You are a hairs breadth from the Austrian conception with the first half of the sentence at least…
Yes, your ranked order of ends is reevaluated, and if you are trying to allocate homogenous units across different ranked scales , well you are doing a different allocation… only it is false to go so far as to say that the allocation you made when you applied a means to an end on scale at a later time was more or less ‘utile’ than when you applied a means to an end on a scale that you had in prior time.
Good question. because it is not possible to reveal that in action. Revealed preference is important when it acts as evidence to counter mere assertions about what is preferred, when we see a person say they want X not Y, but they choose Y not X we learn something.
But the Theory of Diminishing Marginal Utility (of Homogenous goods) does not require empirical evidence of this type, its truth flows from the logic of action. We have praxeology ! It is reasonable to ask how one could disprove it by a revealed action. (which is equally impossible). How could you irrefutably demonstrate in action that you actually valued six sacks of wheat instead of five ‘more than or equal to’ what you value five instead of four ?
Correct! to the role of the 3rd tire or 2nd tire or 1st tire if that is the comparison being made, however, in your example, it is clearly not.
No, you are mistaken. The utility of a bundle of 4 tires is higher then that of the third, and all the other combined utilities of all 4 tires if individually employed. The bundle (of 4 tires) is not identical to the thrid, is it now? Do you dispute the fact that the bundle of 4 tires does not provide “equal serviceability” as each tire individually? if not, then you must concede the point that your analysis is between different goods when comparing the bundle that can service a car and each individual tire that can service something else (say, a wheelbarrow)
It does follow a priori. Here is the praxelogical proof:
[T]he law of marginal utility follows from our indisputable knowledge of the fact that every actor always prefers what satisfies him more over what satisfies him less, plus the assumption that he is faced with an increase in the supply of a good (a scarce mean) whose units he regards as of equal serviceability by one additional unit. From this it follows with logical necessity that this additional unit can only be employed as a means for the removal of an uneasiness that is deemed less urgent than the least valuable goal previously satisfied by a unit of such a good. Provided there is no flaw in the process of deduction, the conclusions which economic theorizing yields must be valid a priori. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006), p. 278
“I was talking about the uses from the standpoint of the user.”
And the argument for declining marginal utility of sacks of grain is also talking about uses from the standpoint of the user. So how come the fourth tire doesn’t count as an identical unit but the sixth sack of grain does? In each case, what has changed is not the nature of the good but what the user is going to use it for–which depends on how many other sacks or tires he has.
I think I have made my point enough times, so it isn’t worth repeating it again. Especially when I have someone conceding that what purports to be a claim about the real world could not be confirmed or falsified by any possible real world observation.
In the neoclassical version of economics with ordinal utility, the closest you get to declining marginal utility is declining rate of substitution–which is observable, is not deducible and could be false under some circumstances. It also doesn’t link declining marginal utility of income to risk aversion, also observable–for that you need Von Neuman’s cardinal utility.
Because the fourth tyre (with the three tyres) is being used in a way that the first three tyres could not have been. The fourth tyre renders a different service to the user, and the relevant unit for such an employment is not a tyre, but four tyres.
I’m glancing through the posts here and it seems someone already asked about your progress on your fiction books, but I was wondering if there was any progress in the newest revision for Machinary of Freedom?
I haven’t persuaded Open Court to either revert the copyright to me or gree to publish a third edition, I suspect because the firm isn’t in very good shape and so isn’t responding to anything very rapidly. And I have two other writing projects–my new book on legal systems and the sequel to Salamander–so haven’t been pushing very hard.
One possibility I have considered is to simply write a part V to Machinery and web it. Most of what would be in it is already written in some form or other and webbed, but not in one place.