I’d’ve thought Mises’s humanistic economics would’ve been concerned about the replacement of human capital. Is not praxeology only applicable to humans?
As I wrote in another thread here concerning the role of human creativity in an economy:
So, I read the “Creative Genius” section [of Human Action], and it seems that Mises does not recognize intellectual property. I would’ve thought he would recognize it yet discourage government regulation of it.
Mises writes (p. 139):
The activities of the prodigious men cannot be fully subsumed under the praxeological concept of labor. They are not labor because they are for the genius not means, but ends in themselves. […] The achievements of the creative inventor […] cannot be classified praxeologically as the products of labor. They are not the outcome of the employment of labor which could have been devoted to the production of other ammentities for the ‘production’ of a masterpiece of philosophy, art, or leturature.
I would’ve thought the process of seeking truths would be the means and the truths sought the end product. Why does Mises contrast the “production of other [non-intellectual] ammentities” with the “achievements of the creative inventor”?
Also, in the “Production” section following the “Creative Genius” one, he defines prouction as (p. 140)
not an act of creation […]. The producer is not a creator. Man is creative only in thinking and in the realm of imagination. In the world of external phenomena he is only a transformer.
Yet, he seems to contradict this, saying that production “is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon” (p. 141), as though production were creative in addition to being transformative.
He concludes this section with (p. 142):
[W]e do not know what mind is, just as we do not know what life, motion, and electricity are. Mind is simply the word to signify the unknown factor that has enabled men to achieve all that they have accopmlished.
If Mises does “not know what mind is,” other than it being an “unknown factor,” then how does he know “mind” is not matter and that, against the Marxist materalists, “the ‘productive forces’ are not material” (p. 141)?
Thanks