Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Mises & The Yogi

Re: Mises & The Yogi

James Wells — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 01:01:58 -0000

Will,

I love how you expand the empiricist camp to include just about everyone with "I mean empirical in a broad, not positivistic, sense. Introspection, even knowledge of what we mean when we say something, is empirical."

But you are wrong. Actually, the only way of knowing anything is the rationalist way. I mean rationalist in a broad, not Cartesian sense. Observation, even accumulation of raw data when reflected light hits our visual organs sending electrical impulses to our brains, is rationalist.

Cheers!

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Brian Macker — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:45:07 -0000

To answer your original question: "Economic principles only apply to Buddhists insofar as they aren't acting like Buddhists?"

Yes, and the I'd estimate the percentage of Buddhists economic law doesn't apply to being a fraction with the denominator being the total number of proported Buddhists and the numerator being the number of Buddhists who die from privation. In otherwords a number so close to zero as to be insignificant.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Brian Macker — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 17:31:38 -0000

Will,

I can agree with your sentence on the empirical.

Your economic example didn't violate the law. In your example the government did not set the price ceiling of the good below the market price.

If you are going to assume that everyone likes the governments edicts so much that they will change their behavior based on mere requests then I don't see the need for the price cap at all. There is no need for it to be mandatory. It can just be a suggestion. Nor does the number of people matter. If you are going to assume ten or one hundred zombified subjects then why not assume a million or a hundred million.

I can think of lots of situations that seem to violate the law but the really violate the "all other things being equal" clause. In your example the violation was that you assumed everyone became a saint. I can think of other ways to twist things so that a shortage doesn't occur. 1) The government doesn't enforce the cap 2) The cap is of so short a duration that people can postpone their transactions to avoid it. 3) The cap coincides with a rise in supply or a fall in demand. 4) The government could spread lies about a product saying it was dangerous and at the same time set a price cap below the old market price.

So what. Does it violate a law of physics if I can fly ... during a tornado. Of course not, but it seems you would hold this as some sort of violation.

Part of the reason why Mises wrote what he did about Buddhists was to indicate that economics doesn't deal with certain special cases. Economics isn't going to tell you what kind of behavior to expect from people like the 9/11 terrorists. The fact that suicide terrorists exist doesn't somehow invalidate economic law.

In effect you have not shown that the mandatory price caps are "effective" or "neccessary". By definition price caps are mandatory, and there would be no way for the government to know whether they were effective without the chance of also causing damage.

Even in your example the government is in effect causing damage if it really set the price below market (which you admit it really didn't). If there really were people who would derive a benefit from the good at the higher price your "price cap" is in effect diverting the good from those people who have a more valuable use for the good to those who have a less valuable use.

I can see no way in which this is beneficial.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 15:58:43 -0000

I mean empirical in a broad, not positivistic, sense. Introspection, even knowledge of what we mean when we say something, is empirical.

There is a well-kknown model within which, by definition, ceilings below the market price cause shortages. It is a "law" of the model. But, as a matter of fact, there are lots of ways to avoid shortages with price ceilings. They are very unlikely, but do not contradict the nature of the elements in the system. For instance, the economy is very small, everyone is very public spirited, and they understand that scarcity (there was a hurricane) is driving up prices, and see the cap as a request from the government to demand less, and so they economize and consume less, driving the price down to equal to or less than the cap. So here's a perfectly intelligible case, fully consistent with human psychology, in which a price cap below the market price doesn't lead to a shortage, but just a reduction in demand and the market price. Unlikely? Absolutely. But ruled out by scientific "law"? No way.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Brian Macker — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:28:04 -0000

Will,

No other ways? That depends on how you define empiricism, and if you do so wrongly you can end up with the kind of mistakes Skinner made. He defined the empirical so narrowly that he missed alot. Our personal expericences with motivation, emotion and the like are empirical. Yet, Skinner treated them as subjective. We aren't after all avitars but real existants in the real world. So internal subjective observations count as empirical in a broader sense.

I disagree with you about economic laws. Seems to me that all physical laws are "ceterus paribus" also. The apple would fall at such and such rate, if .... it wasn't tied to the tree by a string. Physicists are careful to avoid such things. They use qualifiers. The 2nd law of thermodynamics only applies to "closed systems" for instance. Economists do the same thing but many amateurs just don't pay attention to that.

Seems like you are saying that you think you can violate economic laws. Hate to tell you this but economic laws are just as unavoidable as the laws of gravity. For instance, if you legislate price controls that set a price ceiling below the market price you will get shortages. No avoiding this.

In any case it is the same in all disciplines. The laws only apply "all other things being equal".

The economic laws about the behavior of prices arise from individual action in a similar way that laws on gas pressure and temperature arise from the behavior of individual molecules of gas.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Brian Macker — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:04:01 -0000

... mistake on the part of many to believe that Keynes is more empirical than Mises.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Brian Macker — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:56:28 -0000

Gene, are all Austrians Misesians? I didn't mean to apply it so broadly as you seem to think. However if they are making computer and mathematical models they are doing a piss poor job of advertising the fact.

Look I'm not a professional economist, nor do I have a lot of time for following the latest research, so I have missed this. Could you give me some examples.

I have read Human Action. I have also read several non-Misesian takes on Austrian Ecomomics like Rothbards "Man, Economy, State". These seemed perfectly reasonable to me given the state of the rest of the economic profession, like for instance Keynesian theory, which I learned in college.

I consider myself in the Austrian camp. However, I find some of Mises pronouncements on the nature of economic knowledge a little embarrassing. He talks like some kind of foundationalist and I don't find that appealing. My memory of this is vague but I have heard quotes from Mises on this subject and on the physical sciences that I would find impossible to defend, and easy to attack.

All in all my opion of Mises is positive and it think it is a mistake on the part of many to think that believe that say Keynes is more empirical than Mises.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:04:05 -0000

But the ARE NO non-empirical methods. THE way of knowing is the empirical way.

In any case, there are no strict economic laws, only extremely hedged ceterus paribus laws. That is, regularities that obtain in wider or narrower contexts. We think of the "laws" as the widely obtaining regularities. But these aren't laws in the same way that physical laws are.

And by the way, if you're an apriorist, Hartry Field's Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism will blow your mind.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Gene Callahan — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:52:23 -0000

Brian,

There are a fair number of Austrians, especially at GMU, doing just what you say they have "shut themselves out of."

You are wrong that Misesians "disdain the empirical." They just say it can never establish economic laws. And it can't. You might see also _Economics and Reality_, by Tony Lawson of Cambridge, who is not a Misesian, an Austrian, or a libertarian, but demonstrates this at length. He is an econometrician by training, and he contends that every single economic "law" that has been developed by econometrics has broken down as soon as it is formulated.

Empirical methods cannot even differentiate economic from non-economic phenomena.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Brian Macker — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:27:28 -0000

I think this whole a-prior/empirical argument is based on a false dicothomy. The basis for knowledge and methods for obtaining knowledge are all trial and error. Even innate information we might have such as pain signals and our sensory processing systems were techologies "invented" by evolution which is basically a natural information seeking system based on trial and error.

Mises when to far in trying to found his economic theories on one half of this false dicotomy. He should have stuck to showing why other economic theories were improperly applying both empirical and deductive methods. Instead he ended up making what are unsupportable philosophical claims that are used to undermine his perfectly reasonable economic theories. Miseans are using empirical methods whether they like it or not and are missing out on additional methods in there distain for the empirical. Theories that could be improved dramatically by using some of the other methods of science, such as model building.

I think it is reasonable to point out that methods that work for the physics of macro particle aggregations will not work for something that does not have the same basis. It is quite another thing to claim one can only use "a-prior knowledge" and deduction as the only means to obtain knowledge in the area of economics.

With the advent of computers, you'd think that some Austrian economists would try to build models of their theories in order to show how they work, and to explore possible subtlities that armchair deduction might fail to expose. I am a computer scientist and have thought about this. It really would be possible to simulate human action as envisioned by Mises on a computer. Another area of exploration might be some form of subjective mathematics. They seem however to have shut themselves out of such avenues.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Gene Callahan — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:43:20 -0000

Oh, and this:
"But wait! Buddhists apparently think and act in a different way, right?! Oh no they don't, Mises says."
Is silly. Mises just described the goal of Buddhism as the cessation of thinking and acting. He may or may not be mistaken, but, given that view, then obviously someone who achieves the goal is not "thinking and acting in a different way" -- he is not thinking or acting.

Only a gleeful frenzy to dump on Mises could make one overlook such an obvious point.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Gene Callahan — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:34:36 -0000

Some brief thoughts:
1) If the idea that all knowledge is empirical is empirical, then your argument is circular.
And how do you know what characterizes "empirical" knowledge? Did you discover that empirically as well?
2) Mises mis-characterized Buddhism, but in any case, a Buddhist would tend to agree with him -- a fully enlightened person is, in an important way, "not human" -- specifically, they are not moved by the desire to improve their own circumstances.
3) For philosophical defenses of praxeology, see also Aristotle, Barry Smith, Raimondo Cuibeddu, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufman, and Donald Davidson.
4) Even physics has many non-empirical elements -- e.g., Kuhn demonstrated that at least one of Newton's three laws of motion had to be assumed before the other two could be tested, and Einstein seemed to arrive at his relativity theories on mostly a priori grounds.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

John T. Kennedy — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 17:52:30 -0000

You've identified a bit of nonsense from Mises, but what's the big deal?

It was a mistake to make a special case for Buddhists. Now what?

Re: Mises & The Yogi

BillKorner — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:15:26 -0000

Certainly Davidson and loads of philosophers have explored the relationship (e.g. causal or not and if so how) between reasons for acting and the actions themselves. There's also work on the relationship between explanations of actions and reasons for acting.

One paper that deals with both themes simultaneously is:

"Functional Explanations and Reasons as Causes" by G. Sayre-McCord in Philosophical Perspectives (1989) pp. 137-154.

As for how we know about these connections (in particular, whether or not a prior) there does not seem to be as much interest. (But I'm not an expert.)

Mises own assertions and arguments on the matter do not seem to have garnered much interest or respect. But there is Nozick's paper "On Austrian Methodology" in Socratic Puzzles.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

interstar — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 13:40:54 -0000

I wonder if anyone has done some sort of comparison with Donald Davidson's views on rationality?

(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/#Act)

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 04:07:41 -0000

Gene, Since there is no a priori knowledge, it must be empirical!

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Gene Callahan — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 17:46:08 -0000

Will, is your "naturalism" an empirical or an a priori piece of knowledge?

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Gabriel Mihalache — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 07:47:29 -0000

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.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 09:13:19 -0000

Gabriel, I think you're using a priori in a non-standard way (non-standard in American analytical philosophy, anyway). Also, there is a vast literature on naturalistic accounts of meaning. I recommend Devitt's Designation and Coming to Our Senses, Millikan's new Language: A Biological Model and any of her older books (esp. Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories. Also highly recommended for a recent general naturalistic account of the mind, Kim Sterelny's Thought in a Hostile World.

I don't just understand the imagined difficulty in empirically forming the concept of "interest rate". Why would this have anything to do with watching clerks. If learn what it is to borrow something in exchange for something, then you're almost home. If you understand what money is, you're there.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

BillKorner — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 05:38:04 -0000

Seamus is right that there's a big difference between saying:

(1) that we should study how humans gain knowledge empricically (which may reveal "constraints and preferences for aquisition and building of belief structures that appear quite a priori [where a priori means 'well understood in terms of the structures of the brain']")

and saying,

(2) that all knowledge come from the senses.

(And I think that (1) is a more common meaning for 'naturalism' than is (2).)

But Mises is not endorsing (1) and he IS denying (2). So Seamus' point is of no "help" to Misesians who want to pretend he can tip a hat to Quine.

Furthermore, nobody's argued (as far as I know) that "constraints and preferences for aquisition and building of belief structures that appear quite a priori [where a priori means 'well understood in terms of the structures of the brain']" (or the discovery of them) would amount to anything like the A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE of which some used to speak.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Gabriel Mihalache — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 23:23:18 -0000

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: Mises & The Yogi

Jadagul — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 17:41:33 -0000

Will, I'm not really qualified to speak on behalf of Mises, but I think either 1) you're misreading him or 2) he took a good idea too far, but there's a plausible way to extend the argument that doesn't lead to absurd conclusions.

As I understand Mises's characterization of Buddhism (no clue whether it's accurate or not), he claims that Buddhists aspire to lives of total inaction and lack of desire. But obviously, if you aspire to a life of inaction, you have desires and are probably taking action to reach the point where you can eschew action. The "Buddhists aren't people and don't act" claim would only apply to those who had reached enlightenment and actually reached the point where they had no desires and took no actions. Once they reach that point, they're gonna die in, what is it, three days without water?

As long as you're still acting to keep yourself alive, you have preferences and are taking actions, and Mises's theory should include you. Only once you stop wanting anything would you 'stop being human.' And I think I'd have to agree: anyone who has no desires, no values, takes no action to reach any sort of desired state seems totally inhuman to me.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Jason — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:08:23 -0000

Mises is painfully off the mark in describing Buddhist belief and practice. The asceticism s/he describes is something the Buddha specifically pointed out does not lead to salvation.

Dogen, a historical and famous Zen Master, said that the non-doing evil was basically the same as enlightenment. The beginning of the Dhammapada, Sayings of the Buddha, says, "Mind is the forerunner of all conditions [...] Speak or act with an evil mind, and suffering follows you [...] Speak or act with a pure mind, and happiness follows you." Far from fatalistic, world-denying and ascetic. Far from believing non-action is the source of all good.

In fact, purposeful human effort though the noble eightfold path, meditation, and practicing virtue and generosity to reach the end of suffering is exactly the point of the doctrine and discipline of Buddhism. Buddhist renunciation is meant to tread the middle way between being an animal and a vegetable: "In whom there exists no provocation, and for whom becoming and non-becoming are overcome, he is one — beyond fear, blissful, without grief [...]"

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Seamus — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:24:01 -0000

Just wandering around with google and found this conversation. I have an interest in this subject.

Will, maybe we have different uses of 'naturalism', but I view it as quite compatible with a form of a prior knowledge. Naturalism, in tying itself completely to empiricism, must accept certain facts about the basis of human nature. Namely, we are biological creatures. Defining the 'mind' is a tricky , I admit. But if one embraces empiricism (and thereby rejects non-naturalistic explanations), then however you define it must ultimately be tied to the physical structure of the brain. This does constrain what we know and the form in which we know it. If you start with these assumptions and sprinkle them with Quine I can easily see constraints and preferences for aquisition and building of belief structures that appear quite a priori.

Re: Mises & The Yogi

Anonymous coward — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:43:20 -0000

I liked your bit on drawing the exact opposite conclusion to Boettke on the matter.

Suppose that one is presented with patently absurd argument argument X in Mises or Hayek, and that it is obvious that Y is in fact the correct alternative argument. One has several options.

Two of these are:

1) Admit that argument X is absurd, then provide argument Y as a superior argument

2) Argue that Mises or Hayek obviously meant Y when they said X, because of differences in style of argumentation at the time, and that the correct reading of X in Mises or Hayek is in fact Y (even when Mises or Hayek quite explicitly state that view Y is totally absurd, & that they themselves wholeheartedly believe in view X). Then argue it absurd to think that they actually meant X when they wrote X and unfair to consider them as having believed X when clearly (when one has the proper understanding of context, hermeneutics, and Quine) they meant Y.

Boettke usually picks #2.