Austrian Economics and Literature

How Spontaneous Orders Are Like Good Poetry

2012-02-21T18:22:00.003-05:00

Walter Weimer, in his essay "Spontaneously Ordered Complex Phenomena and the Unity of the Moral Sciences," from Centripetal Forces in the Sciences (Gerard Radnitzky, ed.), argues that

The evolution of all spontaneous orders is an essential tension between three sets of principles that regulate change. The first principal is one of creativity or productivity. Such systems exhibit fundamental novelty, change (at the level of particulars) that cannot be predicted in advance. The second principle is that of rhythm, and the progressive differentiation of rhythm. Evolutionary differentiation is rate dependent instead of rate independent. The third principle is that development tends toward opposites, or the principle of regulation by opponent processes. The interaction of these three principles creates an essential tension, a context of constraint, between the previous form of organization, the ongoing state, and future states that may occur. (258)

Great poetry is creative (stems from creativity, and results in more creativity in the new poetry created through its influence), rhythmic (rhythm makes a poem, not line breaks; there is much prose out there with line breaks), and demonstrates counterpoint.

Paul Cantor makes a good case for understanding novels as participating in spontaneous order creation. Weimer's definition of spontaneous orders opens up poetry for the same kind of inclusion.

Monarchs and Mongrels

2012-02-17T17:10:00.000-05:00

For a first serious post here, I thought it would be interesting to revisit one of my first real bits of thinking about connections between the literary and the economic. The first economist I ever read was Hayek. Right after Hayek, I read Smith's Wealth of Nations. While I gather this is a somewhat...non-traditional economic education, it's served me reasonably well. And in reading Smith I found someone whose brain was as filled with literary allusions, references, and quotations, as any writer I'd ever loved and admired. This paper--and I've put the introduction here, with a link to the whole megillah at the end of the post--came from the moment when I realized I'd spotted an allusion that, so far as I could discover, had gone unnoticed for ages.

So, here's Smith and Shakespeare, together again, in "Monarchs and Mongrels."

Adam Smith’s respect for literatureas art and as example infuses all his work. Whether it is The Theory ofMoral Sentiments and its use of the characters of Iago and Othello todiscuss issues of human sympathy and fellow-feeling, the quotations fromMilton and Dryden which begin his essay on “The History of Astronomy,”his references to Phaedra, the Aeneid, and the Illiad inhis examination of the legal history of marriage in the Lectures ofJurisprudence, orthe Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the notes from his mostextended considerations of literature, Smith’s use of literature throughout hisbody of work is constant.

Charles Griswold’s Adam Smithand the Virtues of Enlightenment points to the strong appeal that literaturehad for Smith as a way to speak about important contemporary moral concerns:“Not only plays, novels, and poems but tragedies, in particular, intrigueSmith. Together they completely overwhelm his relatively rare references toproperly philosophical texts. …The notion that we are to understand literatureand drama as sources for moral theory and moral education is clearly andstrikingly evident in The Wealth of Nations as well. (59).”This attraction towards the literary as source material for moral arguments iseasily seen simply by leafing through the footnotes to any of Smith’s works.His references to literature are myriad and most have been well-documented. Inaddition, however, Smith’s writing--steeped in poetry, novels, and drama as it is--oftendraws from the storehouse of his memory to allude to literature without givinga specific reference to the work of which he is thinking. Discovery andexamination of such an uncited reference can give careful readers the sense ofSmith as a writer who instinctively turns to literature as a tool for histhought.

Very early in Adam Smith’s Wealthof Nations the reader encounters one such reference, previously unnoted inSmith scholarship, during Smith’s meditations on human nature as demonstrated incomparison with the nature of dogs. The section is a justly famous one. It is elegantin both its content and its diction as well as in its explication of the socialadvantages and “conveniency” that arise from the human ability to “truck,barter, and exchange,” with skills that dogs are able only to use to helpthemselves. Smith writes:

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and dispositionhalf so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or agreyhound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog. Those differenttribes of animals, however, though all of the same species, are of scarce anyuse to one another. The strength of the mastiff is not, in the least, supportedeither by the swiftness of the greyhound, or by the sagacity of the spaniel, orby the docility of the shepherd’s dog. The effects of those different geniusesand talents, for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange,cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to thebetter accommodations and conveniency of the species. Each animal is stillobliged to support and defend itself, separately and independently, and derivesno sort of advantage from that variety of talents with which nature hasdistinguished its fellows. Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilargeniuses are of use to one another; the different produces of their respectivetalents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, beingbrought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whateverpart of the produce of other men’s talents he has occasion for. (1.ii.30)

Thepassage has been analyzed often. What has gone unnoticed, however, is that Smith’spassage alludes to an equally well-known passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.(The play may have been suggested to Smith by his use of the word “porter”early on in the passage reminding him of Macbeth’s famous Act II “porterscene.”) Suborning Banquo’s murder in Act III, Macbeth discusses human naturewith the murderers for hire in almost precisely the same terms that Smith usesin the above passage.

First Murderer: We are men, my Liege.

Macbeth: Ay, in the catalogue ye go formen;

As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels,spaniels, curs,

Shoughs,water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept

All by the name of dogs: the valu’dfile

Distinguishes the swift, the slow, thesubtle,

The housekeeper, the hunter, every one

According to the gift which bounteousNature

Hath in him clos’d; whereby he doesreceive

Particular addition, from the bill

That writes them all alike: and so ofmen.

(Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.1.90-100)

The similarity of wording, of subject matter, even of thedog breeds mentioned make it clear that as Smith wrote his passage on dogs andhuman nature, Shakespeare’s lines were in his mind.

Thepreviously unnoted allusion is interesting for more than just its help inbuilding a more thorough record of Smith’s use of literature throughout hisworks, however. Smith’s allusion to Macbeth at this early and crucial pointin the argument of Wealth of Nations is far more than a rhetoricalflourish. It is topical, carefully considered, and significant. Smith’sallusion to Macbeth serves toforewarn the alert reader of Smith’s awareness of the market’s complexities andproblems as well as its strengths. Smith’s awareness of the corruptions to whicha free market can be vulnerable are not reservations about the effectiveness ofsuch a market. Rather, they are reservations about the damage that can be doneto the market’s effectiveness by human action and imperfection. It is not thefree market that is risky. What is risky is a free market that, like the monarchy of Macbeth's Scotland, has fallenvictim to corruption, collusion, and misdirected self-interest that erodeshuman sympathy.

A much longer version of this argument is available here, with footnotes and everything.

The Driver by Garet Garrett - Book Review

2012-02-11T00:46:00.000-05:00

Where's Our Dickens?

2012-02-06T11:33:00.003-05:00

Theodore Dalrymple asks, "Where is today's Charles Dickens?" Given our current political-economic situation, we may be due a Dickens. But it should be a real Dickens -- not some ideal Dickens, like the one promulgated by leftist literary theorists, but the one who "is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political, and philosophical outlook." In other words, we need a real novelists (Kundera argues that a real novelist in fact demonstrates in his work an "absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political, and philosophical outlook," or else he is not a novelist).

And there is plenty to work with: politicians who at their best think they know more than is possible to know, and who at their worst willingly sell their votes to their cronies and financial supporters; bankers who happily gain through privatization of profits and socialization of loss; political philanthropy run amok; political unions on the rise; persistent unemployment created by gross (mis)management of the economy and widespread uncertainty from new programs and regulations; an educational system unworthy of a third world country. You name it, the topics for a Dickens abound.

A Brief Introduction

2012-02-03T12:10:00.000-05:00

I'm delighted to begin blogging here at Austrian Economics and Literature. As my shiny new Blogger profile will tell you, I'm a writer, a poet, and a Fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. My background is in English Renaissance and Reformation literature, but I will not hesitate to go all medieval (or 18th, 19th, 20th, or 21st century) on you if it seems necessary. I earned my MA and PhD at the University of Chicago and did my undergraduate work at Wesleyan University. I have published on topics from George Herbert to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and my writing textbook "Writing with a Thesis" is in college classrooms across the country.

If you've heard of my blog, Modified Rapture, it's either because of my post on How the Grinch Stole the Free Market or my post of the ten best economics pick-up lines. It is, I suspect, that kind of geeky literary/economic hijinks that persuaded Troy to invite me to blog here. I'll try to keep it up.

In addition to the hijinks, however, I plan to spend a lot of time pointing readers of this blog to literary and pop cultural works that provide complex and nuanced views of free markets and free societies. I'm much less theory-driven than Troy, so I'll be spending a lot of time jumping up and down and pointing you toward interesting source material and neglected perspectives. And I'll be doing my very best to mount a continuous campaign against the notion that free markets and literature are natural enemies.

And just so I don't leave you with only introductory material, and a completely content-free blogpost, here's a sophisticated little piece on money and value, from one of my favorite economists--Shel Silverstein.

Smart

My dad gave me one dollar bill

'Cause I'm his smartest son,

And I swapped it for two shiny quarters

'Cause two is more than one!

And then I took the quarters

And traded them to Lou

For three dimes--I guess he don't know

That three is more than two!

Just then, along came old blind Bates

And just 'cause he can't see

He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,

And four is more than three!

And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs

Down at the seed feed store,

And the fool gave me five pennies for them,

And five is more than four!

And then I went and showed my dad,

And he got red in the cheeks

And closed his eyes and shook his head--

Too proud of me to speak!

Welcome Sarah Skwire

2012-02-03T11:21:00.002-05:00

I would like to welcome our newest blogger, Sarah Skwire. Sarah works for Liberty Fund -- beyond that, I will let her introduce herself. I think she will be a great addition to Austrian Economics and Literature, and I look forward to all her future postings.

Happy Birthday Ayn Rand

2012-02-02T12:34:00.002-05:00

Happy Birthday Ayn Rand. Milan Kundera argued that novelists make for bad philosophers outside of their novels. And good philosophers make for bad novelists (he used Sartre as an example). Regardless of where you think Rand falls on that continuum, there is little question about her impact and importance. From what she wrote in The Romantic Manifesto, I have to wonder whether or not she would approve of the work we promote here. Regardless, she identified with Mises' economics, which is reason enough to wish her a happy birthday here. Aside from the fact that one would be hard pressed to find a libertarian, including Austro-libertarians, who has not read her at some point. So, happy birthday, Ayn Rand!

The Politics of Johann Wolfgang Goethe

2012-02-01T14:23:00.003-05:00

Mises.org has a piece by Hans-Hermann Hoppe on The Politics of Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Most Europeans know that he was the greatest of all German writers and poets and one of the giants of world literature. Less well known is that he was also a thorough-going classical liberal, arguing that free trade and free cultural exchange are the keys to authentic national welfare and peaceful international integration. He also argued and fought against the expansion, centralization, and unification of government on grounds that these trends can only hinder prosperity and true cultural development.

This of course is consistent with the analysis I gave of a famous passage from his Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.

Overall Hoppe's piece is a great overview of who Goethe was. Goethe wasn't just a genius -- he was a universal genius. He did not just write on a variety of subjects -- he did groundbreaking work in those subjects. And that was when he wasn't writing some of the best poetry in any language.

The piece ends with Goethe's support for what was essentially a Germany made of independent states with no central government -- a structure also supported by Nietzsche (who, not coincidentally, idolized Goethe) on the grounds that such a structure actually helped keep German culture vital. Nietzsche even went so far as to suggest that there was an inverse relationship between the strength of culture and the strength of government. Something for Austrian economics literary theorists to think about, perhaps.

Culture and Rhetoric Matter

2012-01-27T13:51:00.002-05:00

The WSJ has a nice piece on Dierdre McCloskey. She of course points out that culture and rhetoric were central to the rapid economic development of the West shortly after the Renaissance. In other words, a

shift in perceptions was central to the economic take-off of the West. "A bourgeois deal was agreed upon," she says. "You let me engage in innovation and creative destruction, and I will make you rich." A commercial class that was not ostracized or sneered at was thus able to activate the engine of modern economic growth.

Of course, now we see the commercial class ostracized and sneered at. What are the consequences of this? What will be the long-term consequences if it continues? Perhaps, as I suggested recently, we need to see a change in how the commercial class is represented in literature (broadly defined, including T.V. and film). In other words, we need to see a shift in our culture and rhetoric.

Charles Dickens, Capitalist

2012-01-23T14:27:00.003-05:00

Peter Klein has a nice little piece on Charles Dickens, Capitalist over at The Beacon. Indeed, I had heard all my life how anti-capitalist Dickens was, but when I finally did read one of Dickens' novels -- Oliver Twist -- I was overwhelmed by how overtly pro-capitalist and anti-government (it is particularly damning of government welfare programs) it was. One could make a career of recovering Dickens from the Marxist interpretations.

Recovering the Past of the English Language Spontaneous Order

2012-01-21T03:07:00.000-05:00

Language is a spontaneous order, a fact we forget, being embedded in it and often failing to note the changes which take place, so slow does language (often) change. However, it is noted in this piece that English language pronunciation was undergoing rather rapid change during the Renaissance. Both typically slow, but sometimes rapid, change is typical of transformative complex adaptive systems, among which are spontaneous orders. By remembering the fact that the system changes content, we can rediscover such things as Shakespeare's language -- and the puns and rhymes we have lost over the past 400 years.

Among the Finest Inventions of the Human Mind

2012-01-20T10:05:00.003-05:00

In Book I, Ch. 10 of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, we have the following famous dialogue between Wilhelm and Werner:

"Well, here is The Youth at the Parting of the Ways; it has just come into my hand,” said Wilhelm, drawing out a fold of papers from the rest; “this at least is finished, whatever else it may be.”

“Away with it, to the fire with it!” cried Werner. “The invention does not deserve the smallest praise: that affair has plagued me enough already, and drawn upon yourself your father’s wrath. The verses may be altogether beautiful; but the meaning of them is fundamentally false. I still recollect your Commerce personified; a shrivelled, wretched-looking sibyl she was. I suppose you picked up the image of her from some miserable huckster’s shop. At that time, you had no true idea at all of trade; whilst I could not think of any man whose spirit was, or needed to be, more enlarged than the spirit of a genuine merchant. What a thing it is to see the order which prevails throughout his business! By means of this he can at any time survey the general whole, without needing to perplex himself in the details. What advantages does he derive from the system of book-keeping by double entry! It is among the finest inventions of the human mind; every prudent master of a house should introduce it into his economy.”

“Pardon me,” said Wilhelm, smiling; “you begin by the form, as if it were the matter: you traders commonly, in your additions and balancings, forget what is the proper net-result of life.”

“My good friend, you do not see how form and matter are in this case one; how neither can exist without the other. Order and arrangement increase the desire to save and get. A man embarrassed in his circumstances, and conducting them imprudently, likes best to continue in the dark; he will not gladly reckon up the debtor entries he is charged with. But on the other hand, there is nothing to a prudent manager more pleasant than daily to set before himself the sums of his growing fortune. Even a mischance, if it surprise and vex, will not affright him; for he knows at once what gains he has acquired to cast into the other scale. I am convinced, my friend, that if you once had a proper taste for our employments, you would grant that many faculties of the mind are called into full and vigorous play by them.”

“Possibly this journey I am thinking of may bring me to other thoughts.”

“O, certainly. Believe me, you want but to look upon some great scene of activity to make you ours forever; and when you come back, you will joyfully enroll yourself among that class of men whose art it is to draw towards themselves a portion of the money, and materials of enjoyment, which circulate in their appointed courses through the world. Cast a look on the natural and artificial productions of all the regions of the earth; consider how they have become, one here, another there, articles of necessity for men. How pleasant and how intellectual a task is it to calculate, at any moment, what is most required, and yet is wanting, or hard to find; to procure for each easily and soon what he demands; to lay-in your stock prudently beforehand, and then to enjoy the profit of every pulse in that mighty circulation. This, it appears to me, is what no man that has a head can attend to without pleasure.”

Wilhelm seemed to acquiesce, and Werner continued.

“Do but visit one or two great trading-towns, one or two sea-ports, and see if you can withstand the impression. When you observe how many men are busied, whence so many things have come, and whither they are going, you will feel as if you too could gladly mingle in the business. You will then see the smallest piece of ware in its connexion with the whole mercantile concern; and for that very reason you will reckon nothing paltry, because everything augments the circulation by which you yourself are supported.”

Werner had formed his solid understanding in constant intercourse with Wilhelm; he was thus accustomed to think also of his profession, of his employments, with elevation of soul; and he firmly believed that he did so with more justice than his otherwise more gifted and valued friend, who, as it seemed to him, had placed his dearest hopes, and directed all the force of his mind, upon the most imaginary objects in the world. Many a time he thought this false enthusiasm would infallibly be got the better of, and so excellent a soul be brought back to the right path. So, hoping in the present instance, he continued: “The great ones of the world have taken this earth of ours to themselves; they live in the midst of splendour and superfluity. The smallest nook of the land is already a possession, none may touch it or meddle with it; offices and civic callings bring in little profit; where, then, will you find more honest acquisitions, juster conquests, than those of trade? If the princes of this world hold the rivers, the highways, the havens in their power, and take a heavy tribute from everything that passes through them, may not we embrace with joy the opportunity of levying tax and toll, by our activity, on those commodities which the real or imaginary wants of men have rendered indispensable? I can promise you, if you would rightly apply your poetic view, my goddess might be represented as an invincible, victorious queen, and boldly opposed to yours. It is true, she bears the olive rather than the sword; dagger or chain she knows not; but she, too, gives crowns to her favourites; which, without offence to yours be it said, are of true gold from the furnace and the mine, and glance with genuine pearls, which she brings up from the depths of the ocean, by the hands of her unwearied servants."

This sally somewhat nettled Wilhelm; but he concealed his sentiments, remembering that Werner used to listen with composure to his apostrophes. Besides, he had fairness enough to be pleased at seeing each man think the best of his own peculiar craft; provided only his, of which he was so passionately fond, were likewise left in peace.

“And for you,” exclaimed Werner, “who take so warm an interest in human concerns, what a sight will it be to behold the fortune which accompanies bold undertakings distributed to men before your eyes. What is more spirit-stirring than the aspect of a ship arriving from a lucky voyage, or soon returning with a rich capture? Not alone the relatives, the acquaintances, and those that share with the adventures, but every unconcerned spectator also is excited, when he sees the joy with which the long-imprisoned shipman springs on land before his keel has wholly reached it, feeling that he is free once more, and now can trust what he has rescued from the false sea to the firm and faithful earth. It is not, my friend, in figures of arithmetic alone that gain presents itself before us; fortune is the goddess of breathing men; to feel her favours truly, we must live and be men who toil with their living minds and bodies, and enjoy with them also.”

This is of course the passage where Goethe (actually, Werner, as we cannot attribute the beliefs of a character to their author) famously proclaims that one of the greatest inventions of mankind to be double entry bookkeeping. Don Lavoie would seem to agree:

The practice of accounting, that is, of the calculation of profit/loss accounts in terms of money outlays and receipts, both ex ante and ex post, has enabled human beings to orient their productive activities to one another in such a manner as to permit social production as a whole to be carried on with a very high degree of complexity." ("Economic Chaos or Spontaneous Order? Implications For Political Economy of the New View of Science," Cato Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3, Winter 1989, pg. 630-1)

We see, though, that this is a passage that discusses the poet's relationship to commerce, and Werner chastises Wilhelm for his negative portrayal of commerce, arguing that, instead, the poets ought to view such a vital activity as truly beautiful. Werner points out that commerce is in fact orderly (compare this to the socialist complaint about it being disorderly, to which Lavoie was in part giving answer with his comments on accounting, which is similar to the point made by Werner), that commerce brings out the best in men, makes them benefit themselves and others, and bring forth the earth's riches while bringing the world peace (as suggested by the goddess of commerce being described as having an olive branch rather than a sword). In the end, Werner argues, commerce is not about arithmetic, but about human gains.

How is all of this brought about? By accounting -- by double entry bookkeeping. This allows each business to order itself, and thus to bring about a spontaneous economic order. Of course, this cannot be done without money prices. As the Austrian economists argued, economic calculation cannot be accomplished without money prices. This is accomplished through "the system of book-keeping by double entry! It is among the finest inventions of the human mind; every prudent master of a house should introduce it into his economy." Doing so would no doubt help us all order our own economies quite a bit better than the slap-dash way we do it. Goethe recognized, through his character Werner, that this one development, which did in fact take place at the foundation of modern capitalism, has allowed us to order our lives, create wealth for everyone, and materially improve everyone's lives. Without money prices, one cannot have double entry bookkeeping, and without double entry bookkeeping, we could not have economic order.

It seems apparent Wilhelm is not quite convinced, but he does at least have a certain decency about him: "he had fairness enough to be pleased at seeing each man think the best of his own peculiar craft; provided only his, of which he was so passionately fond, were likewise left in peace." A very libertarian thought.

Spontaneous Orders are the Stories We Make

2012-01-18T18:43:00.005-05:00

I am reading Don Lavoie's "Economic Chaos of Spontaneous Order? Implications for Political Economy of the New View of Science" (Cato Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3, Winter 1989), and it is like reading something from Frederick Turner (whose work I cannot recommend enough, and not just because he was a dissertation adviser). He sees the "new science" of complexity, emergence, chaos theory, self-organization, information theory, and related theories as an exciting development -- not least because they confirm Austrian insights. Consider, then, these paragraphs:

As Polanyi’s work on science as a spontaneous order shows, the modernist conception of the nature of knowledge is fundamentally flawed. Modernism treats the process of science as if it were a matter of an isolated mind confronting and mastering the natural world. A single scientist follows given methods to bring nature under his rational control. The new view of science urges instead that it is the dialogue taking place in the scientific community as a whole which is the proper locus of analysis for the philosophy of science. It is the uncontrolled “dialogical” process that brings knowledge to the participants, not the strictly controlled “monological” methods of any particular scientist. The process of mutual interpretations and criticisms going on in the scientific community is a good example of an order that emerges out of an apparently haphazard chaos. The process works best precisely when it is not under any one mind’s control but is allowed to evolve by its own logic, taking advantage of the variety of perspectives it contains. A healthy scientific community cannot be designed in detail, it can only be cultivated by setting up conditions where the freedom of individual scientists to pursue their own hunches is protected.

The “order” we find in a spontaneous order process may be closely akin to that of a story whose plot we can “follow” without claiming to be able to anticipate it from the outset. Here the theory of narrative as it has been developed in the study of history and fiction is relevant to scientific explanation. As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur has shown, the articulation of history has an irreducibly narrative character, and good history shares many of the attributes of good fiction. Essentially to impart the subjective meaning and significance of events in history involves us not in a mechanistic search for determinate laws but in the uniquely human act of storytelling.

There is so much to work with in just these two paragraphs. For example, the way he describes spontaneous orders as a dialogue supports the idea of the arts as spontaneous orders. The artistic canons emerge in the unfolding of history, and are the story of that history, the history of the art in question. Multiple interpretations and criticisms are of course the core of literary analysis -- and literary production. In many ways Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy are different interpretations of William Faulkner's novels. Economists would do well to read more novels and watch more plays and movies. And to learn how to interpret the text of the world.

An Interview with J. Neil Schulman

2012-01-16T17:58:00.003-05:00

Our very own Allen Mendenhall interviews J. Neil Schulman at Prometheus Unbound. And he gives us a shout out!

Systemic Resources and Work

2012-01-10T10:48:00.002-05:00

Each economy has its own systemic resource. In the market economy, it is money. In the gift economy, it is reputation. In the democratic economy, it is votes.

Within the artistic order, an artist's fellow artists’ acknowledgement of them as an artist of note, not money, is their most important systemic resource. In this sense, the arts resemble the scientific order, where scientific reputation is the coin of the realm. The same is true with philanthropy -- a good reputation keeps the money coming in, so you can continue to do good. The arts, philanthropy, and science are in the gift economy, suggesting that reputation may be the systemic resource of all spontaneous orders in the gift economy.

But how does one gain systemic resources?

The artist gains reputation by producing works that other artists deem worthy of being influential on their own works. The scientist gains reputation by publishing scientific works that other scientists agree are true. The philanthropist gains reputation by doing good works.

How does one gain money? By doing work in the economy -- by providing work someone is willing to pay for.

How does one gain votes? Through rhetoric, campaigning, voting on bils (if one is elected) -- in other words, through political work.

No matter the systemic resource, then, one gains it through work.

Usually.

What would we think of a novelist who gained reputation because her father had written great novels, not because her own novels were good? What would we think of a scientist who gained reputation because of the discoveries of his mother, not because he discovered anything? What would we think of a philanthropist who gained reputation because her mother was altrustic, not because she gave to anyone?

What would/do we think of a politician who was elected because he had the same name as his father?

This being the case, one can begin to see why it is that some people have a real problem with inheritance. They wonder why this should be the one systemic resource that is heritable.

Or consider a different situation. What would we think of a painter who gained reputation because the scientific community decided to give it to them, even though they had not produced any artistic works? What would we think of a scientist who gained reputation because the philanthropic community decided to give it to them, even though they had not produced any scientific works? What would we think of a philanthropist who gained reputation because the artistic community decided to give it to them, even though they had not done any good works?

What would/do we think of a politician who gained votes because of money?

This being the case, we can begin to see why it is that some people have a real problem with welfare. The systemic resources of one spontaneous order should not be used to influence the work (or lack of work) done in the others.

I think we can also see why artists in particular are such snobs in relation to money's influence on the arts. Indeed, I think we can begin to see why it is that those in the gift economy tend to be anti-market (and anti-government). They don't want other orders influencing their. They should, of course, grant the other orders the same courtesy.

At the same time, one does have to eat. The artist, the scientist, the philanthropist (a little more obviously, since much of the good they do involves money) all have to eat, and thus all have to have money. The problem with being in the gift economy is that one is not guaranteed to get monetary gifts in return. We in the gift economy end up having to work twice as hard -- working in both the market and the gift economy. Such, though, is life. We all live in multiple orders.

Now, one does not have to agree with people who oppose inheritance -- or even welfare -- but I think it helps to understand where such opposition comes from. It comes from how we understand the relationships between various systemic resources and work. The opposition, too, to usury comes from the perception that the person gaining interest from the loan hasn't worked for it. We forget that the person who borrowed the money has in fact bought something: time.

Of course, money is more tangible than the other systemic resources I discussed. (Votes, I suppose, are more tangible than reputation, but less so than money.) And money itself is capable of becoming its own spontaneous order within the market economy (and would create a much healthier catallaxy were it to become so). These things matter. Yet, understanding the relations between work and systemic resources does give us, I think, some insight into the problems some people have with certain institutions.

How Literature Can Reduce Income Inequality

2012-01-08T19:59:00.003-05:00

In “How Egalitarianism Increases Inequality,” Bryan Caplan argues that:

All else equal, people in respected professions make less money. The mechanism is simple:

1. People like to be respected.
2. People know that if they enter a respected profession they will personally enjoy more respect.
3. This increases the supply of people in the respected profession, which in turn drives down their wages.

So what happens to inequality when one profession becomes more respected? It depends. If people in the profession currently earn less than average, then giving them more respect increases inequality. But if people in the profession currently earn more than average, then giving then more respect actually decreases inequality.

Now for the fun part. Imagine people become more egalitarian, to the point where they heap scorn on the rich and successful. What is the effect on inequality? By the previous logic, the effect is directly counter-productive. The more you scorn rich people, the more people you scare away from high-income professions. The more you scare away, the lower their supply. And the lower their supply, the higher their income!

Lesson: If you really want a materially more equal society, stop beating up on the 1%. Do a complete 180. Smile upon them. Admire them. Praise them. Sing songs about how much good they do for the world. The direct result will be to raise their status. But the indirect result will be to pique the envy of status-conscious people, increasing the competition among the top 1%, and thereby moderating income inequality.

On the other hand, if you want to increase material inequality, by all means heap scorn on the rich and successful. Try to fill them with guilt and self-loathing. The 1% who remain will find that living well is the best salve for their consciences.

Thus, those leftist authors who heap scorn on business people have been contributing to income inequality. They should all become libertarians, learn to appreciate the work business people do, write stories that celebrate their work, thus encouraging more people to go into business, thus driving down wages through competition. That's not the only reason they should become libertarians (of the thick kind, which I argue best mirrors reality), but it's a pretty good one, considering the role of literature as immanent criticism on our various spontaneous orders, culture, and civil society. Immanent criticism, too, can have unintended consequences!

Jonathan Galassi

2012-01-06T16:03:00.003-05:00

An interesting interview with Jonathan Galassi, "One of the wunderkinds of the New York editing and publishing world," at The Economist.

Toward the end, he essentially argues for poetry's role as immanent criticism on civil society. Can something on the one hand act as immanent criticism for spontaneous orders, and on the other hand be a part of its own spontaneous order? I think so.

Literary Order Defined in the Process of its Emergence

2012-01-06T13:06:00.003-05:00

James Buchanan argued that

the "order" of the market emerges only from the process of voluntary exchange among the participating individuals. The "order" is, itself, defined as the outcome of the process that generates it. The "it," the allocation-distribution result, does not, and cannot, exist independently of the trading process. Absent this process, there is and can be no "order."

He of course is talking about the market order, but this is equally applicable to other spontaneous orders, including the literary order. The literary order is the outcome of the process of literary writers writing, and readers reading, resulting in feedback that creates patterns of literary production. How are literary works "allocated" and "distributed"? How do those differences affect the literary order?

Reading patterns -- which give rise to the literary canon -- emerge through the very process of reading, following recommendations of other readers (and of writers), etc. Those who argue that the literary (or other artistic) canon is what it is because of this or that group who are picking and choosing what is in the canon to perpetuate class, racial, gender, etc. interests are the same people who support socialism and interventionism for a reason -- they do not understand these processes are spontaneous orders, and do not believe order can emerge without someone creating the order.

On the Varieties of Economies

2012-01-05T17:28:00.002-05:00

In "Creating a Culture of Gift" (Conversations on Philanthropy, Vol. II: New Paradigms (2005)), Frederick Turner argues that there are five fundamental types of economies: the political economy, the market economy, the gift economy, the environmental economy, and the divine economy. With the exception of the environmental economy, or ecosystem, all of these can be rationally constructed by human beings into organizations, or allowed to develop naturally as spontaneous orders (and mixtures of the two, in interventionist economies).

The spontaneous order political economy is democracy/common law. The spontaneous order market economy is the catallaxy. The spontaneous order gift economy is actually made up of three kinds of spontaneous orders, each representing the three aspects of the gift economy -- the good, the true, and the beautiful become the philanthropic, scientific, and artistic orders. And the spontaneous order divine economy would be what we see in places like the United States, where separation of church and state results in a proliferation of beliefs.

The organizational political economy is dictatorship (not necessarily monarchical). The organizational market economy is central planning socialism. The organizational gift economy is also central planning socialism (the good), but includes central planning science and central planning art (propaganda). The organizational divine economy would be similar to what we saw in Medieval Catholic Europe. Of course, these can be variously combined.

If the spontaneous orders are combined, we get liberal civil society. If the organizational economies are combined, we get something that resembles Stalinsim.

Are there other liberal spontaneous orders? What kind of economy, for example, is the internet? Is it truly distinct? If so, we should expect it to affect the other orders (much as each of the spontaneous orders affect all the other orders).

How might the internet affect the artistic (esp. literary) order? How is it affecting it? In what ways do the other orders affect the literary order?

Language, Money, Inflation

2012-01-04T11:46:00.002-05:00

Steve Horwitz on the analogy between language and money, from "Money, Money Prices, and the Socialist Calculation Debate" in Advances in Austrian Economics, Vol. 3:

One fruitful way of understanding the importance of money as a social institution (and its role with respect to economic calculation) is to see that money's role in the market is analogous to language's role in other human interaction. In the same way that language enables us to transcend our individuality and our physical senses by opening up a means of social communication, so does money enable us to communicate our subjective preferences in the market. In addition to being analogous to language, money also extends our range of communication beyond language by enabling us to make our inarticulate (and thus linguistically inaccessible) knowledge socially usable. The power of the analogy between money and language derives from both being spontaneously evolved means of exchange. The medium of exchange function of money is well-known to economists and the items being exchanged are goods and services. For language, it is mental phenomena that are "exchanged" by being constituted in a language that is accessible to other thinkers. (p. 63-4)

Let us reverse this, and consider how what we understand about money could help us to understand language. Money prices are a "stand-in" for value, much in the same way that the referential aspect of language allows for certain sound combinations to act as a "stand-in" for certain objects, actions, relationships, quantities, or qualities. Thus, in the same way that the quantity of money can affect the distribution of goods (through inflationary and deflationary effects), words can affect many of the things they "stand-in" for.

Let me use an example. Although the statement that "All sex is rape" has been falsely attributed to Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon because of summaries of the former's views by her critics (and to the latter, because of her association with the former), the fact of the matter is that this statement, regardless of its origin, is now in the public imagination -- and is probably accepted by many who would abhor the ideas of the critics of Dworkin.

Such an association of all sex with rape has the same effect of printing more money than there is demand for -- the term "rape" becomes devalued, and the act, too, thus becomes devalued. Sex is not similarly affected, because most adults have had sex (and fewer have raped or been raped), and most people do not consider most sex rape, let alone all sex. More casual attitudes toward rape are more likely to emerge than are disapproving attitudes toward sex. If it were a vin diagram, "all sex" would fill a large circle, while "rape" would fill a smaller circle within that larger one, with most of the larger circle being "non-rape sex" (there is likely to be "acceptable" and "non-acceptable" sex within the "all sex" circle, too, with rape being in the "non-acceptable" region). "All sex is rape" expands "rape" into the "non-sex" area, including everyone's "acceptable" area. Rape is thus re-conceived as being more acceptable.

Of course, classical liberals make the distinction between coercive and non-coercive acts, but not everyone does. Libertarians agree that taxation is a coercive act -- that taxation is theft -- but others disagree. Thus, is it possible for a coercive act to become socially acceptable. This is different from the point in regards to acceptable vs. non-acceptable sex acts, which amount to personal preferences (which some people think validates the use of coercive measures to ensure others also acts according to their personal preferences). Nevertheless, the acceptable-unacceptable line changes with social-cultural evolution. The "acceptable" region is more likely to expand than the "unacceptable" region. A similar point along these lines could be made in regards to same-sex marriage -- that expanding same-sex unions into the "acceptable" region doesn't make opposite-sex marriage "unacceptable". Nor does it mean that we have to accept forcible marriages (although non-coercive polygamy is up for grabs). Just because two things are unacceptable, that doesn't mean they are unacceptable in the same way.

Or think about it this way. It is one thing to say, "All humans are animals," but it is another thing to say, "All animals are human." It is possible to argue, from the first, that while we are animals, we have certain features that make us distinctly human. But if we accept the latter, then we cannot argue for distinct differences. That makes a difference in our attitudes toward humans. It is the attitude we get from someone like philosopher Peter Singer, who on the one hand argues for animal rights, and on the other hand argues for human eugenics. The two attitudes, for Singer, stem from the fact that he essentially believes "all animals are human." One does not have to believe that and support animal rights; but if you do believe it, you will come to the conclusions of Peter Singer.

As we can see, words (or groups of words as terms) refer to a shifting reality. Yet the inflationary effects only work in certain ways. Whether or not this would apply to monetary inflation is up to monetary theorists like Steve Horwitz to address.

New College Course on How Economics is Portrayed in Cinema

2012-01-03T14:54:00.002-05:00

Nice. A college class on the way economics is potrayed in cinema. It is being done by Sherry Kasper, professor of economics at Maryville College. I think this is an exciting development.

Cities and Creativity

2012-01-03T12:00:00.002-05:00

Edward Glaeser argues that cities foster creativity.

Glaeser: I think the most important thing cities do today is to allow the creation of new ideas. Chains of collaborative brilliance have always been responsible for human kind’s greatest hits. We have seen this in cities for millennia – Socrates and Plato bickered on an Athenian street corner; we saw it again in Florence with the ideas that went from Brunelleschi to Donatello to Masaccio to Filippino Lippi and to the Florentine Renaissance. It helps us to know each other, learn from each other and to collectively create something great. In some sense, cities are making us more human.
Our greatest asset as a species is the ability to learn from the people around us. We come out of the womb with this remarkable ability to take in information from those people – parents, peers, teachers – that are near us. Cities enable us to get smart by being around other smart people. I think this explains why cities have not become obsolete over the past thirty years.

Of course, just being in a city isn't enough. You also have to get out of the house, and you have to hang out in the right places at the right time.

Which only raises the question: where are the right places? This differs from city to city, of course. And among cities. What is it about ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, interwar Paris, and modern-day New York that make them intellectual centers? (And if it is no longer New York, where is it?)

J. R. R. Tolkein and Liberty

2012-01-03T11:23:00.001-05:00

Kosmos podcast on J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Rhyme of the Libertarian Binaries

2012-01-02T00:59:00.002-05:00

Steve Horwitz doing a little poetry at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

Ideas for the New Year

2011-12-31T15:07:00.001-05:00

Today is the last day of the year. What topics would you like to see covered over the next year?

Austrian Economics Daily

2011-12-28T18:52:00.003-05:00

I tweet every article. Which has gotten us into Austrian Economics Daily. Twice.

London, Christmas, 1843

2011-12-26T16:20:00.003-05:00

From what work does the following come:

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers" benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.

The Grocers'! oh the Grocers'! Nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses. It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, clashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.

This unapologetic celebration of the market is from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. An odd thing, for those who believe this work to be an anti-capitalist diatribe. The problem with Scrooge isn't that he's a capitalist, but that he doesn't enjoy his life, that he's not generous, and that he has replaces all human affection with mere accumulation. The market is life; accumulation for the sake of accumulation is death, as Scrooge learns.

Take a look at some of the things listed above. It is Christmastime and, thus, winter, yet in the market are pears, apples, and grapes, oranges and lemons -- all out of season for winter London. From whence did they come, then? Through trade with distant lands in which they were in season. Free trade allowed winter London to have summer fruits. There are also "French plums" and cinnamon -- from the Far East -- and sugar, from the West Indies, no doubt, and figs from the Middle East. All of these things are in London exclusively due to free trade. The Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge just how wonderful and joyous the market economy can be.

Of particular note is when Scrooge accuses the Ghost of Christmas Present of depriving people of the market on Sundays:

"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, "I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment."

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you?"

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day," said Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."

"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.

"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

The Ghost points out that those who would shut down the economy on Sundays are of the same mindset as Scrooge. Note that those who shut down the free market economy on Sundays and, as a rule, oppose the market itself, are described as having "pride, will-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness." I agree with the Ghost that this is a perfect description of anti-market people in general.

The bottom lines is that Scrooge is not targeted because he is a capitalist -- he is targeted because he is a misanthrope. The grocers are celebrated in no small part because, having to deal with the public directly, there is no way they can be misanthropic. If Scrooge ran a grocery store, he would have gone out of business long ago. Fortunately for him, he went into a business where he did not have to deal with people to make money. Or, perhaps more accurately, he was attracted to that business for that reason. No doubt Scrooge will nonetheless discover that his newfound love for humanity will nevertheless be quite profitable. The market, after all, is a social network, and the more pro-social you are in it, the wealthier -- in every way -- you will become.

The Rathouse

2011-12-19T17:49:00.002-05:00

We have been added to Rafe Champion's The Rathouse, which deals with critical rationalism -- Karl Popper and Austrian Economics. Thanks, Rafe!

J. Neil Schulman

2011-12-17T02:17:00.000-05:00

Those interested in Austrian Economics should find the work of J. Neil Schulman of interest, as he directly integrates Austrian Economics into the plots of his works, which include screenplays and novels such as Alongside Night and Escape From Heaven. He also wrote and directed (and acted in) Lady Magdalene's.

Some Thoughts on Game Theory and Literature

2011-12-16T12:16:00.000-05:00

Game theory is one approach to helping one uncover the rules of complex social systems. It shows that complex social systems can be understood as games, meaning they have rules. In postulating that games have rules, game theory goes against certain postmodernist-anarchist views that insist on opposing the very concept of rules. They see rules as limiting, as preventing freedom. They do not understand that it is the very presence of rules that give us “degrees of freedom.”

Nietzsche points out in Beyond Good and Evil that rules are absolutely necessary for every form of morality and art form has used and needed rules. “What is essential and inestimable in every morality is that it constitutes a long compulsion: to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism, one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom—the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm” (188). He then goes so far as to say that “all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics” developed only because of rules – and that the use of rules lies in nature itself, that rules are natural. It is through living by rules that we make it “worth while to live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality.”

Nietzsche rejects living without rules. But which rules? The tacit question asked by game theory is: “what rules make for the best games?” But it also asks: “what rules would evolve to ensure survival of the game?” – whether that game is a species or a ritual, an economic system or a work of literature. Further, “Game theory shows how people make decisions about what to purchase and when and the rationale for seeing goals or rewards” (Richmond, et al, Science 11 July 2003, 179). That is, “Our sense of which behavior to choose to reach a goal or obtain a reward is based on the perceived value of the reward, the effort needed to obtain it, and our previous experience about the likelihood of success” (179). Which raises the questions of what is the “goal” of a work of art, and what “reward” that work of art gives us, since behavior’s existence suggests there is a goal and/or reward to be achieved/received that must have been important enough for us to have been pursuing it from prehistory to the present day. We will not act if we do not perceive that the reward we will receive is sufficient.

Action is always directed toward the future; it is essentially and necessarily always a planning and acting for a better future. Its aim is always to render future conditions more satisfactory than they would be without the interference of action. The uneasiness that impels a man to act is caused by a dissatisfaction with expected future conditions as they would probably develop if nothing were done to alter them. In any case action can influence only the future, never the present moment that with every infinitesimal faction of a second sinks down into the past. Man becomes conscious of time when he plans to convert a less satisfactory present state into a more satisfactory future state. (Mises, Human Action, p. 100)

We would not create works of art of literature or participate in viewing/reading/listening to art/literature/music if it did not reward us. That is why l’art pour l’art is neither achievable nor desirable. But each of the questions raised by game theory are really the same question. Formulating it the first way makes it clearer regarding how it can be applied to art and literature. It helps us to see the critic as the uncoverer of the rules the artist used (consciously or not) to create their work of art or literature. Formulating it the second way helps us understand how game theory can help us understand the source of rules, from the laws of physics to the rules of grammar. It shows that more rules are needed for more complex games. Only a few are needed at the quantum level, but with each movement up in complexity, more rules emerge – and are needed – until one gets to complex human social systems, which need thousands, if not millions, of rules. And it shows how necessary rules are if one is going to have any sort of game at all. It is the existence of rules that give us freedom – making us more creative, often far more creative than we are otherwise. Many good rules (note the word “good” here – it is not the number of rules so much as the kind, those that generate more moves, not less) give us many more degrees of freedom. Chess is a better, more complex game, with many more degrees of freedom, than checkers, though both are played on the same board. It is better because more complex. Complexity gives us more freedom. Rules are necessary, but the more complex the system, the more and more complex the rules that are necessary.

This brings us to the question of what distinguishes Rules from Laws (this is similar to Hayek's distinction between law and legislation). Both Rules and Laws are used to delineate what one does. However, Rules are flexible, which means they can be bent; they are prescriptive, which means they say what you can do (as, say, the rules of chess) and, as such, are positive in nature; they act as strange attractors, meaning they are dynamic, they deepen and grow more complex over time, and they increase your degrees of freedom, giving you more possibilities. Action is impossible without rules; rules create actions, possibilities of and for actions. Laws, on the other hand, are inflexible and cannot be bent, but only broken; and they are broken under threat of punishment (laws can be changed – but in the sense that they are changed, they no longer exist as laws and other laws now exist); thus, they are restrictive, saying what you cannot do; they are static, unchanging (especially in philosophy), they decrease your freedom by being restrictive, and give you fewer possibilities. Action is cut off with Laws; laws prevent actions, possibilities of and for actions.

In Individualism and Economic Order, F. A. Hayek points out the dangers found in the radically individualistic view of human nature – showing that it can and usually does lead to the collectivist view (too fine a texture looks like a solid color). Hayek shows that taking the exclusively individualistic view of human nature (vs. the social-individualistic view of human nature) leads to bad games (social systems, economic systems, government), since no information can be shared among players. A good game-system is one where communication – and, thus, community – is possible.

Hayek suggests that there are two kinds of individualism, one based on rational philosophy, which started with Descartes and was further developed by Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and by the existentialists, including Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, and which I will call Cartesian Individualism, and the other based on the Scottish philosophical tradition of David Hume, Bernard Mandeville, Josiah Tucker, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Locke, and further developed by Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton (which is the social-individualistic agonal view). Cartesian Individualism is based on the idea that man is rational and can thus rationally construct society, while the Scottish tradition does not see man as being fully rational, but also, perhaps primarily, influenced by his drives and wants and needs of the moment. These quite different views give rise to quite different forms of individualism. Perhaps the best way of explaining the differences would be to put the two traditions of individualism side by side in a table showing what Hayek sees as the difference between the two traditions, and the consequences of each of these traditions:

Scottish (Social-Individualistic) Individualism

the individual is found within the social, leading to free markets

man is not always rational, or even capable of always being rational – man also has impulses and instincts

since man is not rational, he cannot design or plan something like a society or economy

the individual participates in the social (cooperates) through being selfish

“If left free, men will often achieve more than individual human reason could design or foresee” (11).

It is not necessary to find good men to run the society, meaning anyone can play

it is not necessary for us to become better than we already are, making it easy to enter the game to play it

freedom is granted to all

no one group never always wins, which keeps people playing

reason is seen “as an interpersonal process in which anyone’s contribution is tested and corrected by others” (15)

inherently unequal people are treated equally

inherent inequality allows diversity

hierarchical – intermediates encouraged

Cartesian (Radical Individualistic) Individualism

radical individualism, leading (ironically (?)) to socialism

man is rational and has no instincts and can always control his impulses

since man is rational, he can create through planning the ideal society or economy

individual vs. the social – i.e., selfishness vs. cooperation – therefore need coercion

“social processes can be made to serve human ends only if they are subjected to the control of individual human reason” (10)

only the best can or should run society and make economic decisions – few can play

men need to be improved (presumably made more rational) before a good economy or society can be created – hard to play

freedom granted only to the good and wise

the “good and wise,” “rational” rulers always win – no reason to play the game

reason found in the individual, especially in certain “good and wise” individuals

people are made equal in actuality – thus, have to arbitrarily assign tasks

only State and Individual, thus flattening society – intermediates suppressed

We can see in this comparison that the Scottish form of individualism, by being simultaneously social, provides us with a much broader, more inclusive set of game rules. Anybody can be involved in the social and economic games – making these systems more complex, containing as they do more constituent parts acting in coordination and cooperation. Man does not have to be “improved” for the kinds of systems that would be set up using Scottish principles as he does using Cartesian principles (historical examples of attempts to “improve” man to make him more suitable for “rationally” designed societies include the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, the Terror of Revolutionary France, and the slaughters of millions in the Marxist states of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Cambodia, just to name a few). In the Cartesian view, there is only one rationality, but in the Scottish view, there are many rationalities, which can often come into conflict.

Scottish philosophy gives us far more complex social game rules than does the (radical individualist) rationalist philosophical tradition. One may think this rationalist approach would allow a given individual’s influence to extend throughout a society and create a more interesting game, but what it actually does is flatten out society, making it less complex, less interactive. A radically individualistic world view leads, ironically, to a collectivist outcome. “All unity is unity only as organization and co-operation: no differently than a human community is a unity – as opposed to an atomistic anarchy; it is a pattern of domination that signifies a unity but is not a unity” (Nietzsche, WP 561).

If we take the Scottish view that a person’s knowledge and interests are limited, making our actions limited to a tiny sphere of influence – our family and friends, our churches and schools and businesses, the intermediate social groups the rationalists suppress and the Scottish encourage – we see a highly complex society emerging, with the individual influencing the small social groups, the small social groups influencing the individual, and both interacting to influence larger social groups, which themselves feed back to the smaller groups. We have a series of nested hierarchies where each person acts in a social-individualistic way through the communication of information to other individuals to create smaller cultural subsystems of the larger culture. The same individual can have an effect on a school, a church, a business, and a local government, each of which will have larger effects on the society at large. More people have more influence over society. And man does not have to be “improved” because the worst among us can be canceled out by the best. These principles, upon which the free market is based, are “an effective way of making man take part in a process more complex and extended than he could comprehend” (Hayek, 14-5). One does not have to have perfect knowledge to participate. One can participate while having a considerable amount of uncertainty, and still do well. Which is good, since no person is omniscient. We can reduce uncertainty through education, increasing our own individual knowledge, but we will still be left with a plethora of things which we will never have the time to learn.

There needs to be a way for individuals, with their limited information, knowledge, etc., to enter into a highly complex game, to be able to participate in the game itself. The way to allow someone into a highly complex game is by simply not having barriers to their entering and playing the game in the first place. And, if you do choose to play, and to take large risks while playing, you should be able to reap a correspondingly larger reward. To have a good game,

any workable individualist order must be so framed not only so that the relative remunerations the individual can expect from the different uses of his abilities and resources correspond to the relative utility of the result of his efforts to others but also that these remunerations correspond to the objective results of his efforts rather than to their subjective merits. (Hayek, 21)

And the game must not be constructed of iron-clad laws/legislation, but of more flexible rules. These are also good guidelines for creating works of art and literature, and for writing works of philosophy, theory, and criticism.

An example of good game rules are our “traditions and conventions . . . [which] evolve in a free society and . . . , without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally deserved rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree” (Hayek, 23). Most social rules should be those agreed upon and practiced by most of the people most of the time, enforced by subtle social pressures, not the use and threat of physical force. “In the social sciences the things are what people think they are. Money is money, a word is a word, a cosmetic is a cosmetic, if and because somebody thinks they are” (Hayek 60). They are rules because we agree they are – they are socially constructed. With these kinds of rules, those we find in the free market, we have various choices – while with orders or iron-clad laws, we get no real choices. This is what Nietzsche is getting at in his “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense” when he says words are metaphors we have forgotten are metaphors, not Truth (words are not congruent with things – they are not attached to things through iron clad laws). Any choice is better than none. “It is better to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one” (Hayek 24).
Of course, just because the world has a socially constructed element, it does not follow that all the world is socially constructed. To claim it is brings us to the problems with pragmatism, where no system at all can be constructed. Hayek says pragmatism is “the preference for proceeding from particular instance to particular instance,” where the rule-maker “decides each question “on its merits””(1). With pragmatism, expediency and compromise lead us “to a system in which order is created by direct commands” (1). “Without principles we drift,” and we are led “to a state of affairs which nobody wanted” (2). Pragmatism makes it possible to change the rules with each move in the game – one could imagine some game master watching a game being played between two people, and changing the rules whenever he wished. This would lead to the game players in each move trying to gain the game master’s favor. They would end up trying to bribe the game master rather than paying attention to playing the game at hand. If this sounds like how too much business is conducted, with the government as the game master, we can see why. How much money do businesses waste trying to influence “pragmatic” government officials? With the use of basic principles, everyone is clear what the rules are and that they cannot – or, at the very least, are very difficult to – change. The game players concentrate on the playing of the game itself rather than coming up with strategies to influence some game master. With the use of general principles, the game master can all but be done away with.

There are a set of “basic principles” that are not socially constructed, a reality that exists even if we are not around to observe it which we have to deal with (though our attitude toward it, meaning our perspectives on it, are certainly socially constructed and thus inherited and modified based upon that inheritance). This is physis. On this world we have increasingly superimposed, with the introduction of such technologies as (especially fiat) money and writing, a socially constructed reality. This is nomos. This social reality, these social facts, “are accessible to us only because we can understand what other people tell us and can be understood only by interpreting other peoples’ intentions and plans. They are not physical facts, but the elements from which we reproduce them are always familiar categories of our own mind” (Hayek, 75). We have this socially constructed reality because “we all constantly act on the assumption that we can . . . interpret other people’s actions on the analogy of our own mind and that in the great majority of instances this procedure works. The trouble is that we can never be sure” (64). Which is what makes it all a game in the first place. But if we want this socially-constructed reality to work best, we need to allow it to structure itself as the rest of the world is structured – as a complex, dynamic emergent system.

Hayek has given us strong evidence against taking a collectivist-exclusive (unity-only) or an individualist-exclusive (pluralist-only) view. Hayek gives an alternative in his argument for a combination of individual and social – and even of a naturalistic and a socially constructed reality – that create a hierarchy of social interactions. What he argues for is a social-economic system that is in fact a system – a dissipative-structure system scalarly similar to every other system found in the universe, with the principles/game rules as the strange attractors of that system. It is a social system that reflects Francis Hutcheson’s definition of beauty unity in variety and variety in unity – which should not be surprising.

Hayek in Mind: Hayek's Philosophical Psychology

2011-12-15T11:01:00.000-05:00

The issue of Advances in Austrian Economics I am in, Hayek in Mind: Hayek's Philosophical Psychology, is now published! You can find it here, where you can download each individual chapter. My chapter, which is titled "Getting to the Hayekian Network", is the final chapter of the book. The book itself can be purchased here. Enjoy!

How the Grinch Stole the Free Market

2011-12-14T13:14:00.002-05:00

How the Grinch Stole the Free Market a Christmas poem by Sarah Skwire. Enjoy!

Thoughts on the Artistic Order in Light of O'Driscoll's 1978 Paper on Spontaneous Order

2011-12-14T03:05:00.001-05:00

Here is an article by Gerald O'Driscoll on spontaneous order from 1978. In it he makes several observations we should keep in mind.

The principle of spontaneous order—or of “undesigned order,” as it might more properly be called—can be viewed as the first principle of economics. Indeed, James Buchanan has recently gone so far as to suggest that it is the only principle of economics. The principle is, in any case, a cornerstone of modern economics, whether we trace modern (i.e., post-mercantilist) economics back to Adam Smith and the other Scottish moral philosophers, or to the Physiocrats. With this principle, scholars for the first time could see economic phenomena as interdependent events. Indeed, this principle made it possible to reason systematically and coherently about economic phenomena. Much of nineteenth century economics can be seen as consisting of developments of this principle (along with minority criticisms of the principle and the systems of thought deduced therefrom).

On the other hand, most of twentieth century economics has consisted of reactions against systems in which this principle plays a central role. In this, Keynesian economics is but one among a family of theories that deny the existence of a spontaneous or undesigned market order in which plans are coordinated. The reaction has been so complete that what was taken by earlier economists to be an empirical law—the existence of a spontaneous market order—is now frequently viewed as the product of ideological bias or prejudice.

It seems notable that at the same time that most economists were giving up on the concept of spontaneous order in understanding the economy, that it had been taken up by the biologists, after Darwin's embracing the idea. His final point also helps us see perhaps why sociobiology, which attempted to reapply spontaneous order theory to sociology, including human sociology, was deemed to be an ideological move.

Indeed, O'Driscoll's point that Keynesianism is anti-spontaneous order in nature is another reason why we are not "Keynesianism and Economics." And anti-sociological theory cannot be of any use to understanding the sociology of artistic production.

The fact that spontaneous order theory is now taken to be evidence of ideology rather than of good science also suggests that we who are taking up this approach are in danger of being accused of being ideologues -- no matter the merits of the approach. This is more a warning than anything. (It now occurs to me that this may be the central reason why Literary Darwinism is also considered "illegitimate" by most literary theorists.) We who choose these sorts of scientific approaches to the humanities face an uphill climb.

Why pick up this theory of spontaneous order? Because "the question of the existence of a spontaneously generated order remains the central question of economics—and of social theory generally—even thought it is seldom recognized as such." Thus, if we truly want to understand the sociology of artistic production, we must understand the nature of spontaneous orders -- including the specifics of the artistic order. Denying the ability of spontaneous orders to coordinate behavior is to deny that we are social beings at all. Yet, there is little question these forces work well in the arts -- as the fact that artistic movements emerge, that canonical works emerge and are recognized and have long-term stability, etc. -- even if such forces are denied by market interventionists within the economy. It seems odd that somehow such coordination takes place easily in the arts, in science, and in other spontaneous orders, which all lack that wonderful coordinator of the economy, prices, but fails within the economy.

O'Driscoll observes that

That nonpurposive social organizations will naturally evolve and that an undesigned order can be the product of self-regarding acts are radical ideas in Western thought. These ideas run counter to the dominant approach to social questions and were in ascendency for only a brief period in Western intellectual history. It is not, then, entirely surprising that in economics these ideas have not gained complete acceptance; and that among the general public, even the so-called educated public, they are scarcely understood at all.

Indeed, spontaneous order thought is in direct opposition to constructivist thought, both the strong (creatonist/socialist) and the weak (intelligent design/interventionist) versions. One of the benefits, I believe, in developing spontaneous order theory in other orders, such as the arts and science, is that people mistakenly believe that the economic order is the most important one. There is much that can be said about this kind of materialism, and how it leads us to misunderstand human nature and misinterpret historical events, but that's not what I want to focus on here. The good thing about this failure to value other spontaneous orders as much as the economy is that spontaneous order theory can be more fully developed -- and observed in some of its purest forms -- without too many political issues being raised. I say "too many," but the fact is that there is some recognition that acceptance of spontaneous order theory in any area is to reject constructivism everywhere.

The fact of coordination -- even in the fact of the constant threat (and reality) of discoordination -- results in emergent patterns of behavior:

Do different and disparate individuals have a common reaction to shared experience? We certainly would not want to say they always do, or there would be little sense in referring to “individuals.” Yet, there are obvious cases in which people do react to shared experiences in the same or similar ways: the perception of a fire in an enclosed room will lead to virtually everyone’s making for an exit. Each person could form a reasonable expectation about what the others will do.

Moreover, many events are implicit demonstrations of the degree to which expectations do coincide. Changes in clothing fashion might be cited as an example. The “agreement” among separate manufacturers of apparel can be amazing, though clearly retail customers do not register their preferences for new fashion in a clothing futures market. Apparently individual entrepreneurs, experiencing the same signals and trends, will often form similar expectations.

He again makes my point about artistic movements in his observation about changes in clothing fashion. The emergence of movements and fashions is evidence of widespread coordination of plans/projects/ideas.

I must criticize, however, O'Driscoll's claim that because "Lachmann is critical even of theories espousing a tendency toward overall equilibrium" that he therefore "denies the principle of spontaneous order". As it turns out (in much work done in other sciences since 1978, so O'Driscoll is hardly to blame -- not having has access to knowledge discovered since he wrote this paper) far-from-equilibrium states give rise to complex, creative, self-organizing processes. Equilibrium states are simple and entropic. Thus, equilibrium is not an indication that one has a spontaneous order -- rather, it is the presence of a far-from-equilibrium state that indicates such is present. Coordination and discoordination both are present in such systems.

In the end, though, it is because "Austrian economists tend to view most economic questions as issues involving the principle of spontaneous order" that I believe Austrian economics is the one approach most valuable for understanding artistic production.

Finally, I would like to note a Lachmann quote from O'Driscoll's paper:

Experience shows that in the real world of disequilibrium different persons will typically hold different expectations about the same future event. If so, at best one person’s expectation can be confirmed and all other expectations will be disappointed. Hence the “assumption that all other expectations are confirmed” cannot possibly hold. Nobody can take his equilibrium bearings if he does not know how others will act. In such a situation, which we have every reason to regard as normal, his equilibrium, as Hayek admits, cannot serve as a source of a “feedback mechanism.”

Can we not use this in helping us understand character actions and motives -- both in tragic and comic (and tragicomic) works? Another example of the benefits of Austrian-school insights.

5 Best Books That Incorporate Economics

2011-12-13T16:16:00.004-05:00

We all know that teaching someone something in the form of a story can be a great way to learn anything. In keeping with that thought, there are many books that also include valuable lessons in economics. To prove it, we have gathered just five works of fiction that incorporate valuable lessons in economics.

1. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck’s masterpiece was the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. It tells the story of a family living during The Great Depression and is an essential read for learning how economics can affect everyone.

2. Murder at the Margin – If you love murder mysteries, check out this book. It is by Marshall Jevons, a Harvard economist, and teaches essential lessons in economy surrounded by a murder mystery. Also a good choice if you are an undergraduate or high school student.

3. The Invisible Heart – If love stories are more your thing, then check out this book. It is a love story involving business, economics, and regulation through the eyes of two teachers at an exclusive school.

4. The Price of Everything – Get a “parable of possibility and prosperity” by author Russell Roberts. In the book, a Stanford student’s world is turned upside down by the opening of a mega store. The following is an interesting read and lesson on economics.

5. The Dharma Bums – Because wealth isn’t everything, check out this book. Jack Kerouac tells the story based on true events. It follows the travels of Ray Smith as he gets in touch with the outdoors and recalls what is truly important.

Bonus! The Wealth of Nations – Published in the landmark year of 1776, it was actually written by Scottish author Adam Smith. It focuses on how economics fits into the industrial revolution and is a strong proponent of the free market. It isn’t actually a fictional work, but it has been read and cited various times by scholars such as John Adams.

Molly Mitchell is a Economics graduate student and also owns the site Economics Degree. Her site helps students find the right Economics Degree to fit their needs.

Crowd Sourcing

2011-12-13T10:43:00.004-05:00

If you saw a process description which those involved were described as "making mistakes, going down wrong paths, getting their hands dirty following up the most mundane of details, relentlessly pursuing a solution," you would surely ask if there were not a better, more efficient way of doing things. Of course, as it turns out, this is an almost perfect description of the actions of scientists, inventors, business people, and artists at work. And, in this particular case, it is the description of an experiment done by mathematician Tim Gowers, who started a blog he called the Polymath Project, beginning with "an important and difficult unsolved mathematical problem." After 37 days of the process described above, during which "27 people wrote 800 mathematical comments, containing more than 170,000 words" and involving people ranging from Fields Metalists (besides Gowers) to a high school math teacher, the problem was solved (Michael Nielsen, "Reinventing Discovery", p. 1-2). This is spontaneous order at work -- harnessed to discover solutions to problems -- known in such cases as "crowd sourcing."

Elsewhere I mentioned crowd sourcing in relation to auto design and I have started my own crowd sourcing project for my own poetry, where I am hoping people will come by and make recommended changes so I can improve my poetry. And of course this blog is intended to get people to discuss the ideas, to refine them and hopefully improve them. It is certainly clearer in math and the simpler fact-based sciences whether or not you have a solution than in the more complex social sciences, let alone in regards to normative or aesthetic claims, as one finds in the humanities, but difficulty is hardly a reason to not use crowd sourcing to solve problems. Quite the contrary -- it is precisely these kinds of problems crowd sourcing may be uniquely able to solve.

Of course, within the humanities, normative claims and aesthetic claims have been crowd sourced for centuries or more. It is why we have the morals we do during certain times and in certain places. And it is why we have a canon of great artistic works. Those are the results of offline crowd sourcing. With the internet -- another spontaneous order which allows even broader, potentially more complex social interactions -- online crowd sourcing will of course move even faster.

Coordination and Discoordination in Plays

2011-12-12T18:40:00.004-05:00

Kirzner emphasizes coordination; Lachmann emphasizes discoordination. But both are present in the world.

Tragedies are exemplars of knowledge problems and discoordination: Romeo and Juliet die because their plans are discoordinated; Othello makes bad decisions based on bad information (bad information leads him to rationally reach a false conclusion -- similar to how ABCT works); MacBeth makes bad decisions because he misunderstands the information given him. Hamlet, on the other hand, has good information, but because he is uncertain about its trustworthiness, he delays acting. The delays result in the death of Polonius, leading to the insanity and suicide of Ophelia, and the tragic duel between Laertes and Hamlet, when Laertes seeks to avenge his father's death. Hamlet is thus a tragedy of regime uncertainty.

Comedies, on the other hand, are exemplars both of knowledge problems and of both discoordination and coordination. Love's Labor's Lost shows that even the most well-coordinated plans can, nevertheless, fail to come to fruition -- though in this case, in untragic fashion. The women are called away before the plans can be coordinated, by something having nothing at all to do with those plans. These things happen, of course. Most other comedies, though, follow the pattern of ending in coordination, in bonding, commitment, and promises kept.

Overall, though, plays demonstrate/enact the kind of communicative action/argumentation described by Habermas (Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 2001) and Hayek (in his work on spontaneous orders), the aim of which is to coordinate action. In the larger social sphere, one is likely to see more patterns of coordination than discoordination (certainly if this is not the case, the society in question will collapse), but in particular cases, one can find a variety of patterns, from near-perfect coordination of plans to complete discoordination of plans. The former are unlikely to be found in plays or any sort of story, since conflict is a necessary element of plot. We are rather likely to find discoordination dominant in plays -- as the dominant, necessary element in tragedies, and as the necessary element before plan coordination finally wins the day in comedies, as noted above.

In novels, it is possible to get "inside" the characters -- but in plays, one has to judge the characters more by their actions, since it is impossible to get "in the heads" of the characters (the occasional "aside" aside). Thus, economists need to spend more time at the theater . . . but I plan to save most of those thoughts (aside from those just shared above) for a paper I'm working on: "Why Economists Ought to Go to the Theater." As we can see, Austrian insights coordinate well with the way stories themselves work. Which should hardly be surprising.

The Laws of Spontaneous Orders

2011-12-09T14:10:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that those who study a subject should be primarily interested in determining what the laws underlying the object of study are. The proper work of a physicist is to discover the laws of physics. The proper work of a chemist is to discover the laws of chemistry. The proper work of a biologist is to discover the laws of biology.

This is equally true of the humane sciences -- and of the humanities. The proper work of an economist should be to discover the laws of economics. How many, though, in fact do that, rather than trying to impose their own ideologies on the science? The same could be said of social scientists, political scientists, etc. They need to focus on IS and keep the SHOULDS out of it. Biologists find it ridiculous when someone brings "should" into biology in the form of intelligent design or creationism, but nobody seems to find it ridiculous when economists do the same. The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises observed that,

"The laws of the universe about which physics, biology, and praxeology [the study of human action] provide knowledge are independent of the human will, they are primary ontological facts rigidly restricting man's power to act.
Only the insane venture to disregard physical and biological laws. But it is quite common to disdain praxeological laws. Rulers do not like to admit that their power is restricted by any laws other than those of physics and biology. They never ascribe their failures and frustrations to the violation of economic law" (Human Action, 755-56).

This is no doubt because few economists are in fact trying to even understand economic law. They are instead trying to find out how they can manipulate this or that element of the economy. The result is dismal failure. Worse, they even use the wrong methodology -- mathematics. Math is great for simple systems, like physical systems, but almost useless for complex systems like economies. Some statistics is no doubt useful, but even statistics can be misleading -- and often are. What Hayek warned us about scientism is doubly true of mathematics: it provides a false view of reality when it comes to complex systems. True, there have been impressive advancements in complex systems mathematics, but even with those, we only ever get grossly over-simplified models that bear almost no relation to reality. If we treat the models as conceptual starting-off points, then they are useful. But when we use them as too many who use math do and assume that the math is a precise description of a precise reality, rather than a precise approximation of reality (something John Pierce, in "An Introduction to Information Theory," warned against). That mathematicization of the field of economics is what in no small part led to this current depression, the same way scientism led to the Great Depression and the various failed experiments in socialism.

In the end, we necessarily come to know about the laws of economics using methods appropriate to its level of complexity. The same is true of any of the social/humane sciences, as well as of the humanities. And we need to learn what these laws are so that we are not forever falling into error. The knowledge of such laws may not ever tell us what we should or should not do (that is the realm of moral laws), but they can tell us what is and is not possible. However, as Mises observes:

"Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power. They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law. Are they not the supreme legislators?… In fact, economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power. An economist can never be a favorite of autocrats and demagogues. With them he is always the mischief-maker.…
In the face of all this frenzied agitation, it is expedient to establish the fact that the starting point of all praxeological and economic reasoning, the category of human action, is proof against any criticisms and objections.… From the unshakable foundation of the category of human action praxeology and economics proceed step by step by means of discursive reasoning. Precisely defining assumptions and conditions, they construct a system of concepts and draw all the inferences implied by logically unassailable ratiocination" (Human Action, 67).

And anyone who knows the history of Leftist thinking knows that they have even tried to deny the validity of biology for human behavior. So they don't even have to "reluctantly" admit to being subject to the laws of human nature, having denied such laws exist. But what else is the role of the human sciences and the humanities but to find out what those laws are, and what the laws of the spontaneous orders to which we give rise are? Or to what laws give rise to spontaneous orders in the first place are?

This then opens up an interesting question: what theories are truly valid for what spontaneous orders? And what do we mean by "valid"? I mean by valid, what theories deal with the nature of the spontaneous order they are theories of qua spontaneous order? Theories give rise to immanent criticism of the spontaneous order. Keynes and Mises provide different theories of economics, meaning they are trying to figure out what IS the case. One theory is right, the other is wrong, but both are proper to analyzing economics as such. Marx, on the other hand, by his own admission, does not provide a theory valid to analyzing economics. When he admits that he's not interested in what is, but in what should be, he admits to being an ethicist, with a theory applicable to the ethical spontaneous order, and not an economist.

Let me put this in another way. Literature has many theories literary analysts can use. Some, such as Aristotle's theory, New Criticism, Structuralism, and Poststructuralism, are all theories of literature qua literature. Others, however, are imported theories. Marxism, feminism, and queer theory are all ethical theories used to analyze the content of works of literature. None of these can be used to determine whether or not a work of literature is a great work of literature qua literature -- but the first set of theories can be. The first set help us to understand how a work of literature comes to mean, how it provides information to the reader/listener/viewer. The second set only tell us things about the content, about how characters interact, what the author may have meant or intended (or meant despite his intentions). If we try to say one of these other theories is in fact the true theory of literature, we are trying to impose another rationality, another theory applicable outside the spontaneous order, to that particular order. That would be like saying, for a work to be literature, it must be feminist. Though there are no doubt some out there who would like that, we should all recognize that this is a ridiculous requirement. Yet, we make the same claim for other spontaneous orders -- the economy being a favorite. Outside theories might help us understand the specific content of a given work, but they cannot be used to understand the spontaneous order of literature qua literature. When we do, the result too often sounds conspiratorial in a rather grandiose, irrational sense.

There is much work to be done, across the several spontaneous orders, if we are to find the laws of those orders. The good news is that they will all be there to be discovered, for they do no change. Different sets of rules make for different kinds of orders -- and that fact alone should make us excited for the possibilities.

Librabase

2011-12-08T15:57:00.001-05:00

We can now be found on librabase. They were kind enough to invite us to join!

Entrepreneurship, Austrian Economics, and the Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry

2011-12-07T13:05:00.003-05:00

Here is an article from Tyler Cowen on "Entrepreneurship, Austrian Economics, and the Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry". The connections among entrepreneurship, Austrian economics, philosophy, and aesthetics he draws is precisely why I believe Austrian economics is the ideal economic theory for understanding literature. The fact that it related to so many aspects of the world, without being guilty of "economic imperialism" suggests its scientific accuracy.

Some Thoughts on the Relations Among Government, Religion, and Spontaneous Orders

2011-12-07T11:33:00.004-05:00

Literature is a dangerous business. It can save or condemn one's soul. It tells us something about who we are and how we related to one another, acting as critique of one's soul, one's culture, one's society. That is why so much literature has been censored throughout the centuries -- by both religious authorities and governments. Literature is important and dangerous, or else pro-government and other religious people would not be so up in arms over it.

Science is a dangerous business. It can save or condemn one's soul. It tells us something about the fundamental nature of things -- of the universe, of life, of mind, of society. That is why so much science has been censored or misinterpreted or misused throughout the centuries -- by both religious authorities and governments. Science is important and dangerous, or else pro-government and other religious people would not be so up in arms over it.

Religion is a dangerous business. It can save or condemn one's soul. It tells us something about our relationships to each other, the universe, and the divine. That is why so many religions have been censored throughout the centuries -- by both religious authorities and governments. Religion is important and dangerous, or else pro-government and other religious people would not be so up in arms over it.

The arts were the first of these spontaneous orders to decouple from government and religion. The argument for that decoupling was that the arts are far too important to be controlled by government or religion. This decoupling has become so complete in the West that many now consider the arts to be completely unimportant -- precisely because they are decoupled from government and religion.

The sciences were the next of these spontaneous orders to decouple from government and religion. The argument for that decoupling was that the sciences are far too important to be controlled by government or religion. This decoupling is not quite so complete in the West, but in those areas where it is completely decoupled, that science has been declared not very important, while in those areas where government and religion are still involved, the science is declared vitally important. (Yes, I know many will challenge me on this, and argue the causality is backwards -- but consider the history of the arts and, below, of religion.)

Religion is a more recent of these spontaneous orders to decouple from government and religion. The argument for that decoupling was that religion is far too important to be controlled by government (or the religion that government would make the state religion). In places where religion has become decoupled from government, and where government is considered the proper replacement for religion, religion has been declared not very important (consider those who argue that economics, not religion, is the driving force behind al Qaida!).

Of course, during the time when these spontaneous orders were becoming decoupled from government and religion, many in both argued that the arts, the sciences, and religion were too important not to have strict political and religious controls over them. This is the situation with the economic spontaneous order at the present time. Yet, one could argue, as was done with the arts, science, and religion, that it is too important to be controlled by either. Once decoupled from them, it is likely that the economic order, over time, will come to be seen as "not very important" as well. Of course, once there is a separation of economy and state and the freed market makes us all wealthy, it won't be all that important.

The Cost of Humanities Scholarship

2011-12-06T15:47:00.002-05:00

Mark Bauerlein raises some interesting questions regarding the economics of literary scholarship. I'm not sure Google Scholar is the best way of gathering the data he does -- I know there is a scholarly citation index, which would have worked far better -- but the real issue involves the funding of research. In many ways, the issues he brings up are the same as those many conservatives bring up in regards to some scientific research.

Do we really need another article on the biophysics of nucleotide stacking in single-stranded hairpin DNA? How will such knowledge benefit mankind? Of course, we cannot know the answer to that, until it happens -- and there are some who insist that having the knowledge is, itself, of value.

Of course, the latter is probably the strongest argument for having yet another article or book on Shakespeare's Hamlet. How does it benefit mankind? Well . . . such things are far less tangible. Is not knowledge itself a benefit? Or understanding? Why does the transformation of knowledge into technology have to be the standard?

Of course, all of this skirts the issue of the source of the funding itself. A professor is being paid from money from tuition and from government funding. Who complains about research done with private funding? Few, if any. It is when the funding comes from taxes that people begin to question it. Those in favor of government funding of any sort of research have to learn to put up with the criticisms, or go find private funding.

Along these lines, I recently received a rejection letter for a position that was being paid for by an Australian government program that supported humanities research. The man in charge of the program told me that he was surprised -- and a little saddened -- by the sheer number of people who applied for the position from around the world, noting that many governments did not value humanities research. Of course, Australia is in much better financial shape than much of the rest of the world, which is one explanation. Another is that too many in the humanities over here (Stanley Fish particularly comes to mind) insist that the humanities have no value. Well, if people like Fish make that argument, we shouldn't be surprised that university presidents begin to think that, and begin cutting funding to humanities departments.

But there is also the point that in places like the U.S., government support for a humanities program would be immediately politicized. The conservatives would hate it because it would be dominated by progressives, and progressives would go out of their way to come up with the most offensive, ridiculous research agendas imaginable, just to insist that failing to fund them is a violation of their 1st Amendment rights (a position so absurd that only a postmodernist could make it, and believe it) and to annoy the conservatives. Libertarians, of course, would be against it because government is doing it -- and thus would align themselves with the conservatives, whose anti-cultural cultural wars are deeply offensive to libertarians.

It is a shame that there are not private humanities organizations out there providing jobs. I think it would answer some of the issues raised by Bauerlein. More, it would raise the value of the humanities. Libertarians in particular should be interested in such organizations, as those of us who are in the humanities feel like we have no real home. If we can get hired into a humanities department, we immediately feel marginalized in them. And, of course, if we want free markets, we need to cultivate a pro-market culture. That is the potential job of libertarian humanities scholars. It is what we try to do here. It is what I would do even more if I could get a full time position somewhere, where I could do more scholarly work.

Without the U.N. There Wouldn't Be Music, Art, Film, Dance, Theater and Books?

2011-12-05T10:32:00.007-05:00

David Boaz at Cato takes on Herbie Hancock on whether or not we would have culture without the U.N. That may sound like an absurd argument to make (on the part of Hancock), but the fact that the Washington Post actually published such an argument suggests that there are some who do not think it to be. I suppose that one should not be too surprised that an artist mistakes symbols for reality (as we artists all deal in symbols), especially when we have people like Baudrillard arguing for the separation for symbol and reality, but nobody is going to like jazz because there is now an International Jazz Day. People are going to like jazz because people like Herbie Hancock are making music people want to hear -- rather than wasting their time talking about illusionary positive connections between government and culture.

Science Fiction and Liberty

2011-12-01T16:00:00.001-05:00

Kosmos Online has collected all of their Science Fiction and Liberty podcasts.

Stuart Kauffman Likes Austrian Economics

2011-11-30T10:52:00.003-05:00

After telling Stuart Kauffman in an email that I used his work in my own, including in some upcoming papers, I received the following reply:

"Glad to hear you are using my work with Austrian economics. They are not, I'm glad, so wedded to equations. Kind regards, Stu Kauffman"

Which answers one of the questions I have always had about the Santa Fe group when it comes to economics: why aren't they reading the Austrians?!? Well, apparently, at least Stu Kauffman is.

The Virtue of Work

2011-11-29T16:39:00.001-05:00

Isaac Morehouse compares the poet Hesiod to the philosopher Aristotle.

Southern Literary Review

2011-11-29T12:46:00.001-05:00

Our own Allen Mendenhall is now the editor of the Southern Literary Review. Submission guidelines are here.

Economics and Poetry

2011-11-29T10:21:00.003-05:00

Now, you know you want your daily dose of Limericks Économiques.

Call for papers -- Economics and Literature: Beyond Praise and Disparagement

2011-11-28T16:26:00.005-05:00

Deadline for submission: November 1st , 2012
Planed publication of the issue: 2013
Editors: Estrella Trincado Aznar, Jérôme Lallement

Since the nascent of political economy in 17th century, and even before, literature has been both a place for broadcasting and challenging economic ideas through idealizing fables and pastiches. In turn, economists could borrow from literature some ways to present their own ideas or to criticize alternative doctrines. The purpose of this special issue is to reflect on the transformations of the frontiers between economics and literature: to investigate how literature can reflect economic ideas and arguments and to see how economics and economists have dealt with literary presentations of economic ideas.

Regarding the complex links between economics and literature, it is quite certain that very different national traditions can be identified. For instance, it is sometimes said that the 1848 Revolution in France established a clear-cut divorce between economics and literature. Similar breaking points may have occurred at different times in different countries. Later on, economists that were against the use of mathematical symbolism and reasoning would be labeled “économistes littéraires”. From this last phrase, one is allowed to think that, from the marginalist revolution onward, not only literature had become of no use to the development of political economy but also that it was now something incompatible with its development as a science.

Things are probably not that simple, since the boundaries of literature itself have necessarily changed in parallel with the transformations of society, and that what could be expected from literature at the end of 19th century, after the burst of modernity, was quite different from what could be expected in the end of 17th century. Literature has always evolved in relation to the development of society and human knowledge, taking as its own raw material the representations of the world expressed in all fields of science and philosophy. Therefore, literature has always redefined its own boundaries as it was progressively facing the development of political economy, moral philosophy and political thought as organized discourses. Again, it would have to cope with the rise of other social sciences in the 19th century, and more largely with the institutionalization of the production of knowledge and the rise of disciplinary boundaries.

Therefore, the interplay between economics and literature is twofold. On the one hand, political economy progressively developed as an autonomous discourse, where arguments, ways of thinking, proofs, debates, contradictions, examples, commentaries, hypotheses, conclusions, have been progressively normalized in such a way that literature would no longer appear as an adequate means for broadcasting its own discourse and representations of the world. On the other hand, as political economy was progressively organizing itself as a discipline, literature would reflect in a different way upon the development of economics, either to ridicule its logical and abstract way of thinking, or to condemn its development as a « dismal » science, or possibly to make it a source for literary inventions and novelty.

OEconomia – History / Methodology / Philosophy plans to publish papers dealing with this subtle and moving links between economics and literature. It welcomes articles dealing with a particular work, author, national tradition, or providing a broader view of the relations between economics and literature through the study of specific genres and sub-genres (farces, comedies, pamphlets, fables, novels, philosophical novels, essays, utopias, etc.) and the way it is bound to reflect upon the transformations of economics. Articles dealing with original economic ideas from well-known writers are also welcome.

Authors are invited to submit an article (in English or in French) at:
http://www.editorialmanager/oec. For any complementary question, please contact us at info@weboeconomia.org

Editors should retain the right not to go ahead with the special issue if they do not receive enough papers of sufficient quality. If there are some strong papers, but not enough, then they could be published as stand‐alone papers.

HT: Peter Klein

Welcome Morgan Brown

2011-11-21T09:49:00.003-05:00

I would like to officially welcome Morgan Brown to Austrian Economics and Literature. He is the author of the piece immediately below this one. I asked him to join us after reading the piece he wrote on Shakespeare, to which I linked. I must say that his first contribution here has not disappointed!

I think we have a very interesting, very diverse group here, made more interesting and more diverse with the addition of Morgan. I hope we can have the kinds of discussions like the recent back and forth on culture. It is excellent that we can disagree agreeably! More, I think the fact that there can be agreeable disagreements shows the strength of our position. Surely, if we can agreeably disagree amongst ourselves, we are in a good position to defend our position against those who disagree with our approach.

How College English and AE Go Hand-in-Hand

2011-11-20T18:15:00.003-05:00

I recall what it was like to take introductory courses in college English during my undergraduate studies with the University of Georgia. We showed up to class, wrote on various topics, and received minimal grammar instruction--just enough to get by the Regent's Test. We read plenty of literature, we were introduced to MLA format, and we were taught principles of PC discourse. The grad students who taught the courses assured us that if we managed to handle these principles responsibly, avoiding plagiarism through superb parenthetical citations, we would be equipped for critical analysis and logical discourse.

This always struck me as a strange approach to argumentation. I had been much influenced by the more philsophical American Transcendentalists as a teenager, and had taken my first look at Kant during high school. I revisited the Critique of Pure Reason many times during my years at UGA, since I knew the principles of method and argumentation that Kant sketched out were at odds with nearly 99% of what I learned as an English major. By way of Kant I approached Mises, and have since seen what Austrian Economics has to offer both Logic and Literature: 1) Mises provides a brilliant method for a critique of reason (in many ways more like the Scottish Common Sense Realist, Thomas Reid, than Kant), and 2) Austrian Economics provides a safeguard against the erros of Historicism, Socialism, Postmodernism, Lacanian psychobabble, and nearly every other fallacious system of thought promoted by "English" academes.

The amount of time that introductory college courses dedicate to "formatting" is absolutely mind-boggling. Colleges routinely train students in the principles of citation drafted by the Modern (Menshevik) Language Association, yet the formal principles of logic and argumentation have been abandoned for experimentation with the infinitessimals of MS Word's "Paragraph" tab. I used to be embarrassed to admit that I learned nearly everything I learned about grammar and logic outside of the college classroom. After all, my college degree had equipped me with little more than routine indoctrination in multiculturalism (my sophomore year was the year that he college made multiculturalism a mainstay of the curriculum), an ability to arrange a superb Works Cited page, and ninety-nine ways to turn literature into an apology for welfare economics. But while working for a Master's Degree at Georgia State University, I learned pretty quickly that no other student of my generation had received any formal training in the two fields that justify the existence of English Departments: Grammar and Logic.

Anyone can read literature, and anyone can have an opinion concerning meaning. But how do we know where intellectual fallacies lie? Where do interpretive fallacies lie? For these questions, we require logical exercise.

Everything I learned of any lasting value was learned outside the classroom. When teaching my first English courses as a paid teacher, I nearly laughed out loud when looking at the quality of instruction provided by contemporary textbooks. Remedial students received heavy instruction in grammar, and ENGL 1101 students were simply assumed to have the skills necessary to engage in logical argumentation. They were instead given tips on how to develop a "critical attitude" or a "social outlook." Why should students develop any critical or social outlook if they cannot spot a fallacy at first glance or an error in verb agreement or pronoun agreement? What good is a fallacious theory, or a socially-sensitive apology for a fallacy?

I have been working as a teacher over the past couple of years to strike a balance between grammar and logic (working up from the Subject-Predicate standard to Universals/Particulars, and then onward into Bastiat's "That Which is Seen") which lends itself to a method of logic and argumentation fit for the college classroom. It is amazing to see what students are capable of achieiving if you simply place good materials in front of them. Logic, as Mises and Kant repeatedly urged in their works on human action and philosophy, is the only critical apparatus that man possesses to criticize society. And thanks to intellectual bankruptcy of college English departments, legions of literati and would-be college elites are exiting American "Institutes of Higher Learning" completely unarmed.

I would like to think that a new generation of teachers may be on the rise, which is jaded with the failures of the "Sixties" paradigm. My experience with peers tells me this. The daunting scholarship of the Austrian tradition is an assurance that we do not have to start from scratch if we want to make a change.

The Rise of Ayn Rand on Campus

2011-11-18T11:15:00.003-05:00

Over at Minding the Campus, there is an interesting article on The Rise of Ayn Rand on Campus. The reason Rand comes up occasionally here is because of the fact that she identified Mises' economics as closest to her own. She is thus in the Austrian economics tradition (even if her literary theory is not necessarily valid -- or necessarily invalid -- to what we are doing here). The article is of note because if Rand's works are increasing in popularity on campuses, this suggests the conditions are improving for our kind of analysis of literature.

The Market for Shakespeare

2011-11-16T12:56:00.002-05:00

Mises.org has a nice piece on Shakespeare by Morgan Brown titled Shakespeare: The Ultimate Market Product. I am sure anti-market types would argue that this diminishes Shakespeare, but in fact it does nothing of the sort. The market cannot successfully market things nobody wants.

Lessons from The Lorax

2011-11-16T11:06:00.002-05:00

Steve Horwitz quotes a student paper on Facebook:

The situation depicted by Dr. Seuss [in The Lorax] in which the Onceler destroys the environment does not describe a market failure because the land in which it takes place does not adhere to the principles of a market economy because it lacks clear property rights.

It turns out that there is an excellent piece in The Journal of Private Enterprise on the Lessons from The Lorax.

Why My Economics Is Austrian

2011-11-14T10:25:00.003-05:00

I probably came to the Austrian school in the most unusual way possible. I started by academic career by majoring in recombinant gene technology and minoring in chemistry at Western Kentucky University. I had every intention, at the time, of getting a Ph.D. in molecular biology and doing biology research. But I ended up getting sidetracked – and it all started with an Intro. to Philosophy class I took with Ronald Nash. Among the works Ronald Nash taught from was his book “Poverty and Wealth: A Christian Defense of Capitalism.” Yes, among the oddities of my path, I was introduced to free market economics in a philosophy class. I found the topic so interesting, I went to the library and read everything I could find on economics. I read Walter Williams, Milton Friedman, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Ayn Rand’s Capitalism the Unknown Ideal. The last of course led me to Atlas Shrugged and to the rest of her philosophy. In my case, it didn’t start with Ayn Rand, but her work was an important point along the path. Through her I discovered Nietzsche, whose ideas have been vital to my journey.

At the same time, I was also reading books on chaos theory, complexity, and self-organization – topics somewhat closer to my scientific interests. Nietzsche’s philosophy made sense in light of these ideas, and certainly economics seemed to fit well into them, even if nobody I was reading at the time made the connections. Of course, chaos theory, etc. were fairly new theories, so it was not too surprising to me that the connections were not necessarily being made.

One of the consequences of my increasing interest in complexity, philosophy, and economics was that I grew increasingly bored with biology. Rand’s influence, though, resulted in my deciding to go into fiction writing rather than economics. As a result, I dropped out of a Master’s program in molecular biology to pursue a Master’s in English instead. From there, I was accepted into a Ph.D. program in the humanities at UT-Dallas precisely on the basis of my background in molecular biology, philosophy, literature and creative writing, and economics. Little did I know at the time how good a fit it actually was for me.

At UTD I first met Alexander Argyros, who had published on time, chaos theory, and literary theory, and then Frederick Turner, a poet and philosopher who has published two epic poems, several collections of poetry, and works on philosophy and on literary theory that make use of evolutionary psychology, time, complexity, and free market economics, among which is his “Shakespeare’s 21st Century Economics.” I was thus introduced to people who were thinking the same way I was. More, it was in Turner’s “Game Theory and the Humanities” class that I was truly introduced to Austrian economics, when we read Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order and Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty. Hayek of course introduced me to Mises. And both Hayek and Mises ended up in my dissertation Evolutionary Aesthetics.

But even then, impressed as I was, I was not yet a full Austrian school economist. No, that occurred after graduation, when I was invited to attend a Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders conference. The paper I submitted used a great deal of complexity theory, etc., but nothing of Hayek. It was suggested by the conference participants that I should really include a great deal of Hayek, since his work was what spontaneous order theory was based on. I was then invited to a Liberty Fund colloquium on Hayek, for which I read a lot on spontaneous order theory – and I was hooked. Why was I hooked? Because of everything I had learned up through that time. I view the world as a complex set of emergent processes. I gained that world view through learning about chaos theory, complexity, self-organization, the theory of time developed by J.T. Fraser, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and free market economics – tied together through the philosophies of Nietzsche and Frederick Turner. When I really encountered Austrian economics in the fullest sense of the term, I realized that it was the theory of economics I was looking for. It was the school of economics that fit the world view I had already developed before encountering it. The world is a complex set of self-organizing emergent processes. Spontaneous order theory says the economy is a complex, self-organizing emergent process. Thus, Austrian economics best fits how I understand the world to be.

I did not start off life as a libertarian. I did not start off on my libertarian path through either reading Ayn Rand or the Austrian economists. I ended up on that path, and ended up accepting the Austrian school of economics, precisely because they fit the way the world works – at least, the way I increasingly understood the world to work, as a complex, evolving, self-organizing emergent process. The result is that I now write papers on spontaneous order theory, have a view of human action that is basically Misesian in nature, and have found a home in a school of economics that fits the way the world works as whole. My recent discovery of Lavoie's work has only confirmed my connection to Austrian economics, as he brings much postmodern literary theory into the Austrian school, which obviously fits well into my interest in Austrian economics and literature. In the end, the fact that Austrian economics fits the way the world actually works is why I’m an Austrian economist.

Speculations about Baudrillard

2011-11-12T14:29:00.002-05:00

The emancipation of the sign: remove this ‘archaic’ obligation to designate something and it finally becomes free, indifferent and totally indeterminate, in the structural or combinatory play which succeeds the previous rule of determinate equivalence. The same operation takes place at the level of labour power and the production process: the annihilation of any goal as regards the contents of production allows the latter to function as a code, and the monetary sign, for example, to escape into infinite speculation, beyond all reference to a real production, or event to a gold-standard. The floatation of money and signs, the floatation of ‘needs’ and ends of production, the floatation of labour itself—the commutability of every term is accompanied by speculation and a limitless inflation (and we really have total liberty—no duties, disaffection and general disenchantment; but this remains a magic, a sort of magical obligation which keeps the sign chained up to the real, capital has freed signs from this ‘naïvety’ in order to deliver them into pure circulation).

—Jean Baudrillard, from “Symbolic Exchange and Death”

Baudrillard’s hyperreality is fascinating. I’ve written about it here and here. I have reservations about Baudrillard, but I think his theories could be useful to libertarians and Austrian economists. What follows is merely speculation. I’m seeking feedback, not advancing an argument that I’m invested in.

What Baudrillard calls the “political economy of the sign,” economists call the “subjective theory of value.” Claiming that his term is inadequate because its signification is allusive and coded, Baudrillard seems to multiply the subjective theory of value until it (and what it evaluates: the good or service for which people exchange currency) becomes something else, something re-signified. In so doing, Baudrillard seems to mimic or participate in the very semiotic processes that he is describing.

The re-signified version of the subjective theory of value can no longer be called the subjective theory of value because the re-signified version is, to a degree, counterfeit; the same can be said of the materiality (the thing used to facilitate or complete an economic transaction) constituting the monetary unit described by the subjective theory of value. Strictly speaking, the re-signified version of this theory is itself a replacement copy of the theory, just as money and other units of exchange are merely signs standing in the place of “worth.”

The subjective theory of value holds that a thing does not possess inherent worth. Instead, worth arises because of the social value that attaches to a thing. Worth, or cost, is the price which one person is willing to pay and which another person is willing to sell. Standing in contradistinction to the labor theory of value, which Baudrillard seems to pooh-pooh (perhaps because of his disaffiliation with the Marxism of his youth), the subjective theory of value maintains that worth or cost depends upon the ability of a thing to satisfy the wants of consumers. A consumer is satisfied to the extent that a thing is useful to him. Utility here is measurable in psychological and not just “practical” terms; a person may want something because it makes him feel good. What seems to bother Baudrillard is the extent to which consumers exchange goods (themselves mediated by signs and representations) to become plugged into a symbolic network rather than to satisfy an immediate need. The satisfaction is what comes with the entrance into a symbolic order.

A thing, according to this conception of value, is not worth a lot simply because a lot of people mix their labor with it. Nor is a thing worth a lot because of some essential properties or qualities it contains. Rather, thing A is worth a lot because people think it is worth a lot: because people are willing to exchange something they own (thing B or C or D) in order to own thing A.

For Baudrillard, the subjective theory of value (a term he never uses) has vast implications for the sign in the postmodern world, just as the sign has vast implications for the subjective theory of value in the postmodern world. Because the worth or value of a thing is not tied to labor, it is, in a way, as Baudrillard suggests, subject to infinite speculation and free from all reference to production. Media of exchange (e.g., money) float outside the real—which is to say, outside of material things. They became simulacra for some temporary and contingent concept of value. Perhaps more importantly, the media of exchange are themselves distorted and fabricated by structures of symbols marking various exchanges. Fiat money brings about the complete arbitrariness of the sign, which is entirely divorced from use value. The ability of a green piece of paper (speaking in terms of American dollars) to become exchangeable for products depends upon social signification; the economy itself is dominated by signs and images, which are, after all, what producers and consumers exchange for products.

One could argue that Baudrillard reverses the privilege of consumption and production in the determination of value. At the very least, he insists upon the priority of the sign over the referent of utility. In such an economy, people wittingly or unwittingly exchange fabrications, models, and replicas. Simulacra such as fiat money represent the absence of the referent while supplying a new and different referent only symbolically related to the prior referent; put differently, simulacra signify copies of that which is not there.

Although Baudrillard seems to rely on the subjective theory of value, he also suggests that this theory, like everything else, is plugged into a dominant order of signs and representations. Baudrillard’s semiotics would suggest that identifiable, material referents of value have disappeared beneath layers of distortions, copies, or replications, and therefore that “value,” if such a term may be strategically employed here, is based upon (even as it constitutes) signs and symbols of value. Value, in other words, has been lost through symbolic acts within the realm of exchange and commodities. Therefore, the world today is immersed in an economy of representation; some representation is controlled, some is random, but all of it masks the absence of a basic reality because it has become an order of simulation: a hyperreality.

Llosa on Literature and the Search for Liberty

2011-11-09T14:31:00.001-05:00

Llosa on Literature and the Search for Liberty.

"A story's significance as a piece of art cannot be divorced from its message, any more than a society's prospects for freedom and prosperity can be divorced from its underlying principles. The writer and the man are one and the same, as are the culture and its common beliefs."

"All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated. Mankind has inherited this wisdom from millennia of experience, and our understanding has been enriched further by the great liberal thinkers, some of my favorites being Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises."

The Tragic View of Human Nature

2011-11-09T14:02:00.002-05:00

Is tragedy the literature of Austrian economics? That may be going a step too far (comedy was famously described as "tragedy plus time"), but there is little question that the Austrian school view of human nature is the tragic view. That is how Hayek described it. This is contrasted with the Unrestrained View of human nature. Let me ask: is there such a thing as a literature that expounds the unrestrained view? Or is all literature tragic? If there is no literature of unrestrained human nature, what does that say about that world view?

Liberty and Shakespeare

2011-11-04T14:24:00.001-04:00

Allen Mendenhall has an excellent piece on Liberty and Shakespeare.

Atlas Shrugged

2011-11-03T18:28:00.001-04:00

A nice little piece on Atlas Shrugged. Of note:

“So long as we have not yet reached the state of censorship of ideas,” she once said, “one does not have to leave a society in the way the characters did in Atlas Shrugged. . . . But you know what one does have to do? One has to break relationships with the culture. . . . [D]iscard all the ideas—the entire cultural philosophy which is dominant today.”

Thoughts on that?

FSSO

2011-11-02T10:50:00.004-04:00

I was in Portsmouth, NH for the weekend for a Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders conference, at which we discussed my paper, "The Theater of Tensions," on theaters as organizations on the borderlands of the artistic, economic, democratic, and philanthropic orders. I got some good feedback on it, and I will be revising (and expanding) on it for submission to Studies in Emergent Order. I still have not convinced Gus diZerega (whose work on democracy as a spontaneous order I highly recommend) that the arts are a spontaneous order, so I apparently still have some work to do in that area. (Not that I didn't intend to do just that, anyway!)

David Mamet on Culture and Society

2011-10-25T10:57:00.003-04:00

David Mamet, in The Secret Knowledge, makes several points about culture relevant to the ongoing discussion.

"Culture predates society, as it evolves before consciousness" (11).

"the evolution of a culture takes place not through the disappearance of those lacking a beneficial adaptation and the interbreeding of its possessors, but through imitation" (11).

"cultural adaptations predate and are the basis for that more conscious, more sophisticated agglomeration called society, which might be said to be the appurtenances growing out of culture" (12).

He points out that culture allows those within the culture to be able to better predict the actions of fellow members of that culture (11-12). Of course, the same can be said of the emergent properties of the catallaxy as well. But these are two different levels of predictability: the smaller culture vs. the larger society. We are sometimes confused at the differences from one culture to the next at how people conduct business, then discover that cultural differences explain the differences.

What If Theatres Played Moneyball?

2011-10-24T14:04:00.002-04:00

What if theatres played moneyball? An excellent question. How might theatres use economics to become better at what they do? I may have some more ideas on this after this weekend's conference, where I will be getting feedback on my paper "The Theater of Tensions," which discusses theaters as institutions on the borderlands of the economic, artistic, philanthropic, and democratic orders.

Yes, Culture is a Base

2011-10-24T10:04:00.002-04:00

I will stick with Dario Fernandez-Morera’s numbering in response.

1.& 2. From my readings of cultural criticism, it is in fact culture as I have defined it which is being discussed rather than “society.” You are correct that in a sense “Culture is the new “base” because it underlies all else” while “All else is superstructure.” I do believe that is an accurate description of reality. In that sense, the move from the “relations of production” to culture is a welcome move, as it more accurately represents reality (it is historically wrong and patently absurd to assume “relations of production” are primary, while all anthropological evidence does show culture to be primary). However, I would disagree that that means that if we “Get the culture right and other things can be explained, including the economy.” The so-called superstructures all have their own emergent realities which can and need to be explained in their own terms. The task of pure economics is to understand the self-organizing emergent process known as the economy. However, as Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright try to make clear in Culture and Enterprise, cultural studies can help us understand some of the differing details. And, more, if those doing cultural studies understood economic, that would improve their work as well. Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright are interested in the two disciplines learning from each other, having the work of each inform the other.

3. It may seem obvious once pointed out, that saying “provides information for the action of entrepreneurs is simply a reformulation, and not a very ingenious one, of the obvious, pointed out by Mises and others: the entrepreneur looks for the most favorable conditions he can find that justify his actions,” but it was not obvious at the time that Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright wrote Culture and Enterprise (2000). From the point of view of understanding economic actions – from the point of view of doing science, in other words – we do need to understand all of the elements involved in entrepreneurial discovery. If those studying entrepreneurship have not taken cultural elements into consideration, their scientific understanding is not as rich as it could be. More, as L & C-W point out, the very nature of entrepreneurship is affected by culture. They give the examples of the differences among American, Chinese, and Japanese entrepreneurs, pointing out that both American and Chinese entrepreneurs are more individualistic than are Japanese entrepreneurs, and the Chinese are, in addition, more nepotistic. The Japanese would prefer to work in large companies together in a company which treats them like family, and are more likely to be entrepreneurial in that context. The Chinese prefer not to work for anyone, but would rather work for themselves and hire family. I am grossly oversimplifying their own summary of work done in this area, but it should give an idea of the importance of understanding culture to understand some of the details of business creation, which are bound to have importance in the way people relate to business and interact with and within those businesses. That affects, in turn, the kinds of patterns which will emerge in the spontaneous order of the economy. The little details contribute to our understanding of any particular economy, even as the structural framework of the economy remains essentially the same from economy to economy.

4. I do not disagree that the law of marginal utility applies regardless of culture – or of species (I agree that Mises did not realize how much overlap there is between human and many non-human species in their actions and that therefore many laws of economics can be found in non-human species). However, the law of marginal utility does not apply in trying to sell pork to devout Jews and Muslims, coffee to Mormons, beer to fundamentalist Baptists, dog meat to most Europeans and those of European descent, horse meat to most Americans, or any meat to a vegan. The reason it does not apply in these cases is due to cultural differences. You cannot ignore those cultural differences if you want to understand the economies of the cultures in question. A great example is Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Norway’s developmental agency saw a lake teaming with fish, built a fish processing plant, and saw it fail. Why? Well, it turns out (which this article still manages to miss) that the people who live near the lake think that fishing is such degrading work that they would rather stay poor than fish. To them, only the lowest of the low fish. For us, and obviously for the Norwegians, it makes perfect sense to build a fish processing plant near a lake full of fish, because we think fishing is a perfectly good occupation. However, this well-intended plant is now empty and idle precisely because cultural factors were ignored. This suggests that understanding a culture could tell us precisely where something like marginal utility will necessarily fail.

5. They also fade upon convergence to truth. I hope that’s the case here. :-)

The Problem with Culture 2

2011-10-21T18:08:00.003-04:00

The Problem with Culture 2

The well thought out comments from Troy make this interesting.

1. “Culture” is now used in humanities criticism (“cultural criticism”) in the same fashion as “society” or, earlier, “material relations of production” (which “society” replaced as “relations of production” lost its allure in the face of Marxist Leninist societies where learned professors and leaders well versed in Marxist theory–his “German Ideology”--put it in practice). In other words, in this sort of analysis other entities are made to depend on culture; culture rules and so do the practitioners of cultural criticism; all is dependent on culture; all is conditioned by culture, etc. etc.: “Culture underlies all our other social structures including the economy.” Get the culture right and other things can be explained, including the economy. Culture is the new “base” because it underlies all else. All else is the “superstructure” because it is underlied by “culture,” the new base.

2. So the point is not that one cannot make de jure distinctions between culture and society. One can, just as one can make distinctions between culture and civilization. But as Cervantes said, “this matters little for our story.” What matters much for our story is that culture functions de facto for practitioners of cultural criticism the way society, social formations, relations of production, etc. etc. used to function once upon a time (then, by the way, many of the things that constitute “culture” from movies to “material culture”--a desperate way to conflate things here-- used to be part of the superstructure).

3. To say that culture provides information for the action of entrepreneurs is simply a reformulation, and not a very ingenious one, of the obvious, pointed out by Mises and others: the entrepreneur looks for the most favorable conditions he can find that justify his actions (he follows the economic Law of Marginal Utility).
4. But the laws of economics do not depend on culture. They apply regardless of cultural conditions. In this, as in many other things, Mises’ Kung Fu is the strongest. Take, for example, the Law of Marginal Utility again. It applies to farming in Fiji as much as to entrepreneurship in the U.S. The farmer in Fiji who does not watch out for it will be punished by economics as much as the entrepreneur in the U.S. The poor, near starvation person in Somalia, is as subject to it as the crack dealer in Chicago. What changes is not economic law but the means for its application or disregard. That obviously changes, since in Fiji the means include growing mangoes (or whatever it is that they grow in Fiji) and watching for the behavior of insects and making an educated guess on weather conditions, and in the other they might not include mangoes but something else. I would go further than Mises. The laws of economics transcend species. Higher level (this is important because decision making to choose, I repeat, choose, a course of action is needed for human or otherwise thinking action) predators on the African savannahs adhere to the Law of Marginal Utility all the time: the most effective, and therefore best predators, are the best observers of it. My Kangal dog (a guard dog and therefore closer to predation) is very good at it for certain goals (such as scaring potential intruders both human and animal by barking and acting fierce), better than my Bichon Frise (a lap dog), who barks and becomes hysterical indiscriminately when he sees something unusual.

5. We, too, in these fora, are subject to the economics of Human Action: Discussions fade under the impact of the Law of Marginal Utility.

Dario Fernandez-Morera

Culture and Society

2011-10-19T17:10:00.004-04:00

Dario Fernandez-Morera raises an interesting question regarding whether or not there is a distinction between culture and society.

Let's look first at the etymology of the two. "Society" comes from O.Fr. societe, from L. societatem (nom. societas), from socius "companion", and its meaning as a "group of people living together in an ordered community" is from 1630s. "Culture", on the other hand, from M.Fr. culture and directly from L. cultura "a cultivating, agriculture," figuratively "care, culture, an honoring," from pp. stem of colere "tend, guard, cultivate, till". It is related to the word "cult", which is derived from the Fr. culte (17c.), from L. cultus "care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence," originally "tended, cultivated," pp. of colere "to till". As one can see, then, these two words have quite different meanings.

Societies are defined by the patterns of relationships among the people. Cultures are defined by the beliefs, stories, etc. among the people. There can be different cultures and subcultures in a society, but not different societies in a culture. This should give some idea of the relationship between the two. Further, economics is a social science, but it is not a cultural science. Anthropologists study cultures. It is possible to study economics a-culturally (as economists have, mostly, done), to understand it as a social science. But if one is going to understand the details of a particular economy, one has to study the cultural underpinnings of that social organization.

Now, this does not mean that culture is not social. Anthropology is a social science, after all. But culture is but one element of the social. It is an element that gives character to the other elements, that creates the subtle differences in expression among different economies which may otherwise be similar. It is part of society, but it is not identical with society. We can see this in these definitions of culture as

a : the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
b : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time

and society as

a : an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another
b : a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests

There is certainly overlap in the b definition of society and of culture give above, but the important element is that with culture, it is learned and passed on from generation to generation, which is not necessary for there to be a society. A culture is internalized by the individual members of a society, and that culture informs their actions in many ways. Of course, common culture does help strengthen social bonds, but mere trust is sufficient for that. This goes back to my point that culture in fact underpins society.

So is culture and society two words for the same thing? I think not. I don't doubt that there are many who conflate the two, but these are really two quite different, though related, concepts.

The Problem with "Culture"

2011-10-19T15:33:00.003-04:00

This is regarding a number of posts on the importance of "culture" for the application of economics to the humanities. I just want to point out that the word "culture," very fashionable in the academic world of the humanities these days, is a camouflaged or newly dressed "society." "Society," as we know, has been used in the social science approach to a number of disciplines, which are relativized with respect to "society." "Society" thus becomes the basis for examining human phenomena. Of course, this hierarchizing gives the upper hand to social scientists or anyone using social scientist-related approaches. Naturally, this hierarchizing necessarily gives the upper hand to a collectivist view of things, from which spring the various collectivist approaches to understanding human beings and how they act, including our now very old friend, Marxism ("materialism," etc.). Collectivist approaches and those who practice them are thus conferred superiority over anything else being studied. Thus, for example, the economic law of marginal utility might not apply in Papuan society (excuse me, "culture"). This approach is being extended to the understanding of science by many "historians of science," whereby even scientific laws can be made to depend on social formations (excuse me, "culture"). I recommend as a counter to all this Antony Flew's wonderful Thinking About Social Thinking, where one can easily replace the word "society" with our "new" one, "culture."
Dario Fernandez-Morera, author of American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas.

Taking Culture Seriously

2011-10-19T11:57:00.002-04:00

it is always possible for some members of society to influence their cultural profoundly. Historically the most influential avenue for the shaping of values has been through "popular culture," the stories, poetry, theatre, and so forth by which fundamental values are imparted. (Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright, "Culture and Enterprise," 80)

Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright argue that since culture underlies our other social structures, including the economy, if one is going to have a real impact on the kind of economy we have, one should be writing the culture's stories, poetry, plays, songs, etc. If we leave it to others, we should not be surprised at the outcome. This is a way in which we must take culture seriously.

Culture and the Artist as Entrepreneur

2011-10-18T11:43:00.003-04:00

From "Culture and Enterprise" by Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright:

Entrepreneurial decision-making is not some sort of pure calculation but a complex reading of the polysemic dialogue of the market. It is necessarily embedded within a cultural context. (72)

Hayek pointed out that entrepreneurs also make use of inarticulate knowledge, perhaps derived from the experience of many years within a particular industry, which enables them to make sense of all the many bits of information available to them. (73)

culture provides a framework of meaning that allows entrepreneurs to make sense of all the various, often conflicting pieces of information. Culture gives shape to the interpretive process that is entrepreneurship. (73)

All the above quotes describe what artists do. Their experience within a particular industry is their familiarity with one's genre. And of course, the works they read or view or hear are done so within a particular cultural context, which affects the creation of the artists' own new works.

The last quote applies to both artists and critics. The artist if of course interpreting within their own cultural context, translating works from their own culture and from others into new works within the culture in which they work. But the critic must also keep in mind that they are in a particular cultural context as well -- a lesson from the best elements of postcolonial theory and cultural criticism. There should be little question the importance of culture to the creation of art and to the understanding of works of art. Like the economy, the spontaneous orders of the arts are embedded in a cultural context, which affects the nature of that order. While spontaneous order gives us a structuralist explanation of artistic production that is necessary to understand artistic production, one can argue that the details of that order require poststructuralist approaches, including the details derived from an intimate understanding of the culture the work was created in. However, culture too has its structures:

culture is a society's collection of meanings which emerges through social interaction, and which allows the individual to interpret her own circumstances. This interpretive process results in patterns of behavior across individuals that we call cultural structures. (67)

So a structuralist approach also underlies the apparent poststructuralism of cultural criticism. And if one wants to go further, and argue that individual interpretations can still give us poststructuralism, one can point to the structuralism of the human mind/brain itself. This does not disprove poststructuralism, but rather points to the fact that the insights of poststructuralism come from the space between structures, rather than from cultural differences. But as in any space between stable structures, between equilibria, if you will, you find a discontinuous, far-from-equilibirum space where creativity takes place. So this place is precisely one we should find of great interest, whether we are artists or critics.

Culture is Spillover From Human Action?

2011-10-14T12:52:00.002-04:00

It does not make sense to apply the standards of conscious conduct to those unintended consequences of individual action which all the truly social represents, expect by eliminating the unintended---which would mean eliminating all that we call culture. -- F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1: Rules and Order, pg. 33

According to Hayek, culture is essentially an unintended consequence of our various actions in our various spontaneous orders. Culture is thus spillover. So, too, is society itself. To try to replace spontaneous orders, then, with a constructed order will thus, as Nietzsche also observed, destroy culture (Nietzsche pointed out that there was an inverse relation between the strength of government and the strength of culture, and he also pointed out that government would not support the kind of education necessary for there to be a strong culture, but would only support the kind of education which would serve the government).

Tribute to Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T15:11:00.003-04:00

Why in a sense what Keynes mischaracterized Say as saying is right and Keynes is wrong:

A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

-- Steve Jobs, 1998

This is as true of the arts as of technology. In fact, so is the following:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

The success of the artist of genius, the success of the person with the new idea -- how different are they?

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

R.I.P., Steve Jobs. You are the best example of the best free markets can offer. What you did is what spontaneous orders of all sorts are all about. The artist, the critic, the inventor, the entrepreneur can all learn much from you. Thank you for making our lives better, for making the world a better place.

The Nested Hierarchies of Spontaneous Orders

2011-10-06T12:32:00.002-04:00

Larry Arnhart has an excellent post on property rights. Of note is his observation that "the property claims of the [California gold] miners moved through three levels--natural possession, customary rules, and formal laws. This manifests the general structure of Darwinian social order as the joint product of natural desires, cultural practices, and deliberate judgments." This is spontaneous order in a nutshell.

Those wishing to find spontaneous orders at work in literature should thus be on the lookout for expressions of natural desire, the cultural practices/customary rules that emerge from those desires, and the deliberate judgments and even formal laws that arise to solidify or guide those practices and rules. We must also keep in mind that one of the roles of literature is to act as eminent criticism -- judgment -- of those orders represented. And the literary critic acts as eminent critic of those representations and critiques.

The implication here is that our natural desires, including emotions, morals, trade, etc., give rise to spontaneous orders that are critiqued through other spontaneous orders, such as philosophy and literature, that themselves emerge through other natural desires (understanding the world and storytelling-- which overlap -- respectively). Eminent criticism is itself a natural desire, and gives rise to a variety of spontaneous orders, from literature and philosophy to literary criticism and cultural criticism. There is even now metacriticism, the existence of which points to criticism itself now being a spontaneous order. And in identifying metacriticism as the eminent criticism of criticism itself, where does that place such a critique as this? Meta-metacriticism? Or merely another form of metacriticism, only self-referential? I have perhaps outpostmoderned postmodernism!

Empathizing With Shylock, or Sarah Skwire on Shakespeare on Usury

2011-10-05T18:37:00.007-04:00

Sarah Skwire is on a roll. Today she has an excellent piece on Shakespeare's attitude toward usury, critiquing a piece by Yaron Brook, “The Morality of Money-lending," or at least what he says about Shylock. I would go a bit further, though, and argue with Frederick Turner (in Shakespeare's 21st Century Economics) that Shakespeare is more generous toward Shylock than we typically imagine (forgetting, as we do, that our moral order is not the same as the one Shakespeare lived in -- and that he helped lay the foundations for our own). Given what Shakespeare knew and did not know, and given the prevailing attitude toward Jews and usury, Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock is in many ways generous and complex. Take for example one of Shylock's most famous speeches:

SHYLOCK

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

These harsh lines have Shylock proclaiming, "If I am this way, you made me it; and yet, I am human, like you." He insists on empathy, and to whatever extent Shakespeare could get you to empathize with Shylock, he had humanized him. Even if you want to see revenge on him, he has invited empathy -- by wanting revenge on him, you understand wanting revenge, and you thus understand how he feels. Thus, you empathize with him, and come in on his side, just a bit. In this Shakespeare has done the unimaginable (for the time): made a Jew a sympathetic character. And this matters in Shakespeare's attitude toward usury as well.

Sarah Skwire's critique of Valiunis

2011-10-03T11:26:00.002-04:00

For a friendly criticism of the Valiunis article I linked to here, read Sarah Skwire's critique on her blog. She raises several valid points in regards to literary analysis. She reminds us that literature is (or ought to be) complex, and thus not easily reducible to simple categories. Which is after all one of the points of doing an Austrian economics analysis of literature rather than the reductionist Marxist one.

Happy Birthday Mises!

2011-09-29T11:39:00.001-04:00

Today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of one of the great defenders of freedom, one of the great theorists of classical liberalism, Ludwig von Mises. He is one of the clearest, most persuasive free market thinkers who has ever written. I don't know how anyone can read Human Action and not come away with both a much clearer understanding of economics and persuaded of liberalism. His methodology is, to my mind, well ahead of its time. Indeed, that has been part of the problem with Austrian economics, that its way of understanding the economy is so far ahead of the rest of economics that it is not really understood at all by mainstream economics. The good news is that, with the introduction of complexity, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, etc. into mainstream economics, the mainstream is in fact moving more and more toward where the Austrian school is already. Which is a nice gift for such a great man.

I hope everyone here leaves a little message for Mises' birthday today. What has he been for you?

Business and the Literati

2011-09-27T10:22:00.002-04:00

Over at National Affairs, Algis Valiunas has an article on Business and the Literati that is worth a read. A lot for the writers of literature to think about.

The Decline and Triumph of Classical Liberalism

2011-09-26T13:49:00.003-04:00

Great lecture. Pay particular attention to what he says about the importance of culture, including shifts in culture.

Book Review of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian & the myth of socialist Sweden

2011-09-21T23:50:00.000-04:00

Rules and Goals

2011-09-19T12:53:00.003-04:00

"Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one" (Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, 11).

Does this imply that an Austrian economics approach to literary studies is necessarily structuralist in nature, focusing on rules followed?

Should we be trying to understand the purpose(s) of literature? Or of the author(s)?

In the case of the former, Aristotle points out that plot must have a foundation (arche) and goal/purpose (telos). Is this the only goal/purpose proper to literature? Should that be something those interested in Austrian economics and literature should be interested in? Or is that a goal of literary Darwinism?

Or should we be focused, rather, on the rules of literary production -- on what rules people follow and how they follow them (and change them) in achieving their literary purposes?

The Merchant of Avon

2011-09-12T12:14:00.003-04:00

A piece from 1997 by Frederick Turner on Shakespeare and economics. Yet it is also much more. It is about how poets contribute to economics -- or could.

New Website: Austro-Libertarian Book Reviews

2011-09-12T01:24:00.005-04:00

Many of my literary friends describe themselves as fervent leftists. Some even believe all great art is (and must inevitably be) produced by people who are similar to them politically. This absurd idea has bothered me since my several-year-old discovery and devotion to libertarianism. I now see literature in a different light. My new website, romansbookreport.com, and corresponding youtube channel is my argument to my former self who accepted without critical thinking the bias of my professors and friends. I begin with Joseph Conrad’s satirical novel “The Secret Agent” which is overtly anti-Marxist and anti-Communism, exposing the hypocrisy and contradiction of those philosophies with all the subtlety and precision of Ludwig Von Mises, who engaged these subjects directly.

I will critique literature which supports ideas of individual liberty, and literature which opposes such ideas. I will also review non-fiction books which have been critical to my devotion to liberty and property rights in the tradition of Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hans Hermann Hoppe.

Part 1:

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-QyZZh3q0I&feature=related
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjwWFiM07Y&feature=related
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrLTlYNFUaM&feature=related
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsB2AC1VHao&feature=related

The Burned Books Fallacy

2011-09-07T10:47:00.005-04:00

As I said in earlier posting, seeing if a concept is transferable from one kind of spontaneous order to another can help highlight an idea's absurdity (or its brilliance).

Two things I want to look at are the broken windows fallacy, which Paul Krugman and many other Keynesians have in fact been promoting as true (and which Keynes himself argued to be true), and stimulus money.

Let us start with the idea of stimulus. Let's say that you wanted to stimulate literary growth, that you wanted more literature produced. What is the best way of going about this? One can try to stimulate either supply or demand. The former would put the power in the hands of the government doing the stimulating; the latter would put the power in the hands of the average person. Let us look first at the former.

The government can either try to stimulate literary production in general, or engage in more targeted production. If the government tried to do the latter, you would have politicians from the different states insisting that their writers were the best, and should therefore receive the most stimulus dollars (let's say, for argument's sake, that the government is going to pay a certain amount per page of writing produced). If you decided to just rely on the NEH, you would have money going primarily to those the NEH liked, and those are writers who are not necessarily who the average reader would like. Or even who the average professor of literature would like. Of course, this doesn't even address the problem of quality, even among the best. Toni Morrison consistently creates great works of literature, but if you were paying her by page produced, I have little doubt that over time her quality would decrease. If you then want to avoid all of these problems, maybe just paying everyone to write would be the best way to stimulate the growth of literature. Wouldn't the fact that more people are writing increase the likelihood that more good works are produced? Not necessarily. If it is likely Toni Morrison would produce fewer quality works, what makes anyone believe anyone else would? The result would be a writing bubble of very low-quality work, with both the average quality decreasing and the highest quality decreasing as well. As a result, stimulus money would in fact have the opposite result intended. In the first, most likely scenario, those already writing would get the money and continue writing -- to the extent they increased production, it would be to the detriment of quality. In the second scenario, the desired result of more literature produced wouldn't be accomplished, as what we would get would be mostly large quantities of garbage. In fact, it would become increasingly difficult to find any actual quality.

Now suppose instead that the government decided to give the consumer the ability to purchase what they wanted. We can suppose that they mail out $1000 debit cards that can only be used on books written by living authors. Here at least we would get some idea of what people want. But such a program would in fact be pretty similar to the Cash for Clunkers program, which didn't boost long-term demand for cars, but only boosted short-term demand. There was then a slump in car sales immediately after the program was over. Again, those who already have books out would benefit, and new writers (entrepreneurs in the economy) would receive none of the benefit. In writing as in economic activity, it is often the upstarts who are driving innovation. Thomas Pynchon's great novel was Gravity's Rainbow, released in the 1970s. He is still writing now, but everyone agrees that that novel is the best he's ever written. Stimulus money for literature would go not to the person writing the great novel that will be coming out next year, but to authors who have already been established. Those already established would benefit, not the innovators. So while it may be true that stimulus money given to the consumers would be better, it's still going to create distortions favoring the status quo.

Now let us look at the broken windows fallacy so popular among Keynesians today. This is, to apply it to literature, the theory that if we just had a big book burning, that would stimulate people to buy more books. Or maybe if Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Frederick Barthelme, and Cormac McCarthy were to all die in a plane crash during a hurricane, other literary writers would have a chance to be noticed. Both ideas are idiotic. It does not benefit literature to lose any of these people. If they write more, that will increase the quality of literature, making it more likely that more writers will write better works. If anyone is stimulated to buy more books, in the first scenario, that is taken away from future (and different) book sales, creating the cash for clunkers problem mentioned above. And getting rid of the best authors in the country will do nothing to make anyone else any better. (Yes, the book burning example is closest to the broken windows fallacy as typically conceived; the latter example merely takes this idiotic idea to its logical conclusion.) And Krugman's latest idiotic idea, as reported here, is that more regulations will actually result in economic growth. This is like arguing that if we only forced all writers to write everything in iambic pentameter, we would get more writing. What will really happen is many writers will go find something else to do.

In regards to that earlier posting, the concept of labor being fungible may in fact be more Marxist than either neoclassical or Keynesian, though the fact that when you treat labor (or capital) as an aggregate, you necessarily treat it as homogeneous and, thus, necessarily treat it as fungible. The math necessarily treats labor or capital as perfectly interchangeable, even if the author then goes on to elaborate that they are, in fact, not. However, how can one come to a right conclusion when one necessarily starts with either a false foundation (in the math) or from contradictory premises? So the average Keynesian may not explicitly argue that labor and/or capital is fungible, but insofar as they are using equations with labor or capital in it, they necessarily base their economics on it.

The Economics of Theater and Theater as Experience

2011-09-04T17:54:00.003-04:00

Here is a good post on the economics of theaters. If you read his earlier post he links to, you can see that he is no libertarian and, likely, no Austrian. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't have some great insights into the economics of theater. He most certainly does. Consider one of his final points:

if I asked you to come up with a worse business model than that [of theaters], it’d be pretty hard: high monetary costs, high temporal costs, high waste, low income, few efficiencies, an inability to scale, little consistency, little demand.

All of which is true. How does one overcome the problems he points out?

One of the problems he points out in the piece is that it's hard to get people to pay for an experience. Richard Florida in his several books, however, has pointed out that this is not true, and that experiences are in fact what the creative class is looking for. Perhaps theaters need to play up the fact that each and every performance is a unique experience.

Money and Contract in The Merchant of Venice

2011-09-04T16:50:00.001-04:00

I highly recommend Money and Contract in The Merchant of Venice by Carlos Rodriguez Braun.

Writing Is Not Fungible

2011-09-04T13:10:00.003-04:00

Steve Horwitz, over at Coordination Problem, posted a response to Jonathan Chait's argument that labor is fungible. Horwitz also has a follow-up, further driving home the point. The issue is whether or not labor is perfectly interchangeable -- which is the definition of "fungible." The reasonable answer is, "no," but it is clear that Keynesianism runs deep in many economists, who apparently really do take seriously the idea of the homogeneity of capital, including human capital.

Let us apply this to writing and literature, and see where it gets us.

With the fungibility argument, the fact that one is a writer means that one can write anything -- poetry, epics, novels, short stories, essays, articles, popular works, academic and scholarly works, blogs, tweets, plays, teleplays, screen plays, verse, prose, etc. On that logic, the fact that I have a Ph.D. in the humanities and a M.A. in creative writing -- meaning I am highly educated in writing -- means I should not have gotten a job rejection on the basis that I was unqualified for their technical writing position. If writing is writing is writing, shouldn't they want to hire a Ph.D. over a B.A., even if the Ph.D. is in humanities and the B.A. is in technical writing (we will ignore the fact that if I were hired into an English department, there is a good chance, given my background in biology and chemistry and publications in economics, that I would be asked to teach technical writing classes)? People who hire do not think that labor is fungible. If they did, then they wouldn't describe what they are looking for, what makes a candidate qualified. Further, if labor were fungible, then wages would be the same for everyone, since everyone would be perfectly interchangeable.

But even if we argue that labor isn't fungible, but is substitutable, we still have my situation above. Clearly I am a substitute for someone with a B.A. in technical writing -- but the places I have applied to do not think I am a close enough substitute to even call me. And they are likely to hire someone already working as a technical writer over someone who is unemployed.

But let us get away from personal examples. Let us look at where this idea of homogeneity and fungibility gets us. If fungibility were true, a great poet would be able to write a great novel, and vice versa. Of course, as anyone who knows even a little literary history knows, this is far from true. Thomas Hardy, who was a brilliant novelist and a brilliant poet, is a rare example. More typical are the Faulkners and Hemingways of the world -- horrible poets, but brilliant novelists.

Further, one would be very surprised if one were to learn that some great novelist has never read a single novel, but only read verse poetry. In fact, such a person doesn't exist. Great novelists read great novels. Great poets read great poets. One has to have the right literary capital with which to build one's one work. Playwrights read plays, screenplay writers read screenplays. Teleplay writers read teleplays. This doesn't mean that one doesn't get ideas and inspiration from other forms of writing, but the primary literary capital for a given genre will be other work within that genre.

Of course, this isn't news to anyone in literature. I have merely put what is well known and well established into economic terms. But in doing so, I think one is able to highlight why this idea of fungibility of labor and capital is utter nonsense. It helps to see if an idea from one spontaneous order is transferable to another. If it's not, that doesn't mean it's not a good idea for that other spontaneous order, but it should suggest looking at the idea a lot more closely. Spontaneous orders are very similar in structure, after all. I suspect that most ideas about how one spontaneous order works are loosely transferable (but, again, hardly fungible) to understanding how other spontaneous orders work. If an idea not so transferable, it is likely wrong.

Yet another reason why we are not called Keynesian Economics and Literature . Literature is not fungible. Nor is is really substitutable. Each is unique. Literature is heterogeneous.

Along these lines, I have to modify an earlier posting in which I leave out capital theory. Clearly I have come to realize that capital theory is central to an Austrian economics theory of the arts as well.

Why don't art history books include propaganda art?

2011-08-24T00:53:00.001-04:00

I heard this question posed today by a university professor as if it was profound. I don't find it so.

My niece makes glitter and glue paintings in her pre-school which have huge significance to her mother, my sister.

Her glitter paintings won't appear in art books for the same reason propaganda art doesn't. It's crappy art. In the case of my niece, it has significance because of the mother-child relationship. In the case of propaganda art, it has significance because so many people are caught up in the mass delusion the art supports, whether it be Aryan purity, the creation of a workers' paradise, making the world safe for democracy, hope and change, freeing the Cuban slaves, or whatever the slogan of the day.

Once the bubble bursts on the collectivist madness, we are left with crappy art plus a feeling of embarrassment on the part of whoever awoke from the mass delusion.

Why is it crappy?

Propaganda art doesn't (and can't) reflect the richness and complexity of the human experience. It looks at the world through a straw and sacrifices everything that makes us human in a vain, perverted attempt to constrain human activity and imagination for any one of the many false collectivist gods.

Economics in Children's Literature

2011-08-21T20:55:00.002-04:00

Motoko Rich has noticed that economics can be found in children's literature. From some of the examples given, this seems a place ripe for good economic criticism. One should probably not be surprised that most writers promulgate folk economics in a variety of forms (most not being economists, economics being a difficult, complex, specialized field of knowledge that too many economists themselves don't understand that well), but it should nonetheless be pointed out that this is where many children will get their first lessons in economics, and will thus have their folk economics reinforced.

Narrative Make Us

2011-08-19T11:45:00.002-04:00

Robert James Bidinotto has an excellent post on the relationship between narrative and one's world view that I think is quite insightful. Children do absorb their world in a quite direct fashion -- due to the presence of such high numbers of mirror neurons in the human brain. Further, it is similar to the anthropological/evolutionary psychological theory of narrative as providing a stage for alternative scenarios to be tested out in a safe play space. If we read stories that comfort us into believing that a certain world view is in fact possible, then we will be comfortable allowing or even directly working to create that world. I agree with Bidinotto that stories are central to the way we think and to our world views. We are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves as well, so stories are central to our very identity. What does this have to do with Austrian economics? Well, Bidinotto is an Objectivist, as he makes abundantly clear in his post, and Rand made it clear that Mises was the economist she considered most accurate. Also, the points Bidinotto raises also raises questions for fiction and poetry writers influenced by the Austrian school regarding what we should be doing, and the importance of it. Of course, the most important thing is to be good and interesting, or else the world view we want to communicate to others will not be so communicated.

Zorgean Economics

2011-08-18T17:35:00.001-04:00

How about a little economics from The 5th Element?

Googling Facebook -- A Novel

2011-08-13T13:15:00.004-04:00

I am writing a novel -- an online novel -- Googling Facebook. A spontaneous order novel? Or, at least, the appearance of one? Feedback will make it the former rather than the latter (hint-hint!)

(BTW, one of the characters is an economics major interested in the Austrian-school.)

Spontaneous Order Art

2011-08-09T20:34:00.004-04:00

I am currently reading The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose. In it he describes an online game associated with the opening of the film AI. In it he describes how Jordan Weisman and Elan Lee of 42 Entertainment developed and ran the game. However, there is something of interest to Austrian school economists:

When he and Lee were planning the game, Weisman had argued that no puzzle would be too hard, no clue too obscure, because with so many people collaborating online, the players would have access to any conceivable skill that would be needed to solve it. Where he erred was in not following that argument to its logical conclusion.

"Not only do they have every skill set on the planet," he told me, "but they have unlimited resources, unlimited time, and unlimited money. Not only can they solve anything -- they can solve anything instantly. He had dubbed his game The Beast because originally it had 666 items of content -- Web pages to pore over, obscure puzzles to decipher. These were supposed to keep the players busy for three months; instead, the players burned through them in a single day.

Talk about a demonstration of spontaneous order!

It seems that this element of the internet has yet to be truly taken advantage of. Imagine a business offering to pay people whatever percentage of a solution they contribute. What possibilities are there for not just games, but for interactive works of literature? Might there emerge a real spontaneous order form of literature? Would it be participatory? Involve multiple authors and editors (could one imagine a wikinovel?)? Multi-genre? All of the above? May the spontaneous order of the internet and of the world wide web give rise to a real spontaneous order art form that was impossible before their arrival?

Habermas' Spontaneous Orders of the Arts

2011-08-03T13:55:00.003-04:00

In "Modernity -- An Incomplete Project," published in The Anti-Aesthetic (Hal Faster, ed.), Jurgen Habermas describes a sociology of artistic production that has a strong resemblance to the spontaneous orders of the arts I describe.

For example, he points out that Max Weber (a favorite of Austrian economists), "characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are: science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified worldivews of religion and metaphysics" (8). One could also argue that economics is yet another sphere that also separated out around this time, first giving rise to mercantilism (which is what religious economics first becomes when liberated), then to capitalism. Each of these in Weber's list have "specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty" (8). Out of these drives come their spontaneous orders, and out of these spontaneous orders come immanent criticism, typically associated with the emergence of certain professionals. These spontaneous orders attempt to answer "questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized" and experts in each area could emerge, meaning "There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are" (8), creating distance between experts, and between experts and the public. The former could be bridged by interdisciplinary scholars; the latter could be bridged by public intellectuals -- meaning we would have to have a few around (rather than demagogues posing as such). Ultimately, Habermas argues that Enlightenment modernity consists in efforts "to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic" (8), which is part of the very description of what a spontaneous order is. However, this is a project that fails or succeeds based on the approach one uses -- constructivism fails; gradualist spontaneous orders with immanent criticism succeed.

Most impressive is Habermas' description of the emergence of the full spontaneous orders of the arts. Habermas gives a precise description of the process of the emergence of the spontaneous orders of the arts and its consequences in creating ever-greater value subjectivity and specialization:

Greatly oversimplifying, I would say that in the history of modern art one can detect a trend towards ever greater autonomy in the definition and practice of art. The category of "beauty" and the domain of beautiful objects were first constituted in the Renaissance. In the course of the 18th century, literature, the fine arts and music were institutionalized as activities independent from sacred and courtly life. Finally, around the middle of the 19th century an aestheticist conception of art emerged, which encouraged the artist to produce his work according to the distinct consciousness of art for art's sake. The autonomy of the aesthetic sphere could then become a deliberate project: the talented artist could lend authentic experience to those experiences he had in encountering his own decentered subjectivity, detached from the constraints of routinized cognition and everyday action. (9)

However,

This modernist transformation was all the more painfully realized, the more art alienated itself from life and withdrew into the untouchableness of complete autonomy. Out of such emotional currents finally gathered those explosive energies which unloaded in the surrealist attempt to blow up the autarkical sphere of art and to force a reconciliation of art and life. (10)

Habermas here should have said "ironic attempt," as there are few movements more autarkical and less connected to "real life" than surrealism, as Habermas himself argues:

These experiments have served to bring back to life, and to illuminate all the more glaringly, exactly those structures of art which they were meant to dissolve. They gave a new legitimacy, as ends in themselves, to appearance as the medium of fiction, to the transcendence of the artwork over society, to the concentrated and planned character of artistic production as well as to the special cognitive status of judgments of taste. (10)

In other words, their very attempt to overthrow the result of there being a spontaneous order of the arts only worked to reinforce its internal logic. The same is true of postmodernist works.

In the end, Habermas argues that the project of modernism "aims at a differentiated relinking of modern culture with an everyday praxis that still depends on vital heritages, but would be impoverished through mere traditionalism" (13). While this is about as good a description of spontaneous order as Hayek described it as one could want, Habermas nevertheless manages to fail to see that free market economies are but another example of the very kinds of spontaneous orders he had been describing. This is, sadly, to be expected from even the best of Europe's intellectuals.

Better Metaphors

2011-08-02T13:12:00.002-04:00

Max Borders has a fantastic piece on metaphors for the economy. Naturally, metaphors are of great interest to us literary types. For example, he points out that

A much more accurate metaphor for the economy is an ecosystem. We are simultaneously independent and interdependent. We can no more fix an economy than we can fix a rainforest or a coral reef. At best, we can leave it alone. Such is not the faith of a "market fundamentalist," but the implication of a tradition informed by evolutionary thinking, the science of complexity and self-organizing systems.

This is something with which I certainly agree, and have argued elsewhere.

Second Poetry Writing Contest

2011-07-24T19:38:00.003-04:00

Poets, it's time to start thinking about your next poem(s)! The next contest deadline will be June 30. I'll do a reminder with more details soon.

Poetry Contest Winner

2011-07-20T14:02:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to the winner of the Austrian Economics and Literature poetry contest, Stephanie Herman, for her poem "Ode to the Labor Theory of Value".

"Ode to the Labor Theory of Value"

From Smith to Marx, a value came about
When work and time were measured, in and out.
And prices? They were set by measurements
of worker's time and sweat and nourishments.

"A sweater's worth the time it took to knit;
A prune will cost the toil it took to pit.
Two deer are worth a beaver in the field,
'Cause hunting beavers brings a lower yield."

But Menger saw that value wasn't fixed;
Jevons and Walras said a value's mixed.
My value's on the margin: last bite chewed -
Not based on how the baker's work ensued.

From different needs the buyer brings to bear,
And costs the seller pays to make the ware,
The value varies when a market's free;
Exchanges happen when we can agree.

Letters to Castro

2011-07-10T18:34:00.001-04:00

Max Borders also linked to this, and commented. It is rare for anyone to have as complete a transformation in political economic ideology as happened with Llosa.

Two Small Points

2011-07-10T15:31:00.002-04:00

Today is the last day to submit to the poetry contest. I hope I get a few stragglers.

Also, on a completely unconnected topic, I have noticed that when I view the daily stats for this blog, we have a lot of hits from online searches for "Austrian economics and Shakespeare." Sounds like there is a bit of interest in this topic.

Error on Contest Information

2011-06-29T21:31:00.003-04:00

I made an error in my email address on the poetry contest. It should have been:

zatavu1@aol.com

Since it is likely others have tried and failed with that email address, I am extending the contest until Saturday, July 9 (just to make it the end of the week).

The Religious Origins of the Artistic Order

2011-06-29T18:02:00.003-04:00

I am presently reading Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (H.T. Lowe-Porter, tr.). It is, of course, fantastic. It is the story, as told by a friend, of a composer of genius who purposefully contracts syphilis. The composer, whose name is Adrian Leverkuhn, first went to college to study theology, then changed over to music. As the narrator studies philology, the two end up having philosophical discussions about the nature of art. Of particular interest for those interested in spontaneous orders is pg. 59, where the narrator paraphrases Adrian's idea that

the separation of art from the liturgical whole, its liberation and elevation into the individual and culturally self-purposive, had laden it with an irrelevant solemnity, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering, . . . which did not need to be its abiding destiny, its permanent intellectual constitution.

Of particular note here is the observation that there was a "separation of art from the liturgical whole" that resulted in "its liberation and elevation into the individual and culturally self-purposive." The separation out of the various social spontaneous orders from "the liturgical whole" that constituted life in Europe through the Middle Ages, beginning in the Renaissance, gave us the Modern Era. The Church had been the center of political power, economic power, artistic inspiration and support, law, morality, etc. After the Renaissance, we saw these things separated out from the Church -- including its monopoly on religion so that in some places, like England and the U.S., there are examples of religion as a spontaneous order -- such that we had/have/could have what F. A. Hayek termed the Great Society, which constitutes that society which has each of these realms separated out as much as possible into their own spontaneous orders.

Art in particular was inseparable from religion until the Renaissance. There were period when this was, perhaps, not the case, such as in Roman times, but certainly in ancient Greece and Medieval Europe -- and in most cultures -- the arts are inseparable from religion. What happens if and when it does separate itself out, become its own spontaneous order? As Mann observes through Adrian, it becomes individualistic and "culturally self-purposive." It becomes increasingly subjective (which Adrian later equates with freedom (190)) and self-referential. Mann, through Adrian, argues that the religious origins of the arts were or are still affecting the content of the arts, which is hardly necessary for it if it is in fact liberated from religion (this hearkens back and is not unrelated to Nietzsche's observations that most atheists were in fact still Christians insofar as they continued to abide by Christian morality even as they gave up on believing in the actual existence of God -- that if they were true unbelievers, they would jettison the whole deal and engage in a revaluation of all values).

It may still be the case that the arts are not entirely liberated from their origins in religion. But is it possible for them to be? Is it possible for the different spontaneous orders to ever be completely separated out from each other? To what degrees must they necessarily hearken back to their foundations? Or intermingle with each other?

For myself, I am finding much liberation in producing plays that abide by strict form and bring religion back into the content, structure, and world view. But that observation is fertile grounds for another posting at a later date on the dialectic of freedom.

Today is My Birthday

2011-06-26T14:33:00.001-04:00

Happy Birthday to Me! :-)

Free day! Discuss what you want!

And as a present for me, get 5 of your friends to come read the blog!

Why the Silence?

2011-06-25T23:13:00.002-04:00

If regular readers are wondering why I have been increasingly spotty on my postings, it is because I have becoming increasingly busy with looking a job and with working on several projects with August deadlines, and I am working on a play. Much of my reading has involved non-Austrian economists, and so there has been little in that realm to transform into literary insights. I hope I can get back to Austrian economics and literature soon. Of course, since several upcoming projects do involve Austrian economist and literature, I will no doubt have much more to discuss here soon!