Then just go ahead and do it? I’ve heard this stated several times, that Austrian econ needs to be cast in formal terms. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with it given that it’s mere formalisation. I’m not sure if it’d yield any positive returns, but it’d make Austrian econ more elegant if it succeeded. But either you or someone else interested in doing so should actually carry the task out then. There’s others on here who’ve expressed an interest in so doing, so get in touch with them and get on to it.
According to basic Austrian economics this is impossible.
according to austrian economics its not demonstratable
I’m doing just this.
Huh? The first chapter of theory of Money and Credit is all about this kind of thing (subjectivity of marginal utility).
Suppose an agent’s options are restricted to a, b, and c, with a>b>c, ‘>’ being a preference relation for the agent.
Suppose further that c>a. Without loss of generality, let the agent choose b, meaning that he prefers b to the other two (which is how action is defined). This contradicts the premise that a>b, since preference is anti-symmetric.
Like scineram said, this is basic stuff.
I don’t see what the problem is. Besides for the fact that transitive modeling is possible, the point of modeling isn’t to describe an individuals preferences but the outcome of many people with different preferences.
Arrow’s impossibility theorem and the Pareto efficiency has some of this.
The problem is that preferences in action are based on value, and value is subjective.
I’m hungry > I’m thirsty > I’m tired
Sure I’ll eat before I’ll drink. But, even if I’m really really really thirsty, I may decide to take a nap and get a drink later.
this just shows that at time 1, you demonstrated a preferrence for eating over any other course of action(which may have included drinking and sleeping options..)
at time 2, you demonstrated a preference to sleeping over any other course (i.e. drinking, or eating, etc)
and so on…
And how is that proof that human action can’t be modeled?
did i say it was? but then im sure i dont quite know what you mean when you say ‘human action can be modeled’, particularly if you think mathematical form would be superior to linguistic form
TIME!!!
You caught me, I didn’t really think that one through
haha time!
i can usually remember to put it in arguments,
but time defeats me in real life, never enough time !!!
Um, what my proof demonstated is that preference is necessarily transitive.
Well, since krazy kaju made a (false) assertion about individual preference, to which scineram responded with a correction, to which you posted a comment expressing uncertainty about his claim, I thought that I would explain plainly (at least I thought I was being plain, until I read yours and MatthewF’s responses) scineram’s claim, which, you know, kinda necessitates that I stay on the sub-topic the three of you had established, viz. individual preference. Make sense?
The problem here is that this is exactly what ecoli had said. rolls eyes
Technically, preference is an ordering on the subjective valuations of predicted outcomes resulting from possible actions. If this ordering is cyclic then there is no most preferred outcome, which implies there can be no action.
‘Subjective’ does NOT mean ‘impervious to logic’.