Mises Wire |
- Bob Murphy on Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money?
- The Fundamental Economic Problem with Biden's Rescue Plan
- Lord Acton: Libertarian Hero
- Murray Rothbard as a Philosopher
- Milton Friedman's Methodological Mistake
| Bob Murphy on Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money? Posted: 30 Apr 2021 01:15 PM PDT Rothbard called Mises's The Theory of Money and Credit "the best book on money ever written." But Rothbard himself may have written the best money book for lay readers, namely What Has Government Done to Our Money? Bob Murphy joins the show to discuss this superb and eminently readable tract: a mini-course on money itself, from its origins and uses to its degradation by kings, politicians, and central bankers. In only 119 short pages, Rothbard gives us everything we need to know about this most critical commodity in society—along with the ruinous development of fully fiat (unbacked) state money. Readers also enjoy a brilliant history of money regimes, from early barter to the classical gold standard and the ultimate collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement. Read this fantastic book for free in HTML format: Mises.org/WHGD Bob Murphy's series, "Understanding Money Mechanics": Mises.org/MM Bob Murphy interviews Fed economist David Andolfatto on the devaluation of money, among other topics: Mises.org/BMS175 Hans-Hermann Hoppe reconsiders Hutt's seminal article, "The Yield from Money Held": Mises.org/HoppeHutt  |
| The Fundamental Economic Problem with Biden's Rescue Plan Posted: 30 Apr 2021 12:15 PM PDT March 31 gave us a statement on the American Jobs Plan, and April 28 saw President Joe Biden speak on it to the American people (well, roughly 8 percent of the American people). The goal of the law is the following: While the American Rescue Plan is changing the course of the pandemic and delivering relief for working families, this is no time to build back to the way things were. This is the moment to reimagine and rebuild a new economy. The American Jobs Plan is an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country's infrastructure, and position the United States to outcompete China. Public domestic investment as a share of the economy has fallen by more than 40 percent since the 1960s. The American Jobs Plan will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race. By increasing government spending, the Biden administration seeks to address infrastructure like highways, ports, and airports, as well as the electrical grid and broadband internet. For a longer list of the goals of the bill, read the full statement here. This move, of course, will be lauded by many and disputed by others. But it does not seem too much to assume that both sides will miss the main problem with this bill. The Left will adore it for its brave use of the state to improve the lives of Americans, while the Right will abhor the bill since it is not their preferred form of big government spending (how dare we spend perfectly good money on infrastructure that could be used to murder innocent people in the Middle East?). What both sides fail to recognize is the economic reality of any and all state actions, a reality pointed out to us by Murray Rothbard in his 1956 article, "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics." In that article, without having to rely on a single ethical judgment, Rothbard concludes the apodictic advantages of the market and the perennial waste of government expenditure. Rothbard begins his reconstruction with two scientific principles: the unanimity rule and demonstrated preference. In Rothbard's words, Wilfredo Pareto's Unanimity Rule (reintroduced by Lionel Robbins) states, "We can only say that 'social welfare' (or better, 'social utility') has increased [sic] due to a change, if no individual is worse off because of the change (and at least one is better off)."1 Demonstrated preference is the idea that we can only know anything about someone's value scale by observing actual decisions they make, usually in a market exchange. Any assessment of someone's words would be psychological in nature and irrelevant for economics. With demonstrated preference, we can say that every voluntary exchange must ex ante apodictically result in an increase in social utility, for every exchange demonstrates a perceived expected benefit for both parties involved. Whenever an exchange is prohibited or mandated by the state, there must, definitionally, be some party that benefits and some party that is harmed, which makes it impossible to make any statement on total social utility given the impossibility of comparing utility interpersonally. Moreover, the presence of a harmed party means these actions violate the unanimity rule. We can confidently conclude, then, that any government interference with exchanges can never be said to increase social utility. But the analysis does not stop there. All government action ultimately rests on its power to levy taxes. Taxation, though, is nothing more than a coerced exchange between the people and the state. Given this insight, not only can government interference never increase social utility, but no action a government could ever make could increase social utility. All this leads to the following two conclusions: (1) the free market always increases social utility, and (2) the government can never increase social utility. The main problem with the American Jobs Plan is now clear. It is not the fact that it calls for more spending on infrastructure and promoting supposedly green technology, as opposed to, say, the military. Its problem is that it calls on the state to do anything at all. Biden's call for increased government action will do nothing more than waste our precious finite resources. There is nothing proactive in the bill that can be said to lead to an increase in social utility, and the restrictions it places on the free market will fail to lead to a more prosperous society as well. The plan is to restrict the free market, the only mechanism capable of promoting the general welfare, and expand the role of the government, an institution that can never promote the general welfare. A job well done, Mr. President.
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| Posted: 30 Apr 2021 12:00 PM PDT [Originally published April 4, 2006, at LewRockwell.com] "You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science."1 Thus ends a long passage of a letter from John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, First Lord Acton (1834–1902) in which appears his famous aphorism regarding power's tendency to corrupt its possessor. In a few words to a fellow historian, who regarded his critic as the "most learned Englishman now alive," his vast historical knowledge, passion for justice, and love for his Church are fused and brought to a fine point.2 What revolted Acton, what he devoted his life to exposing, was the rationalization of crime when the criminals are authorities, whether civil or ecclesiastic. For Acton, the historian's calling was that of a "hanging judge," holding the strong and the weak to the same moral standard. As Acton's counsel was to "suspect power more than vice" when studying history, his moralism may have been intense, but it was never that of the petty vice-cop.3 When some years ago I first read Murray Rothbard's description of Lord Acton as "the great Catholic libertarian historian," I suspected overstatement, in spite of the opinion's source.4 The abuse of "liberal" by twentieth-century statists cannot justify an anachronism, and (so it once seemed to me) attaching libertarian to a Victorian aristocrat, who once urged Marx's Capital on England's Prime Minister, just might be anachronistic.5 The more I learned from and about Acton, however, the more Rothbard's categorization rang true. I would go Rothbard one better and say that Acton was a libertarian hero. His championing of liberty against power was the central theme of his intellectual life. It was wide-ranging and without compromise, even when it cost him. Acton described himself as "a man who started in life believing himself a sincere Catholic and a sincere Liberal; who therefore renounced everything in Catholicism which was not compatible with Liberty, and everything in Politics which was not compatible with Catholicity."6 As Acton scholar J. Rufus Fears put it, in "liberty, Acton found more than the key to the unity of history. He found the key to the unity of his life as a Catholic, as a Liberal, and as a historian."7 We murder to dissect, Wordsworth warned, so we cannot understand any one of those life-vectors apart from its relationship to the other two without risk of distortion. Within the severe limits of a short article we shall try to minimize that risk. Between his birth in Naples a few years before Victoria's accession to the British throne and his death in Bavaria a year after hers, John Acton led the fullest life possible to a Catholic intellectual of means in Protestant England. Related to many of Europe's nobility (and even royalty) and fluent in its chief languages, he traveled widely as a young man not only throughout Europe, but also to America and Russia (on the occasion of Czar Alexander II's coronation). He corresponded voluminously with many notables including his friend, the aforementioned Prime Minister Gladstone, and General Robert E. Lee. Religiously disqualified from attending Cambridge University in 1850, Acton was apprenticed for seven years to Father Ignatz von Döllinger of Munich, Europe's most learned theologian and historian. Under his tutelage Acton unearthed archives to examine the primary sources of history. The result was that he gained an education that made him the peer of those who enjoyed the academic pedigree denied him as a Catholic. In 1895, however, Cambridge honored him with an appointment to one of its most prestigious chairs, the Regius Professorship of Modern History, the first Catholic to be so honored in three centuries. From it he planned (but never produced) a history of liberty, living only long enough to organize The Cambridge Modern History. If the "one supreme object of all my thoughts is the good of the Church,"8 then Lord Acton was a Catholic before (in his hierarchy of goods as well as chronologically) he was anything else. Both his intellectual activity and even his libertarianism were forged within the hull of Peter's barque. He improved the reputation of English Catholic intellectuals with his editing of and impressive contributions to two scholarly journals, The Rambler and Home and Foreign Review, closing the latter in advance of almost certain papal censure. His determination, to the point of nervous collapse, was that of a man in love with the Church. "I would rather die than having [sic] to live without the sacraments and to leave the Church."9 The reign of Pope Pius IX was the most unfortunate feature of Acton's world, and not just because the specter of absolutism that increasingly haunted his Church diverted his energies from the writing of books. This pontiff had once been the hope of liberals, Catholic and non-Catholic, until Europe's ascendant nationalist movements boxed the Vatican in, psychologically and, eventually, territorially, and an illiberal, bunker mentality set in. As the de facto leader of the Church's ultimately victorious "ultramontanist" party, Pius not only dashed any hope that he would reconcile himself with liberalism, but also went so far as to identify his very person with Tradition.10 Two issues surfaced for reflective Catholics: freedom for the Church and freedom within the Church. For Acton they were not incompatible goals. He doubted, not that the Church has implacable enemies, but that authoritarian governance helps Her fight them. If anything, he feared, it throws dry wood on the flames of anti-Catholic prejudice. Liberal self-governance will fortify the Church, not weaken Her, as She conducts Her spiritual battles. For Her "own everlasting foundation," he wrote, is
Acton made this fight his own, going so far as to wage journalistic guerrilla warfare in Rome against the foreordained course of the First Vatican Council. While the Council sat, he would meet with every delegate he could by day and write up his notes in his rented apartment on the Via Della Croce by night, the next day availing himself of a diplomatic pouch to dispatch his reports to Father Döllinger in Munich. From these reports Acton's scholarly colleague would, under the pseudonym "Quirinus," cobble together an article for the Allgemeine Zeitung. That paper's Roman subscribers would eagerly consume it within days—to the sound of pounding fists from inside the papal apartments. For the Pope's aim in convening the Council was to satisfy his burning desire to define papal infallibility as a dogma to be believed by all Christians on pain of damnation. But he didn't need the definition to feel, and assert, infallibility.12 Unlike John Henry Cardinal Newman, the Catholic convert from the Church of England with whom Acton is sometimes too casually linked, Acton opposed this proposal, because he thought [not] doing so was not so much inexpedient as wrong. Infallibility meant that a solemn papal pronouncement on faith or morals was to be received by Catholics as true because it enjoyed (in the words of the Council) "the same infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer thought fit to endow his Church" and "not in consequence of the consent of the Church."13 Acton's conscience, extraordinarily well formed as it was historically and theologically, did not allow him to ratify that affirmation; and just because he was a Catholic, he could not ignore that conscience's directives. His opposition was not a symptom of doubt regarding any doctrine that had "always been believed, everywhere, by everyone." Rather, he feared that the ascription to a sinner of a divine attribute, however circumscribed, would tend to discredit the Faith and fortify harmful absolutist tendencies within the Church. He also feared that were he to reveal his opposition to infallibility he would be excommunicated. With the zeal of a convert, Henry Edward Cardinal Manning had worked to contrive such a predicament. The prelate pressed his interrogation in a letter, asking the historian point blank whether he ought not to say that he submitted to the decrees of the Council. In his reply of 18 November 1874—a model either of adroit evasion or of legal self-extrication worthy of a Saint Thomas More—Acton stated that a "misconception" was driving the Cardinal's inquisition: "I can only say that I have no private gloss or favourite interpretation for the Vatican Decrees. The acts of the Council alone constitute the law which I recognize. I have not felt it my duty as a layman to pursue the comments of divines, still less to attempt to supersede them by private judgments of my own."14 In another reply (16 December 1874), this time to his diocesan bishop, who had the authority to quiet the whole matter, Acton protested "that I have given you no foundation for your doubt…. I have yielded obedience to the Apostolic Commission which embodied those decrees, and I have not transgressed … obligations imposed under the supreme sanction of the Church." That satisfied Acton's ordinary, and that was that. The self-imposed pressures of his journalistic, scholarly, and political activity, which often involved foreign travel, put some but not undue strain on his family life. All his considerable good fortune did not, however, spare him the sorrow of burying two of his children at very young ages. Given Cambridge's previously mentioned denial to him of the opportunity to study there in 1850, it is a pleasant irony that his most professionally rewarding, even happiest, years of his life were the last seven, dating from his acceptance of the Regius Professorship. He was a popular lecturer who spoke to standing-room-only crowds, who were sometimes charged admission. He left behind a library of nearly seventy thousand volumes, many of them annotated in his hand. They are now preserved at Cambridge, having been saved from certain dispersal and disintegration by a check from Andrew Carnegie. Acton's understanding of the Church's mission was organically related to his libertarian philosophy of history. The Gospel that transformed individuals could not help but go on to transform their societies:
In summarizing the contribution of the Stoics to the Christian, i.e., Acton's, idea of liberty, he wrote:
What did Acton mean by "liberty"? In one place he said it was "the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion."17 In another he grounded his concept of liberty in Catholicism and contrasted it with modernity's:
For Acton, the principle of liberty always faces the counter-principle of power, and he linked this tension to the primary moral effort of the individual to suppress his own libido dominandi, which is secondarily expressed in institutions. That libido is the urge to "push people around" with impunity (as Rothbard would render the Latin). It is, as Acton put it, the insidious "enemy within." The greater that urge's potential range of expression, the greater the danger, be its subject mitered or crowned: "The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind and is always sure of finding new and unforeseen allies in continuing its martyrology."19 That passion varies in intensity from person to person, as does the desire to cool it. As there can be no permanent moral victories against it, we cannot reasonably hope to establish a utopia in which liberty is enjoyed as a permanent victory, a settled attitude, immune to back-sliding.20 Power tends not only to corrupt, but also to "expand indefinitely, and will transcend all barriers, abroad and at home, until met by superior forces." This
Man is therefore not only a liberty-seeker, but also a power-grabber; his political maturity will arrive when he becomes a consistent power-checker. In describing church-state rivalry in pre-modern Europe, Acton reiterates the theme of countervailing power as the key to liberty's progress, referring again to that critical period of four centuries:
As Leonard Liggio confirmed Acton's point:
Acton again:
Acton once wrote that property was the "basis of liberty,"25 but he was no Lockean theorist of self-ownership; that is, he did not—regrettably in my opinion—define liberty in terms of property rights. It is therefore not surprising that he deems the "state . . . competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its own immediate sphere. Beyond the limit of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life, by promoting the influences which avail against temptation,—Religion, Education, and the distribution of Wealth."26 Acton limited, but did not eliminate, the State. But more on that problem presently. The context of the famous "power dictum" is a letter, dated 5 April 1887, to Anglican Archbishop Mandell Creighton, whose five-volume history of the medieval papacy Acton had savaged (in a publication that Creighton edited!) for the double standard that he allegedly applied to crimes, depending on the social rank of their perpetrators. The recipient of the letter quoted at the beginning of this essay, Creighton was a Fellow of Merton College and Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. He had sought out Acton as a reviewer because he "wanted to be told my shortcomings by the one Englishman whom I consider capable of doing so." As he later hoped Acton would succeed him when he left Cambridge to take up his see at Peterborough, he was most enthusiastic in support of Acton's appointment to that University's Regius Chair.27 Yes, Creighton thought him incomparably learned, but "he never writes anything," referring to his notorious underproduction of publications. As an historian Acton was, nevertheless, according to Gertrude Himmelfarb, "perhaps the most learned and intellectually ambitious of his generation."28 The power under review was ecclesiastic. Let us view his epigram in its surroundings:
Acton continues to turn the polemical heat up …
… and then boils things down:
Then follow the words with which this essay began. Rothbard stressed the deeply anti-conservative nature of Acton's thought. "While natural-law theory has often been used erroneously in defense of the political status quo, its radical and 'revolutionary' implications were brilliantly understood by" Acton:
Rothbard then quotes Acton:
Here's what Acton wrote just before those words:
If one reads Acton superficially, it seems as if the State is ever under suspicion, but never under indictment. That is, he does not seem to regard the State as such as the enemy of society. But we must take care not to equivocate. When 19th-century writers referred to "the State," they did not necessarily mean what anarchocapitalists mean. They may have meant something more fundamental, such as the principles according to which people implicitly regulate their mutual affairs, which principles they more or less accurately express in a legal code. Therefore, if it is true of any possible society that its members' interactions are arranged intelligibly, that intelligible arrangement may be said to be its "state." It refers to the whole of society, not just that portion of the population arrayed against the rest by its monopoly of police. It is in the interest of those monopolists to identify their particular interests (those of "the State" in the Rothbardian sense) with the general interest (that of "the state" of the whole society). They have largely been successful in getting their victims to accept that identification. So when a writer like Acton refers to "the divine origin and nature of authority," the last thing he means is that heaven smiles upon, or at least winks at, the anti-social gang that taxes, inflates, conscripts, rewards, punishes within its own turf and occasionally lays waste to the territories of rival gangs. Rather, Acton is referring to a dimension of human living that is no more dispensable than its biological dimension. For example, he once wrote that the State has
A society could, therefore, no more be without a State in that sense than it could be without families. Given that stipulation, "libertarian state" would not be an oxymoron, but rather name a society whose members are fundamentally libertarian in their settled convictions. To avoid the sin of equivocation we need only announce in advance which sense of "State" we intend. For Acton "a State in which the law is powerless to punish a thief ("anarchy"), or in which a society is unable to restrict the action of the government ("despotism")" are equally undesirable, no less so to the anarchocapitalist than to anyone else.33 For example, in the United States there is (as there wasn't two centuries ago) a settled conviction toward chattel slavery as a morally impermissible relationship. That is, Americans implicitly regard the control by human being A of human being B's body against B's will as intrinsically criminal. They so regard it no matter what any positive statute somewhere may say to the contrary. They hold that to seek to exercise such control is ipso facto to be criminally minded. The American polity or State, in the sense I am trying to clarify, is anti-chattel slavery. The libertarian argues for logically extending the range of that settled conviction to embrace all of justly held property. In so arguing, he shows his discourse to be commensurate with that of most non-libertarians. That is, it recognizes a common objective, namely, how to pursue our innumerable and diverse projects peacefully, how to cooperate even in the conduct of our rivalry, and how to deal with violent non-cooperators "so that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace together." I do not wish to overstate my case for Acton as a libertarian hero. While Acton doesn't believe that the government is the preferred means of satisfying the "claim on the wealth of the rich" that the poor allegedly have, neither does he rule it out as a necessarily objectionable means. He does believe the poor have a moral claim in "so far as they may be relieved from immoral, demoralizing effects of poverty." The claim is not that the poor man somehow owns part of another's wealth, but rather that when he "becomes destitute," presumably through no fault of his own, "it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences injurious to society and morality."34 It is not so much the enforceable right of "the poor" as it is the moral duty of "the rich." If there was one weakness in Acton's intellectual armory, it lay in his grasp of economics. To that ignorance I mainly attribute his conflating of the State in Rothbard's sense with the State as society's necessary political dimension.35 Yet this conflation, in which he was (and is) not alone, does not detract from the value of the radical libertarian potential latent in his thought. For no more than his Savior did Acton specify what, if anything, belongs to Caesar. Although Rothbard knew that Acton did not take the anarchist step, he
Not enough, perhaps, to dub Acton an anarchist, but enough to spawn the conjecture that anarchism is where his thought leads.
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| Murray Rothbard as a Philosopher Posted: 30 Apr 2021 09:00 AM PDT Murray Rothbard was a polymath, and philosophy is one of the fields to which he made important contributions. When people think of him as a philosopher, though, they often have in mind only his work in ethics and political philosophy, found, for example, in The Ethics of Liberty. His work in this area is of great significance, but he wrote about other areas of philosophy as well, and in this week's article, I'd like to consider an important argument he made in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. The issue he was concerned with arises in this way. Mises says that economic theory for the most part is known a priori. (I say "for the most part," because economic theory also includes subsidiary postulates that are not known a priori.) In what follows, I'll be talking about a priori "judgments" or "propositions" rather than "concepts," because for our purposes this makes things easier, even though Mises himself usually talks about a priori concepts.) By an a priori judgment, I mean one that can be known to be true without having to test it by experience. It can be known to be true just by thinking about it. For example, I know that "2 + 2 = 4" is true just by thinking about this judgment. Once I do so, its truth is clear to me. I don't have to test it by counting collections of two objects added to collections of two other objects to see whether the judgment survives testing. A problem that now arises is this: How can judgments of this kind give us knowledge about the real world that we live in? You can't discover the truth, it is claimed, just by thinking about it: you have to investigate the world empirically, i.e., though your senses. Rothbard has a very interesting response to this. You probably think I'm now going to discuss that response, but I'm not—that's a topic for another time. Rather, I'm going to address another twist in this tangled tale. Mises's large claims for a priori knowledge were out of philosophical fashion when he wrote, at least among economists who thought they knew something about philosophy. Some of these economists tried to make Mises more palatable to the mainstream of the profession by watering down the meaning of a priori. His one-time student Fritz Machlup was one of these, and he developed an account of the a priori that anticipated influential later work in the philosophy of science. Rothbard offered a brilliant and neglected criticism of this account in his article "In Defense of 'Extreme Apriorism'" and this I consider to be a substantial contribution to the theory of knowledge. Machlup argues in this way. Even though Mises talks about the a priori, we don't have to take him as departing from the standard method of empirical science. In order to test the propositions of a theory, we have to make certain assumptions. Without these core assumptions, which are immune from testing, we couldn't carry out empirical tests at all. It doesn't matter whether these assumptions are true or false in reality: they are held true within the theory. Norwood Russell Hanson and Imre Lakatos, independently of Machlup, developed similar accounts later, and these have become influential. Rothbard rejects this totally. He compares Machlup's view with that of Terence Hutchison, an economist who argues that all parts of a theory, including the theory's assumptions, should be tested. Rothbard says:
Rothbard's criticism is simple and devastating. He says that a statement is either true or false. There is no such thing as a special kind of truth, "truth within a theory." You can refuse to test certain propositions, and in that sense you are "holding them to be true," but that is a bad procedure if you are aiming to establish an empirical science. Sometimes supporters of the view that Rothbard challenges point to cases like this. In Newton's physics, the second law of motion is that force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma). But, it is claimed, this can't be tested, because force is defined so that this law must come out to be true. The definition is "true within the theory." If this is a correct account of Newton's theory (I doubt that it is, but never mind that), then it seems wrong to call the law true. It is a definition, and how can you make something true just by defining it a certain way? The question would then arise: How helpful is it in generating true predictions to use this definition? It's interesting to note that this criticism of Machlup-style interpretations of science uses a point that the logical positivists raised against Mises: How can you make something true just by defining it a certain way? In making this criticism, Rothbard is not abandoning praxeology for positivism, or failing to see that he is using a point inconsistent with praxeological reasoning. His claim applies only to "nominal" definitions, that is, statements that a term is being used in a certain way. Nominal definitions aren't true or false. This leaves room for "real" definitions, which aren't postulated, but are directly grasped essences. Far from rejecting real definition, Rothbard uses a real definition to show why the action axiom is true. On this more later.  |
| Milton Friedman's Methodological Mistake Posted: 30 Apr 2021 04:00 AM PDT In 1966, famed Chicago School economist Milton Friedman wrote a hugely influential essay on the methodology of economics entitled "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (contained in the volume Essays in Positive Economics). In distinguishing economics as a "positive science", Friedman focuses on the use of empirical investigation where the "ultimate goal … is the development of a "theory" or, "hypothesis" that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed." Focusing on prediction rather than explanation of observation presents the first step wrong, but as can be seen later in his essay, Friedman doesn't even stick to this requirement for prediction, saying that the theorist's role is in part "to specify the circumstances under which the formula works or, more precisely, the general magnitude of the error in its predictions under various circumstances." He even goes so far as to discount possible theories that can give more accurate predictions, saying "it does not always pay to use the more general theory because the extra accuracy it yields may not justify the extra cost." In short, Friedman is arguing that the truth of a theory's statements does not matter. All that matters is whether the theory makes "good" (i.e., accurate enough) predictions. The case Friedman would make against, for instance, the phlogiston theory of combustion is not that the theory of elements is simpler, explanatory of phenomena unrelated to combustion, nor that no one has ever discerned a phlogiston's existence or presented any way to do so. Instead, Friedman would simply argue that the predictions of phlogiston theory were not accurate enough. Enough for what? I don't know that he could even say so. These methodological errors come to a head when Friedman presents an analogy to a "theory" that predicts the shots of billiards players. Here Friedman tells us that we should
So here we have a "theory" of billiards. We can, supposedly, assume that "expert" billiards players operate in an idealistic world where they perform their shots perfectly using precise mathematical calculations and estimations. Here we can—in our theory—assume away all difficulty of the game, all inaccuracy of estimation, and all imperfection of human ability. Instead we can treat the players as if they were perfect billiards-shooting robots and proceed to make "reasonable" (even "excellent"!) predictions from there. But it is not difficult to see that if we actually tried to predict the outcome of a game of billiards—even one played by experts—in such a fashion, we would quickly run into problems. The first issue we would run into is … what is billiards anyway? None of the complexities of the math of a billiards shot can help you determine what the goal of the game is: not the angles of deflection, the velocity of the cue as it strikes the cue ball, the geometry of the balls scattered on the table. We must include in our theory the "rules of the game". And here we thus introduce, by necessity, a teleological element. The billiards player is not making a shot at random; each and every action taken in the game is directed at a set goal (within set constraints), and these goals are defined by the objective and constraints of the game as played. Whether these players are playing 8-ball or 9-ball pool, or even something totally different like carom or artistic billiards, is a completely necessary part to predicting what shots a player will make. Having added that in, we are still no closer to making any sort of predictions about the outcome of the game, however. Now we must account for the player's ability to choose their shot. Fundamentally, we are presented with a praxeological element of action to the problem. The player, as a free actor, can choose between various shots. Do they choose the easier shot that might get a target ball in a pocket, but not set up the next shot well, or some more difficult shot that would readily lead into future shots? The assumption Friedman's toy theory makes of essential perfection may incline us to assume the most difficult shots will be made every time (though it isn't too hard to see how this would not conform to any real game of billiards), but even there we run into complications: two shots could be of essentially equal mathematical "difficulty", but the player would still have to choose just one. This element of action also combines with the teleological element: the player's goal may not match the described role of the game, as they could be playing for another reason, such as to show off their skill (even if they could make more strategic shots) or make a friend feel better (say by losing intentionally). These reasons can not be divined by others, but exist only in the mind of the player. Do we throw our hands up and say we can only give probabilities at this point? Many would probably assume this is the answer that gets us out of this quandary: a "reasonable" assumption that the player makes the "best" shot (according to some mathematical criteria) with probabilities thrown in to account for cases where there are multiple "best" shots. As natural as this escape hatch might be at first blush, we can see on further reflection that it doesn't really address the issue at hand. Different players will have different willingness to take risks, understandings of what it means to "line up a shot", play preferences: no mathematical model can accurately account for the varying potentialities here, even when factoring in probabilities. And all this is to say nothing of the fundamental differences in reality that would naturally exist: imperfections in player ability, the table, cues, or billiard balls. Or any of the various mental and emotional pressures on a competitive player going up against a well-skilled opponent. These are no small facet of the outcome of various shots and the billiards game itself, but a rather large component of it. Competitive billiards games can and do rest on one player losing focus and missing a shot he should have made, or mistakenly choosing one shot when they could have chosen another, potentially superior option. They can rest on the angle of deflection off one of the table's side boards being just slightly off—and whether players can adapt to these differences quickly. Even predicting what shots players would make given a certain table setup, which has already proven impossible, could not allow for predicting how the game would evolve from there. What could actually be predicted about billiards is thus rather small, and almost entirely inconsequential: assuming an ideal environment, the trajectory of a shot once the balls are in motion can be roughly predicted by the laws of physics. Physicists often use such idealizations to try to reason about isolated effects, using the generally accepted fact that physical forces are additive in predictable manners to explain (but generally not predict) larger-scale phenomenon. However, even the most studied physicist will acknowledge that predicting any "real world" phenomena outside of heavily isolated experiments is a job for supercomputers at best and essentially impossible at worst. (There is a reason that quantum mechanics class exercises mostly involve at most a handful of particles "in a box" and not macroscopic objects comprised of billions of such particles in complex interactions: performing the mathematical calculations would be nigh impossible with even the best computers.) As the old physics student joke goes, "first, assume the horse is a sphere…." These conclusions can only be drawn more strongly when, instead of unthinking and predictably responsive objects like subatomic particles or billiard balls, we introduce human beings with goals and choices of their own into the mix. Prediction becomes essentially impossible except by rough chance, and provides no guide towards any explanation of how things are or why. Instead we must turn to logical deduction from basic facts like praxeology's action axiom ("human beings act") and teleological constructs like imputed goals to make sense of what is going on. This is even more true of the large complex of human interaction that produces a national economy as it is about anything as relatively simple and intuitive as a game of billiards. Originally published Disinthrallment.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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