: everyone needs meaningful work in their life: "As a former Marxist, his analysis always held labor, particularly when self-directed or done voluntarily in cooperation with others, in high esteem because of the ethic of responsibility it produced. Work wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, just a means to put food on the table or a roof over your head. Rather it provided meaning, dignity, and moral instruction, something not found by repeating mind-numbing tasks over and over at someone else’s direction."

Mises famously contended that there is no third way between socialism and laissez faire. This was an odd contention on his part, since we'd also have to say that according to him we've always been on a third way: pure socialism is not possible (I think Mises was right about this) and we have never had a pure market economy (also, I think, not possible). Now, Mises was terribly wrong about some things, but he certainly wasn't stupid, so: how did he reconcile these two seemingly disparate ideas? (I am thinking about this as I begin my research on distributism.)

See Nate Silver, here : "The Cleveland Cavaliers led for much of Game 1 of the finals against the Golden State Warriors and had a better than 70 percent shot at winning it when LeBron James put the Cavs up by four with 5:08 left to play." Having just finished reviewing a book on Shackle, who largely holds the same view as Mises on case probability *, I find it interesting to ask just what Silver means here. Clearly, Silver is drawing upon a database of results that contains information on how often teams up four in a game with 5:08 to play won that game. Perhaps he has 200 records that match that criterion, and the team up four won 140 of those games. "But so what?" ask Mises and Shackle. The Cavaliers aren't going to play the Warriors 200 times, starting from this identical situation, so they can win 70% of the time. This game won't result in a Schrödinger's cat situation, with the Cavaliers 70% victorious and 30% defeated; no, one team or the o...

I offer again Mises' characterization of choice: "All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference." --  Human Action Mises is explicitly stressing the notion that there is one kind of choice, and that all choices pick out an item from a "unique scale" of preferences. Collingwood say, "No, moral choices are of a distinct type from economic choices, although they are both purposeful." If we adopt Mises' view, we have to picture Jesus surveying an array of possibilities, engaged in considerations like: "Well, I certainly have a great absolute advantage at producing loaves and fishes. And I do think that Galile...

Mises famously treated moral choices as just another species of economic choice: "All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference." -- Human Action Collingwood saw the important difference between merely economic action and moral action that Mises missed: "It is thus possible to distinguish three types or forms of action. First, the doing something because it is what we want to do; secondly, the doing it because it is expedient; thirdly, the doing it because it is right. The first is the sphere of impulsive action; the second, of economic; the third, of moral. These three are not mutually exclusive species of a genus. There is no action ...

When I noted that Collingwood held that all exchange is at its bottom with oneself, some readers were perplexed. But Mises (who admired Collingwood's philosophy of economics) says much the same thing : "Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange. A less desirable condition is bartered for a more desirable. What gratifies less is abandoned in order to attain something that pleases more. That which is abandoned is called the price paid for the attainment of the end sought. The value of the price paid is called costs. Costs are equal to the value attached to the satisfaction which one must forego in order to attain the end aimed at." (Italics mine.) This exchange is clearly between one state of affairs for an agent ("eating the bread") and another, for the same agent ("eating the cheese"). In such exchanges, we often use other agents to...

People who want to attack Mises's use of "praxeology" as some bizarre, idiosyncratic move on his part often fail to realize how common this sort of analysis was among philosophers in the early 20th century. Bradley, Bosanquet, Green, Croce, Collingwood, and Oakeshott all perform analyses similar to Mises, sometimes described as examining the presuppositions of human action. For instance, here is Green: "without intention there is no action... In saying then that the proper, because the only possible, function of law is to enforce performance of or abstinence from external actions , it is implied that its function is to produce or prevent certain intentions, for without intention on the part of someone there is no act." -- Principles of Political Obligation , pp. 18-19 I do think that Mises made two mistakes in this area: 1) There was no need for him to use the term "praxeology": this made what he was doing seem stranger than it needed to. (In f...

Mises talked about the connexity of prices , meaning that most or all markets in the world influence each other. Of course, that is "more or less influence each other." The corn market in the United States influences the pork market quite a bit, but the market for Tibetan religious ornaments much less so. But forces can act to increase the connexity of markets that were hitherto more loosely joined. For instance, the risk of mortgage-backed securities was seen as low, since they pooled mortgages from all over the country, and there had almost never been a nation-wide downturn in real estate prices: different area's real estate markets were only loosely connected. But, in the very act of pooling these mortgages, bankers were coupling these markets more tightly. So by dismissing the possibility of a nation-wide collapse in housing prices, the securitizers created conditions conducive to a nation-wide collapse in housing prices.

No, it does not: "But now the drop in interest rates falsifies the businessman's calculation. Although the amount of capital goods available did not increase, the calculation employs figures which would be utilizable only if such an increase had taken place. The result of such calculations is therefore misleading. They make some projects appear profitable and realizable which a correct calculation, based on an interest rate not manipulated by credit expansion, would have shown as unrealizable. Entrepreneurs embark upon the execution of such projects. Business activities are stimulated. A boom begins. "The entrepreneurs embark either upon lateral expansion of production (viz., the expansion of production without lengthening the period of production in the individual industry) or upon longitudinal expansion (viz., the lengthening of the period of production). In either case, the additional plants require the investment of additional factors of production." -- Mise...

"The market rates of interest on loans arc not pure interest rates. Among the components contributing to their determination there are also elements which are not interest." -- Mises, Human Action , p. 536 Note: I did not say "some good sentences" -- the sentences are not particularly eloquent. It is the thought behind them that is important.

"The revolutionary impact of Keynesian Economics on contemporary thought stemmed in the main, we have argued, from Keynes' reversal of the conventional ranking of price and quantity velocities. In the Keynesian model price velocities are not infinite; it is sometimes said that the implications of the model result from the assumption that money wages are 'rigid.' This usage can be misleading. Income-constrained processes result not only when price-level velocity is zero, but whenever it is short of infinite." -- Axel Leijonhufvud, Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes , p. 67 In other words, the classical theory of markets, as we still present it to students today, posits that when faced with a disequilibrium price, the market will make infinitely fast price adjustments, so that no quantity adjustments will ever occur. That, certainly, is a very special theory: in reality, price adjustments can never be infinitely rapid, so there will always be some ...

"Wicksell had already recognized serious problems with the marginalist approach to capital theory. Essentially, whereas labor and land can each be measured in terms of its own technical unit (man-hours, acres, et cetera) heterogeeous capital in the aggregate must instead be expressed in value terms -- how, otherwise, to sum a railroad and a sewing machine?" -- Goodspeed, Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution , p. 25 Assuming Goodspeed has Wicksell right here, Wicksell is mistaken. Of course, we can measure labor in man-hours and land in acres, and for some purposes those measures are useful... but not for economic analysis. In economical terms, land and labor should be "measured" exactly as capital is: by the discounted value of the future income streams they are expected to produce. An acre of land in Manhattan is in no economic sense the same as an acre in Antarctica, and a man-hour of Joe Blow's labor is not economically identical to an hour of Kobe Bryant...

Jonathan Finegold Catalán notes that Mises seemed to dismiss Keynes without even really bothering to read him, and wonders why. I suspect the answer is that Mises was done learning new things by the time The General Theory appeared. We see a similar reaction to the emergence of game theory, where the only thing I am aware he ever said about it was the rather dismissive remark: "'Patience' or 'Solitaire' is not a one-person game, but a pastime, a means of escaping boredom. It certainly does not represent a pattern for what is going on in a communistic society, as John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern assert." (As if a pastime might not have a similar pattern in it as some serious activity! Solitaire would still have the exact same game pattern if it was played as part of a death match, but it would hardly still be a pastime!) I don't think there is really even anything wrong with the fact he was not interested in these new avenues of research, except...

"I don't believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I ... I know many exalted personages, and my artist's mind does not shrink from political and social issues. Well, after having seen so many events and so many more or less representative men, I have an overpowering urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the saviour of Italy and – let us hope – Europe." -- Igor Stravinsky, 1930 And what had Mussolini saved Italy from, per Stravinsky? Bolshevism. I note this not to condemn Stravinsky, but to put Mises's remarks on Il Duce in context ( once more ). Many, many people had good things to say about Mussolini in the late 20s and early 30s. Mises had lots of company!

Mises : "The total complex of the mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society. It substitutes collaboration for the--at least conceivable--isolated life of individuals... The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man's reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs." -- Human Action ...