And yet, logical arguments could be made about the likely fate of a hypothetical society in which the “rape everyone that moves and eat all babies for dinner” norm has taken hold. Just so happens that not many such societies could empirically be discerned, as well. The “right” not to be raped, or not to be eaten for dinner if you are a baby does not have to come from God for it to have REAL objective (inter-subjective) ramifications in a society. It could be that societies in which everyone had the “right” to rape everyone else and the “right” to eat any baby for dinner are simply logically and evolutionarily incompatible with human action, hence dead.
I don’t disagree with your line of evolutionary argumentation, I just don’t see how can you use it to establish anything certain about the future.
The most common mistake, I think, people engage when they talk about evolution is their predisposition to read too much into it, and to let their hindsight bias confound them about what’s predictable and what’s just random.
Once things have already happened, it is not that hard to look at the events and make some historical sense of them, and say that they’ve unfolded following some rational pattern of evolution.
Fair enough, I don’t disagree with that. But that doesn’t mean that such rational pattern was as predictable in foresight as it looks now, in hindsight.
I consider the dinosaurs as a much telling example. I’m no paleontologist, by the way, all I know about dinosaurs is that they were these big and bad-ass lizards that lived 100 million years ago.
It seems fair, though, to assume that they had evolved from smaller lizard-like or amphibian-like creatures.
So during millions of years, the evolutionary trend was to get bigger and stronger, and that’s how the dinosaurs came about.
And all of the sudden something happened and this trend reversed, and the mighty dinosaurs got smaller and smaller and now they are the relatively feeble birds we see all around.
However if someone observed the T-rex reigning all over the Jurassic, he would never guess that its distant descendants would look like fowl. And that the puny rodent-like mammals of the time would evolve and become the new boss.
So if an apex predator as powerful and ruthless as the Tyrannosaur-rex can evolve into something as pathetic and helpless as a domestic chicken, the major insight we get is that in the long run, evolution is a very counter-intuitive thing.
Now back to economics and politics.
Even if we can track record several societies and identify a similar institutional trend going on for most of them, it is still a far cry from saying that such institutional trend will continue the same path forever, regardless of all other factors involved.
You can even take the condemnation of rape as an example.
Most modern societies seem to have evolved institutions that condemn rape, that is, social mechanisms that increase the expected costs for a given individual engaging on a sexual assault against someone else.
Such institutions are things like thorough criminal investigations and women carrying concealed handguns and tasters for advanced western societies, and public lynching and stoning elsewhere.
However, those mechanisms are not enough to extinguish all rape activity from happening.
And for anyone to pursue such a moral crusade against rape would mean accepting the enormous costs involved.
A cost that no one seems to be in position to bear. The vast majority of people do not dedicate all their available resources to stop rapists, they have other priorities.
Therefore, a certain amount of rape seems to be tolerated as another distateful fact of life by people on every society, as these people divert resources that could be used to decrease rape statistics to other ends.
The future of rape depends on the fluctuating costs and dispositions of people to persecute and also to perpetrate rape activities.
And you cannot foresee how these fluctuations are going to take place.
Maybe you can form a somewhat educated guess for the short run, but the long run is a weird and completely foreign land.
I find the general austrian approach of methodological individualism to be the most adequate, however not due to an alleged strict a priori character of praxeology as a science. It is due to the very much observable fact that, ultimately, are individuals that take the decisions, not groups, classes and whatnot.
Even when these decisions are somehow compounded through a complicated organizational scheme, they are originated by individuals.
Groups don’t think and don’t act, and that’s not an “a priori fact”, but an assumption that seems to be in accordance with the real world evidence.
Rothbard said in Man Economy and State that economists don’t make assumptions, but he is wrong.
This whole “a priori science” thing is an unfortunate epistemological misconception that haunted Mises, Rothbard and still haunts most of the remaining austrian economists to this day, due to it’s status of sacracy.
Anyway, I found many of the policy analysis carried on in the book to be very insightful. The entire argument of socialist miscalculation due to a nonsensical price system is brilliant. The chapters on monetary history and business cycles are very interesting too.
However, I failed to agree with his objections to the use of statistical data and mathematical models as tools for enhancing economical understanding.
Some of the arguments are very pertinent, and timely, due to the widespread mystification of scientistic looking equations that were indeed meaningless or at least much less powerful than people seemed to think, but this is not a justification for ruling them out altogether.
Of course some understanding of economics is amenable to some sort of measurement, and people do that all the time, when they make their transactions seeking profit. The relations may not stay the same forever, and what works today may not work tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean that measurements taken today are useless.
His argument that in economics there are no “natural constants” therefore mathematic equations are meaningless is not correct, and his whole chapter sketching a new theory of probabilities seems to be little more than verbose nonsense.
Of course, it is a very import book and I recommend it to everyone who wants to acquire a deeper understanding of economics, but as you can see, I don’t take it as gospel.
More to the point, I would recommend you Friedrich Hayek, since his methodology seems more in tune with the evolutionary approach you seem to be interested in.
Hayek’s style is less clear cut, engaging and forceful than Mises’, but it is also a lot more careful. Mises sometimes gets too extremist, and too prophetic. No wonder there’s a cult around him. Hayek is less of an idealogue, even though he’s not entirely saint either. A lot of stuff inside “The Constitution of Liberty” is propaganda.
Anyway, I prefer Hayek.
Much of my previous arguments here are actually fragments of my understanding on the general Hayekian idea. My previous post can be considered an elaboration on his famous quote that “the mind cannot foresee its own advance”.
The norwegian government controls close to 50 % of the buying power/money directly and indirectly controls most of the rest via regulations etc.
Do you believe norwegian socialists/socialdemocrats etc want equal rights for mankind, or just norwegians?
Average Joe in Norway goes to a public school, the billionaires children goes to private schools in other countries.
So since mankind are generally similar, what will happen if limitations on trade, migration/immigration(protectionsim) were repealed(i.e. global laissez-faire, minarchism, market economy etc was introduced?) Would the inequality increase or stay unchanged, compared to what it is today with the nationalism etc we have today?
Take away the natural resources, and Norway ia an average western industrialized country.
Would norwegians accept it if the petrodollars were out of the equation? Would mankind produce/develope the technology etc that it has, if we had global socialdemocracy, like Norway?
But what about using the fruits of ones labor as one sees fit, i.e. actually having the money/buying power one has produced, so one can acctually be able to choose what books to buy, what food to buy, pay for ones own hobbies(not other peoles hobbies/interests), can norwegians do that? Can norwegians sell/buy sexual services? Can norwegians play poker for money? After all one spends a big part of ones lives when one is awake, producing stuff(aquiring buying power), and the rest of the time buying/consuming the goods/services that that money buys?
Privately owned oil companies, foreign/domestic companies, norwegian government owns 2/3 of the biggest company producing oil in Norway.
But then the populations of those countries would have to produce more, or settle with less.
So what? In this context it’s singular. One person made the comment that it’s “grammatically incorrect to use a plural verb conjugation for a single person subject”, and my question was directed to him…the single person subject. Are you actually suggesting that that makes my sentence grammatically incorrect?
Tim, it’s not that I do not share your intentions regarding social welfare and mutual aid. It’s just that I don’t think society should be legally forced to entrust the allocation and organization of this service to a centralized monopoly that aggressively crowds out, distorts and/or removes altogether all other potential alternatives created by the people.