Trying to do cost/benefit analysis with subjective consumer desires?
I could also use some education on this question. In the particular case of leaded fuel, how would a poisoned victim go about determining the owners of the exact exhausts that spewed the exact lead atoms which caused his poisoning? How exactly would such a court claim be made (in anarchy) and against whom? Are we talking class action suits (claims) here?
Z.
Sure, and this isn’t to say that it’s easy, just that whilst we’re working with subjective desires, knowledge and expectations it’s necessary that the applied economist find some way to approximate these subjective valuations. The alternative is to commit ourselves to some sort of useless nihilism when it comes to saying anything meaningful about the real world.
No, this is why goldbugs prefer gold (which raises the interesting question of why you insist on capitalizing the G in gold). Granted, the two categories, unfortunately, have an overlap, but I would hope that most sensible, self described Austrians would realise that historically banks have invested a great deal into making their notes very detailed and elaborate. Not only was this a form of product differentiation but it allowed the bank to spot fake notes more easily. I’m also not sure you understand the concept of expected rate of return, but there we go…
What a beautiful rendition of the siren song of scientism Giles. Let me try an approximatizashun for you. The amount of human hours devoted to false mechanistic analogies and the devastating methodological failures of mainstream economics due to a simple category error is over 9000 times greater than that spent by Austrian economists. Still, econometricians and “social planners” have failed to deliver a single constant to apply to human affairs or exhibit a shred of predictive power.
You’re really not one to speak.
Against the owners of the private roads. Of course, you could argue that by living in an area beside a road you may be contractually obligated (and by this I mean explicit drawn out contracts between you when you purchase the house and the road running along it; any pollution pre-existing the purchase will of course already be homesteaded and not something you can sue for) to put up with a level of pollution and that the owners of said roads would be liable for any increases over and above that. How would it be determined? Up for courts to decide, it’s not something you can figure out from the armchair.
Wouldn’t be any real long-term effect at all. I mean, you know, putting aside the 60 G’s spent on the thing, the fact that it can’t be sold because no one’s allowed to drive them anymore, or that all the people who purchased them now have to buy ANOTHER car if they want to drive. The cost of of the factory retooling for a different vehicle, the losses taken from new vehicles sitting in storage until they can be dismantled, the labor in removing those vehicles, lost production time and costs, plus the time taken to decide what to retool FOR, of course, would have pretty much zero impact on the economy. Just like when the big three have layoffs. That doesn’t hurt Detroit’s economy AT ALL. No, clearly the only tangible problem is that someone was forced to do something against their will. Sure, that sucks, but everything else is just peachy. Peachy like…like…well, like sarcasm, or something similar.
Christ, it’s like talking to college students…
Makes sense. The possibility and severity of such claims would pass on an incentive to the road owner to regulate the amount of pollution from cars he allows on his roads. Depending on his calculation of such risk, he could implement a toll scheme that is progressively more punitive for polluters, or even flat out ban extreme polluters off his roads completely. Thanks.
Z.
There’s no scientism here, nobody is pretending to look for universal constants that hold true in all of human behaviour, and of course I understand there must be a lot of humility when it comes to estimating these sorts of things. Nonetheless, I think it’d be better to have some sort of empirical estimates about this sort of thing, otherwise you’re just left dogmatically asserting that the market is always efficient (whatever that means) and that the government is immoral.
I’m sorry that you are in denial Giles. Ceteris paribus, a monopoly on justice can only hamper the ability of tort victims to pursue claims.
Of course, the oil industry is the pinnicle of laissez faire so theres no chance that Tetraethyl lead, a known toxin with no previous industrial use, ended up in fuel because of government.
Without government, I think we would have thorium-reactor-powered Hummercraft right now rather than be worrying about lead in gasoline.
Probably the same point as that nonanswer [:P]
I am simply trying to understand the position.
That still doesn’t really answer the question I was asking, do you claim that property rights can always be defined so as to factor everything into the price system? I mean, it’s just that you deny the problem of externalities, so I can only suppose that your position is that in a completely free market all external effects will be internalized, which seems to be an extreme position to me.
If there are no constants, then there are no empirical estimates. I wouldn’t contradict what you said.
Human action is empirical just so you know. But of course I’m talking about rational empiricism and not logical positivism empiricism.
Is this the second time now you created a position for me? You have a conversation with imaginary me and I will go fill my own bag of hot air if I want to continue.
So unless we can quantify subjective consumer desires, we bound ourselves to nihilism? Have you tossed out the whole apriori method?
I thought we did have a way to estimate consumer desires, knowledge, and expectations. The market price?
That’s the problem with externalities: you can’t factor in the price of the limited resource “fresh air” because nobody owns it (or can own it, for that matter), nobody distributes it and thus, nobody can put a price tag on it. You can’t compare the price of the damage done by air pollution with the benefits it might bring. How do you expect the market price to reflect the cost of something that simply cannot be calculated?
Are we talking about the price for air or the price for air pollution? Couldn’t a firm simply offer a discount on their pollution producing product and see how consumers would respond?