So I was thinking about fruit trees. An individual apple tree gathers resources and invests them in projects (apples) that take time to come to fruition. It abstains from consumption of water and nutrients now (it could be using them to grow taller) in order to get a payoff in the future (reproduction).
An apple tree has an advertising budget (the resources it uses to make its product an appealing color). It also competes with other apple trees, other strains, and other fruit-bearing plants for market share. Of course, some of the dominant breeds will become crony-capitalists by getting cushy deals with the government (humans; maybe?).
Apple trees also participate in totally uncoerced free exchange with fruit eaters. They get to eat, and the fruit tree gets a chance to reproduce by the eaters throwing the core somewhere far away. It even has safeguards against “fraud” whereby someone would take and eat the fruit but destroy the seeds (the hard core and somewhat poisonous seeds).
More broadly, isn’t natural selection basically a market process?
Bohm-Bawerk frequently wrote of capital “ripening” into consumption goods, so you’re in good company with this line of thought.
However, natural selection and the market are similar, but crucially different, in that natural selection, for the individuals involved, is a zero-sum game. The market is not.
I think that the analogy that he provided is very interesting. If you want to refute it, then you will have to try much harder.
Why do you believe that the market process necessitates free choice? Also, the tree does indeed have time preference. Natural selection set the time preference of the tree.
The situation between the trees may be a zero-sum game. However, the situation between the trees and the animals that distribute the seeds is not a zero-sum game. Both the tree and the animal benefit. In fact, such a situation is an example of the division of labor within the non-human realm. Humans are not the only animal that divides labor. However, (I think that) humans are the only animal that divides labor within their own species.
Yeah, the plant-animal interactions can be positive-sum, that’s why I chose fruit trees.
Just now got back from my historian/politician friend’s house, and we were arguing about intellectual property law. Seems to me the natural world innovates plenty well without a patent system.
My friend was saying patent law now allows for “blocking patents,” where you can patent an invention that uses another patented invention. Then you won’t be able to use your derivative invention, but the original patent holder also won’t be able to use their patent for that specific purpose - unless they buy the derivative patent from you, in which case you can negotiate for rights to make and sell the derivative product.
My response as a tentatively anti-IP guy was to say that it looks like all the beneficial improvements in IP law seem to be heading toward having no IP law at all.
A tree is not a rational being. It is nothing more than the incredibly complex interactions between DNA and its environment. The result of these interactions is determined solely by the laws of physics and chemistry. The tree has no purpose, it has no capacity to recognize or choose between certain ends (“grow taller” or “grow fruit”), and it is erroneous to claim that the tree is pursuing any ends. The tree cares not one bit whether it lives for a thousand years or becomes sawdust tomorrow. A tree doesn’t grow fruit because it has made a rational decision to invest, it grows fruit because that’s how the structures created by that particular piece of DNA interact with their environment. Fruit eaters eat fruit not because of some voluntary agreement with the tree (which, as it is not a moral agent, can not possibly agree to anything), but in spite of the impossibility of coming to such an agreement. The fruit tree is not seeking a “chance to reproduce.” It has no interest in the propagation of its genes. It’s tempting to view evolution from a teleological perspective. Don’t do it.
That said, this is a very interesting analogy, but as has already been said, it is just an analogy.
Who said that humans are not merely “nothing more than the incredibly complex interactions between DNA and [their] environment” and that “[t]he result of these interactions is determined solely by the laws of physics and chemistry”? Do you believe that economics or specifically Austrian economics assumes that humans freely choose?
The time preference of the tree and the ends of the tree and the ends of the fruit-eating animals and the choice between certain ends and et cetera are all regulated via the mechanisms of natural selection. If you assume that humans freely choose their own actions, then the ends of humans and the time preference of humans and et cetera are all regulated via their own mind that was organized via natural selection. However, if you do not assume that humans freely choose their own actions, then the ends of humans and the time preference of humans and et cetera are all regulated directly via natural selection. Does whether you assume free choice or whether you do not assume free choice change economics?
An analogy can be perfect. So, how can some thing be “just an analogy”? I think that you mean that “this is a very interesting metaphor, but as has already been said, it is just a metaphor.”
How? You cannot analyze evolution unless you analyze evolution via teleology.
Of course it’s all a metaphor, but my point in bringing this up is, “What can we learn from it?” In particular, if we wish to argue whether free markets work, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the market acters are deterministic or not.
Putting the thought experiment another way, if humans were robots that behaved exactly like humans but had no free will, would the free maket no longer work?
Completely off topic, but is there a tag for hyperlinks? “Link” in brackets or something? The button I’m seeing is grayed out…
That said, a truly satisfactory answer to this would involve some insight into the origin of consciousness that humans haven’t quite grasped yet. For now, I’m content with knowing that, even if we are just the product of physical and chemical interactions, the illusion of free will is persistent enough that it ought to be considered real. More importantly, for this case a tree doesn’t even have the capacity for such an illusion. Whatever the tree does cannot be attributed to some choice on the tree’s part, and this is what prevents the tree from being a capitalist, even in terms of an analogy or metaphor.
Not to split hairs, but natural selection is not the only force driving evolution, and many biologists consider it to play a relatively minor role. Assuming that “natural selection” means evolutionary forces in general (please let me know if I’m misinterpreting), you still can’t attribute a choice to evolutionary forces for the same reason you can’t attribute them to a tree, or to the laws of the universe governing such evolutionary forces.
The more pertinent question is whether the growth of a tree should be considered economic in nature. Trees do not engage in purposeful action, so I would think not.
I tend to think of a metaphor as a figure of speech, and an analogy as similar to a metaphor but more verbose, usually involving a rational argument. The difference is subtle, but if you think metaphor is a more accurate description, so be it. I don’t really see how it relates to the rest of the discussion. The point is, metaphors and analogies tend to involve simplifications and omissions that can affect their accuracy. In this case, what is omitted is the capitalist’s choice to engage in certain activities in order to attain certain ends.
Many (though certainly not all) people who study evolution beg to differ. They get along just fine without attributing a purpose to inanimate life forms.
What is “purposeful action”? If you say it requires free choice, then we are back to I. Ryan’s question. And to the thought experiment I posed above.
They wouldn’t be metaphors and analogies if they were fully accurate. The point of metaphors and analogies is to draw parallels. If there is an argument here, it’s about whether there are any useful parallels between capitalists and fruit trees (or their genes), or between market interactions and the interactions of fruit eaters with fruit trees. I’m not claiming there definitely are, but I would be surprised if there weren’t any.
I seriously suggest to those who have not already to read Boundaries of Order by Butler Shaffer, available in .pdf format for free on this site (also a paperback version for sale in the store).
It is all about the power of decentralized systems, and how order is nothing more than the pattern of interactions among these relatively equally powerful individual units. One principle he discovers is that even irrational life forms behave according to the principle of private property, and that the mutual gains inherent in the human implementation (mainly through capitalism) are also present in “lower” life forms.
I would hesitate to call mutually advantageous natural phenomenon “capitalism”. It seems more like capitalism is a subset of mutually advantageous natural phenomenon.
Of course it requires free choice. Actions are the result of choices. What’s being discussed here isn’t economics at all, it’s biology. The lack of free choice doesn’t change economics because it makes it not economics.
Work for what purpose? How could it not work? There’s no possible way the interactions between these robots could fail to meet the robots’ preferences. Robots have no preferences. A one way ticket to the scrap heap is as acceptable to a robot as anything else. You can’t even meaningfully speak of success or failure in terms of this market without inserting your subjective preferences, made as a result of your free will, into the experiment. This defeats the entire purpose of proposing a free market system with no free will. The system itself provides no means for discriminating between desirable and undesirable outcomes. Somebody, somewhere is going to have to use free will to determine whether or not the system works. This determination is also highly subjective: maybe you think the objective should be a peaceful robotopia, while I prefer skyscraper sized battle mechs duking it out. The parallel to humans just doesn’t stand because robots (just like trees) lack that defining human characteristic known as intelligence, and the desires and decision making capacity that come with it.
Of course they won’t be fully accurate, but the degree of inaccuracy is certainly relevant to the usefulness of a metaphor. I guess it depends on what purpose you want this metaphor to serve. Maybe if you were speaking with a child, or a biologist who wanted to learn about economics, this could serve some purpose but I just don’t see how. To even comprehend the metaphor you must have some understanding of the role of capital in production and an understanding of why voluntary interaction between individuals is mutually beneficial. You have probably grasped the basics by that point, at which point the comparison between trees and humans seems a bit silly and prone to misunderstanding because it neglects so much of what makes a free market a free market.
Yes, this is the kind of elaboration I was hoping to find by bringing this up. That book looks very interesting. I will check it out as soon as I’m done with the five other books that just arrived from the LvMI.
I think we have different definitions of “free choice.” See below
In other words, if humans were robots that behaved exactly like humans but had no free will, would the free market continue to function as it currently does? And note that I mean these robots are indistinguishable from humans from our perspective, have all the same preferences (programmed in and “learned” in the AI), etc. So it’s a rhetorical question, and I believe the answer is “yes.” The point of all this was to gently illustrate that the argument that “people have free choice but fruit trees don’t” necessarily gets into the philosophical question of whether humans are deterministic or not, which is far from settled.
I haven’t given it enough consideration yet. In the meantime, I thought I’d throw it open to the readers, and meambobbo has cited a book that seems it might provide interesting insights along these lines.
It’s entirely posible, and I even think quite probable, that this idea will provide nothing that turns out to be useful to us, especially given how few people will read this post, but that’s the nature of exploring ideas and entertaining thought experiments. My primary goal in these kinds of posts is to encourage thought and discussion from new angles.
Indeed. I downloaded the pdf and it’s not terribly long (350 pages) and seems like a relatively easy read. I should enjoy this one.
That seems likely. “Free choice” to me implies the ability to assess different possibilities and identify one as the most preferable. This requires intelligence, which trees do not have. The jury’s still out on robot intelligence, but any intelligent being must have a will, making an intelligent robot for the purpose of this conversation analogous to a human.
The interactions between entities that act exactly like humans will be, by definition, the same as the interactions occurring between humans. The troublesome part to me is why the robots would act exactly like humans. Even if you did feed a set of human preferences into a computer, human preferences are constantly changing. How would robots update their preferences in exactly the same way a human would, unless they were in possession of something that was effectively a will? I just don’t see how the will of a human and the actions of a human can be separated.
Well, the issue of compatibility between free will and determinism hasn’t been resolved either. Maybe this book will help shed some light on the subject.