I was not complaining about a grammatical error, I was claiming about a “not quite true” statement on purely logical grounds. The statement is so fundamental to the whole of AE that an error in it can not simply be brushed off. Indeed I have come across that statement in another thread, where its not-quite-correctness had caused considerable problems.
Why don’t we try and hammer out a more correct version?
Well, yes and no. It is hard to guess with high precision and constancy, but it is easy to do approximately. If I make the statement “Men who haven’t eaten for three hours or more like being given chocolate” and “man dislike being hit on the head with a hammer” then I think you’ll find I’m right for most people most of the time.
the semi-colon should have drawn you into reading that line fully in the context of the one preceding, in which case it makes sense, and adds a layer of emphasis. Furthermore, that a man acts implies that he believes action will make a difference; he believes he will prefer the state of affairs resulting from action to that from his not acting
If the desperate man who needs to pay for an operation to save his life but can’t afford it, puts his life savings on a horse but then the horse loses. The man will then wish that he had never made the bet because he will live out his last remaining days even poorer than he would have been otherwise.
So clearly he does not “prefer the state of affairs resulting from action to that from no action”.
What I suspect you are thinking is that the man prefers the state of affairs immediately after placing the bet, i.e. before finding out the result of the race. But if that is what mises intended by the original sentence, then I’d say it was a pretty lame sentence, of very little consequence.
he demonstrated his preference when buying the ticket… or do you think when he bought the ticket he did not demonstrate a preference?
so clearly he prefered the state of affairs he thought would follow from his buying the ticket to what he thought would follow from not buying the ticket.
Hmmmm… I now see that it could be interpreted that way… although it is clearly ambiguous. As it makes more sense for it to be interpreted in the way you say, I shall give Rothbard the benefit of the doubt and assume that that is what he meant. I shall now re-read some of my recent post in the light of that and reconsider a few things…
Lets do an imaginary interview with a guy who has just bought a lottery ticket but before the result is known…
Q: “Do you expect to win the lottery?”
A: “No. Obviously its possible… but I don’t expect to win”
Q: “What will be the consequence of you not winning the lottery?”
A: “I will have lost the cost of the ticket”
Q: “How will your ‘state of affairs’ be after finding out you’ve not won, compared to how you were before buying the ticket?”.
A: “I will be less happy”.
Q: “Let me get this straight, you have taken an action for which you forecast that your state of affairs after the action is less good than before your action?”
A: “Yes.”
BTW, this interview was conducted with a “desperate man” who is not getting any thrill from the gambling process.
The whole interview is mute and irrelevant. Your first question should have been.
Q: Why did you buy the lottery ticket?
A: Because I wanted to.
End of discussion. Valuation is subjective. Your trying to pass judgement on another mans subjective valuation process. Unless your intentions are to make everyone think and value things as you do you cannot do this without you yourself sounding irrational. It’s like making everyone only like/eat chocolate and everyone’s favorite color only being red.
The point was to show that I could come up with a scenrio in which rothbard’s sentence is clearly false.
I challenge you to come up with a scenario that demonstrates that my revised version is false.
Just as a reminder, my version is “Since he wishes to attain these goals, he must, at the time of making the action, be predicting that the consequences of his action will be the lead to the greatest value of any action available to him at the time.”
well, he demonstrated a preference in action. to then say that he never did prefer choosing what he chose, is a lie. of course he might now believe his prior self to have made a mistake. and even at the time, he may have acknowledged that he was taking the risk that at a future time he would regret his decision, but overwhelmingly he preferred to buy regardless, then**,** when he was buying. he bought. this is as plain as day.
If you find this hard to swallow I recommend against your participating in a debating society.
Does that mean if mickanomics is convinced that joining a debating society will make his situation worse off than had he not joined it, he will then choose to join the debating society?
I think I have worked out why you are so convinced I am wrong…
You are considering the immediate effect of the action. If we consider the happiness of the man immediately before making the bet to immediately after making the bet (but before finding out whether he has won the bet or not). Then you are perfectly right. The man does prefer the “after” to the “before”. But I would suggest that this is not the true basis on which the man decision is made. A man’s action is determined but his prediction of the total effects of his action, both short and long term, something like the integral (I’m using the mathematical sense of the word) of happiness over time from the moment of the action forward to the end of his life.
Yep, he does. He preferred to take a gamble. He may regret it later on, but it was his preferred course of action ex ante. He may have ‘not acted’ (whatever that means) and regretted that instead. So what? At the time the (“in”)action was taken it was preferred.
People’s predictions can be wrong. Action is taken when people perceive they will benefit, on net balance, from an action…compared to all other actions available that they are aware of. We can’t know intentions, but we do know that in order to take a certain action, a person must prefer that action to the other ones they are aware of.
So BEFORE any action, people prefer the “after” action scenario based on their predictions and based on their predictions of what would happen if they took a different course…but those predictions are not always correct. So AFTER the fact they can be dissatisfied, aka “buyer’s remorse.” However, most people(of course this is an empirical issue when I say “most” and i don’t have statistics on it or anything, lol) are satisfied with an action after they take it…and if they’re not, then they wouldn’t continue to make that same decision in the future.
Yes, that’s it. He prefers the gamble to no gamble, and the action he takes is the gamble. He’d probably even prefer to have the chance to take the gamble again over the money he lost, after the gamble. Even if not, though, he preferred the gamble the first time around. The gamble, by the way, is “the state of affairs resulting from action”, even if it is an uncertain state of affairs. The same can be true for any entrepreneurial action, which are by definition uncertain.
Mises was not a fool, you (not Jon) should continue reading for his real meaning (which is fleshed out over the course of thousands of pages) instead of trying to pick apart his sentences, especially seeing as he only learned English as a second language when he was well past his youth.
The point at which he makes the appraisal is the instant before the action. But lets be careful about what he is making the appraisal of. He is not simply estimating how he will feel the instant after the action. Instead he is estimating the full long term effect of his action. Indeed the immediate short term effect my be negative - for example the act of saying “yes doctor, go ahead and give me that painful injection” will lead to an immediate short term reduction in wellbeing followed by a longer term improvement in wellbeing that outweighs it.
