Three Truths Counter-indicated by Praxeology

[Grant]

@Mabel

Finally, on your question about the socialist computational problem: I believe von Mises said the operative difference between socialism and capitalism is whether or not you have a stock market. So I submit that the critical question is whether or not a regime of economic command can ever have the knowledge required to effectively co-opt the capital markets’ function of allocating capital among economic sectors.

If a regime was able to predict market outcomes better than the actors involved in the markets, it could do so through voluntary trade, and it would profit from it. Co-opting would be unnecessary. Those prediction models would then of course face competition from competing models, so of course a regime’s use of physical force could be more profitable than having to deal with competitors. But it does not follow that because a firm can demonstrate superior performance in a market that it should be able to co-opt that market. We do not nationalize Walmart and give it a state-protected monopoly because it happens to be doing a good job of providing low-cost goods at the moment.

Arguments can be made for paternalistic intervention by governments, but not in the case where the interventionists’ methods could produce the same effects via voluntary exchange.

[Torsten]

How complex is your economics calculations model?! If I’m recalling it correctly Mises didn’t say that a planned economy wasn’t able to provide for some basic needs, but that it would struggle to deal with some more complex problems of human need and resource availability.

Perhaps we should recapitulate the basic arguments of the socialist calculation debate first.

[Anonymous_Coward]

This problem is, in principle, solvable because it involves simultaneous solution to three polynomials of the third degree, and such polynomials can always be factored. But I have never had an econ professor step up to this challenge – even after I showed him numerical examples of the challenge having been met by non-economists.

Perhaps you should submit your model to a peer reviewed economics journal instead of posting it on a forum where most of the responses come from admittedly non-economic professors…

If you credit my earlier assertions about what is mathematically possible in the way of describing economic sectors through the lens of general optimality, then I think it is clear that the critical knowledge is available. Regimes of state capitalism or market socialism can consolidate ownership of their nation’s asset portfolio, and optimally distribute capital among their assets without the experimentation of free financial markets.

How does your model deal with consumer preference? Sure you can ‘optimally distribute capital’, my OS’s kernel does that thousands of times per second but it doesn’t help me at all if it decides the optimal solution is having me wait before I see the text I’m typing on the keyboard appear on the screen.

If the optimal solution says I get ham for dinner but my preference is for steak since the optimal solution is always ham then how does this accurately model the economy as it exists today? This may be a strawman argument since you seem to claim consumer level detail is unimportant for accurately modeling the optimal solution for resource distribution but then again maybe not.

I earnestly suggest we formulate a response that is more respectable than “math is hard” or “SFEcon is anti-Semitic”

I earnestly suggest we formulate an argument in defense of your position which is understandable to non-post graduate arithmeticians and completely devoid of strawman arguments. I counted a few in your posts which were obviously complete misrepresentations of the basic principals proposed by the Austrians which were also unnecessary to advance your agenda.

It is very obvious you have an ax to grind and a somewhat hidden agenda of trying to win a bet by getting a certain number of ‘Austrian economists’ to not argue against your model. You also seem to think people admitting they are unable to comprehend the descriptions you post of complex math in defense of your argument is an admittance that there are no flaws in your theory.

So, dumb down your description and use logic as the basis of your argument if you really want critical analysis of your new socialist paradise.

----edit----

SFEcon is a conversation, however trite, about economics’ most fundamental generalities. This discussion is obviously not undertaken for the sake of the generalities themselves, which, insofar as we know, are entirely sound and adequately supported. We are, rather, presuming to exhibit a superior vocabulary, and a more subtle grammar, with which to state the essence of economic science.

Um, yeah, I think I found the root cause of the ‘language barrier’ that is seen here…

[Mabel]

Hi all,

I seem to have received a number of challenges on a single point; so let me try to address them together.

First, I hold that the economic order’s general stability and balance cannot be accounted-for in a tendency for individual firms and families to operate where marginal equal marginal costs. I do not think that economic science has a defensible model of what goes on at this level of analysis. I am, therefore, ready to defend the heterodox position on this point if challenged.

Second, I hold that the economic order’s general stability and balance can be accounted-for in a tendency for capitalists to move financial assets among economic sectors in order to optimize the global investment portfolio. If one accepts that the polynomial factoring problem is solved, then the premise of general economic optimality can describe sectors in terms of their production and utility tradeoffs. I invite your attention to the finding that these descriptions are temporally solid.

Given such premises, I certainly would not presume that a regime of economic command could possibility optimize its realm to a degree of analysis finer than one or two hundred sectors. Since I do not, in the first instance, accept that the idea of economic optimality has any application at levels of abstraction beneath that of the sector, naturally I would not expect that a model based on optimization could have any application there either.

I believe the most detailed SFEcon to date model has 30-40 sectors. The data for these models come out of national input/output tables. Leontief’s I/O tables are very different from SFEcon’s; so the data conversion is challenging. This will only be resolved by having national statistical offices compute the SFEcon tables instead of Leontief’s. The reasons this should happen are 1) the SFEcon parameters engage economic causality, while Leontief’s do not; and 2) the SFEcon parameters are consistent in time, while Leontief’s are not.

No model can anticipate new products or consumer preferences. SFEcon’s boundary conditions are technical and utility tradeoffs; and the model’s behaviors are only determinant within that boundary. But the SFEcon model, like a proper scientific system, can be used to quantify its boundary. This gives us a high-level abstraction of technology that can be traced in time, which can be exploited for policy discussions and/or private profit.

A socialist regime could theoretically use this changing picture of technology to optimize its capital allocations among sectors in order to maximize its performance in the global economy. It is not clear if this might work as well or even better than the competitive exploitation of personal capital for profit. But, if you are part of the regime, you do not want to share returns to capital, or the power that entails, with entrepreneur’s or their heirs.

Such a regime would of course lack many incentives for innovation. But we observe in our own culture that much innovation is traced to people working for wages whose only incentive is career advancement. Socialist nations are presently able to profit by simply stealing Western innovations. And the leftist ideologues here are frankly agitating for a halt to economic growth.

While I personally do not want to live under any such regime, I can no longer argue against such a regime on the ground of economic theory. Capitalists competing for superior returns is a proven means to arrive at overall economic efficiency and order. It might well be the only practical means to such ends.

But capitalism is ultimately an abstraction – the criterion for a singular, efficient, and orderly state of affairs that is only approximated in reality. I wish to argue that approaches to such states can now be described in the manner of familiar scientific systems. I put the argument here because I have found it unwelcome in Austrian circles, and would like that to change.

Best,

Mabel

[Anonymous_Coward]

Libertarian economics begins with a commitment to reason and evidence, and proceeds to von Mises’ “miracle of the market” as the only possible explication of economic causation. And, when confronted with a perfectly sound, mathematically determined rendering of that “miracle”, our side’s response has been to hound the mathematician out of academic life with our pro forma accusations of Nazism and sexual deviancy.

“Our” side huh? I assume the Nazi reference is to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and his analysis of pre-WWII Germany as a model for the inevitable result of socialism leading to fascism. No clue about the ‘sexual deviancy’ charge. Evidence?

Equilibrium is therefore more than physical equilibrium defined above, which I think is how you are defining the term. The economic steady-state is, I assert, the unique physical equilibrium that is also a general economic optimum. The general economic optimum is the unique physical equilibrium in which every economic sector values every commodity at the marginal cost of producing that commodity. I formulate the central tenet of the Austrian school as being that, until such a state is achieved, the economy must remain in flux.

How does this take into account different industries bidding on the same commodity and increasing the price over the marginal cost of production. True the price will tend to fall towards the marginal cost of production as competition enters the market but entrepreneurs also tend to seek arbitrage opportunities so the economy will never reach a steady-state.

To define the general economic optimum further, please reconsider the physical equilibrium defined above. At any physical equilibrium we can presume to know 1) where every economic sector is on its production function (i.e.: how much of each commodity it is using) and 2) every commodity price. We can, therefore, presume to know every sector’s marginal product with respect to every commodity. Knowing prices and marginal products, we can formulate values of marginal product: the price at which a sector can sell its product, times the marginal product of an input commodity.

How is this helpful? People do this all the time without vector polynomial math formulas. Any new computer gadget comes out and people take it apart and determine its production cost based on the prices on the components it contains. Without accounting for marginal utility you can’t possibly formulate the price it can be sold.

When (and only when) all the values of marginal product in a sector-versus-commodity array equal the price of the respective commodity, then the system is presumably in stasis and will have no reason to change (for so long as its underlying structure of production and utility tradeoffs remains constant). This is the unique, steady state that I refer to as ‘equilibrium’ or ‘the general optimum’.

Then the entrepreneurs go off and find the next Big Thing and disturb the ‘equilibrium’. That’s why we aren’t still in the trees with the rest of the monkeys – a troop of howler monkeys have ‘no reason to change’ so would fit your model quite well.

Is that really the big discovery hidden behind all the fancy math and barely understandable ‘superior vocabulary’ that prices tend to fall towards production costs?

I would, however, submit that placing these admittedly valid, characteristically Austrian, conclusions at the center of economic thinking is needlessly hostile to the development of economic science. Indeed, it creates a tautology by which economics can never be scientific. It is analogous to traditional culture’s presentation of Intelligent Design as science - where it would be sufficient to simply assert that we cannot (and therefore might never) understand evolution in mechanistic terms.

Nice scarecrow argument you have there. So the Austrians are the Intelligent Designers I assume and are pushing their views on the rest of the economists by coercion and fiat…well both the same really. What conclusion are you referring to, that a socialist planned economy is impossible?

As to whether or not I consider economics to be a science, I accept Nelson’s estimate in his Economics as Religion: at present ‘economics’ is mere pseudo-scientific imagery in the service of a self-sufficient system of values, whether the Libertarianism of Chicago or the Progressivism of the two Cambridges (one in England, one in Massachusetts).

Economics as we have it is the Scholasticism of our materialistic age – a baffling circuit of unexamined assumptions and pre-ordained conclusions. I find economics’ subject matter interesting for the potential it holds for doing better.

Ah, yes, that would fully support your claim to being an Austrian economist…as I understand it Mises considered it a social science.

A socialist regime could theoretically use this changing picture of technology to optimize its capital allocations among sectors in order to maximize its performance in the global economy.

How would this solve the problem of socialists not being able to determine commodity values without outside influences? Or tell if they are applying their resources in the most efficient manner to serve the people? You know, the folks governments are supposed to work for and not the other way around.

While I personally do not want to live under any such regime, I can no longer argue against such a regime on the ground of economic theory. Capitalists competing for superior returns is a proven means to arrive at overall economic efficiency and order. It might well be the only practical means to such ends.

Aren’t you in effect arguing against a socialist regime by saying ‘[capitalism] might well be the only practical means to such ends’. I don’t think anyone would argue that socialist regimes are able to operate inefficient economies. That’s a given. What is at issue is if they can operate better than free markets.

I really hope I’m helping you win your bet by not using fancy formulas and voodoo economic theories to argue against your theory. I try to help out when I can but I’m not really and economist so don’t think I qualify…

[dchernik]

@Mabel

No model can anticipate new products or consumer preferences. SFEcon’s boundary conditions are technical and utility tradeoffs; and the model’s behaviors are only determinant within that boundary. But the SFEcon model, like a proper scientific system, can be used to quantify its boundary. This gives us a high-level abstraction of technology that can be traced in time, which can be exploited for policy discussions and/or private profit.

If your computer program cannot predict which new or old products will be profitable and how much, then of what use is it in helping socialist central planners? Suppose a planner wishes to introduce a new version of iPod. How will he know, without prices, which combination of inputs will be best at producing the output, that is, which combination will not cause the more urgent desires of the consumers to be unrealized? After all, the factors of production can always be used elsewhere or to a different extent than in the particular combination under consideration.

It won’t do to say that the planner will use current prices, for of what use are current prices 50 years from now?

There are always technologies available which cannot be used in production, because such use would be uneconomic. How will your central planner know whether a given technology should or should not be employed in the production of any good or service?

[CDS]

Firstly, I am not an economist either, but a historian.

The impetus for the SFEcon project seems to be indicated by the following (admittedly long-winded, selective and highly stylized) quasi-historical account of the ‘progress of modern civilization’ (or some such thing):

http://www.sfecon.com/Capitalism.htm

I suggest you read it to give yourselves an idea about the motivation behind this project. If, Mabel, you are in any way affiliated with the project, I see no way that you can call yourself an “Austrian.” (This is admittedly a minor point however, and one that really has little bearing on the issues at hand, as it in no way addresses any of your critiques).

The (implicit or explicit) desire to manipulate, plan and control economic processes by means of a centralized state structure is certainly at the heart of the SFEcon project, according to their website. Wealth is to be socialized. Succinctly:

" . .every citizen would be an equal shareholder in the comprehensive national mutual fund."

Although the site is quite derrogatory toward the ‘progress’ of civilizations, and the mistakes made along the way, it apparently considers it best to continue along in this general tradition.There is really very little argument on the site as to why their program is necessary, but there is a lot of speculation (the word “might” crops up often). In fact, the concluding paragraph simply cites that, as an apparent alternative to capitalism, humanity has somehow shown (via Statistics? or some other criteria…) its preference for “civil decency.” This apparently is directly in opposition to free markets.

If one chooses not to read the treatise linked above, I will leave you with this final quote, taken from the website:

“. . .If the population opts for a more general expression of value, it might consider the possibility of outright surrender to the elected officials’ personality type: make them the board of directors over our national portfolio of investments, allow them to dispose of all the nation’s profits, and deprive them of income in any other form. This might finally perfect the Federalist program insofar as society’s most avaricious personalities would perceive their only advantage in a general maximizing of economic efficiency.” (italics mine)

hmmmmm…

[Inquisitor]

TBH, I don’t see what the point of this whole thread is. I am only studying Economics now, and my knowledge of Austrian econ is still paltry, but none of what I have read of it excludes the possibility of the use of mathematics - Mises warned that mathematical economics promised more than it could possibly deliver, but I see no reason why mathematical econ should be fundamentally incompatible with Austrian economics. Quite a few (neo-)Austrians use quantitative methods.

However, SFEcon seems to have a political agenda attached to it, and I am extremely dubious of any so-called solutions to the calculation problem.

[Bogdan]

I know one Austrian who argues that even on mathematical grounds a mathematical solution to the socialist calculation is impossible : Robert Murphy - Cantor’s Diagonal Argument : An Extension to the Socialist Calculation Debate (PDF).

[Mabel]

O.K. Guys this is how it is going to have to be: if anyone wants my response to the points being made here, they are going to accommodate my agenda first. Too many things (some of them worthwhile) are being said, too quickly, for there to be any practical means for me to address them.

Once again, I have offered a few mathematical developments and objective demonstrations that I believe are counter-indicated by current economic thinking. Adequate responses need go no further than …

This is factually wrong in some particular.

This is already available elsewhere in economic science.

This does not pertain to economic activity.

If, having considered the evidence, someone wants to go further, I will accommodate them with a thoughtful reply. But there is no sense in lengthy commentary on facts until they are admitted into evidence.

My contact with LvMI has put me in touch with several people who are interested in the evidence I have offered, and this is all I need to accomplish here. If any of THESE people wish to go on to a more general discussion, I will accommodate them. If any of THEM are intrigued by other’s commentaries on SFEcon, I will address the issues they identify. In other words, those who have volunteered to consider some portion of the evidence are going to be my filter.

If you think what you have to say is worthy of my response, you are probably going to have to signify your self-estimation by first exerting yourself to report your assessment of the evidence offered. If you know in advance that the evidence is not going to be meaningful, then why comment at all?

I understand my tacit presumption that certain demonstrations should upset the thinking of the Austrian school can be upsetting in itself. But lengthy, opportunistic manifestoes as to WHY YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE UPSET do no indicate a supple assurance in what you believe. So please: one issue at a time; and give us a chance sort it out before changing the subject.

Cheers,

Mabel

[equack]

Mabel, I would appreciate if you e-mailed me any papers regarding the economics you’ve mentioned. They will be instrument in helping me learn Austrian economics if I have something to challenge my own beliefs. Hopefully, once I get past the math, I can provide a critique of it.

Socialist Calculation Debate Round III will be interesting. Considering the score is currently 2-0 for the Austrians, I see no reason why we can’t make it 3-0.

[equack]

Forgot to add my e-mail, it’s equack@mises.com.

[The_Dean]

Dear Mabel;

Taking up your first challenge, I must say that I was surprised by your little paper on the connection between formal descriptions of the economic optimum and hyperbolic functions. It must call into question everything economists have deduced from the polynomial factoring issue. Seeing that this connection has always been there for economics to discover, I was also surprised to have found only one reference in the literature; and that could not have been more obscure. A few years ago, a member of the Ukrainian Ministry of Economics cited the “hyperbola of Roemer” in the Ukrainian Economist. Apparently this is the Kurt Roemer mentioned at SFEcon’s site.

That said, I would like to press you on a matter raised by Anonymous Coward. The SFEcon site reproduces a petition from the faculty at for the removal of a Professor Roemer based on some finding that this fellow is a Nazi and a racist. The petition itself is obviously the product of a disordered mind. It is hard to believe any such person is on a faculty anywhere; that a college dean would have acted on their demand; or that such an action, taken against an instructor of any competence, might have been sustained. But SFSU is famously weird, so I suppose it is possible. However, I found your assertion that “our side” has run Roemer out of higher education to be a complete drive-by. So I must also ask: are you placing SFSU in the vast right-wing conspiracy?

And, on the matter SFEcon’s non-Marxist critique of capitalism: I found the comments of CDS to be way out of context. Clearly, the point of this article is that a civilization is at peril when its societal and political decisions come to be overly reliant on mere economic calculation. I find this a welcome reply to economist Gary Becker who states that, when economists have done their job, all human activity will attributable to objective economic factors such as “differences in prices and incomes”. Becker also found “differences in taste” as a “convenient crutch” for “analytical failures” in explaining temporally variant observations of behavior. I do not know how highly Becker’s generation of Chicagoans might be regarded by the Austrians; but it seems to me that they are as convinced in their economic determinism as Marx.

The lengthy quote about how a command economy might preserve the efficiencies of capitalism is clearly based on the premise that society has already surrendered its property rights. I do not see any advocating for the surrender. As I am beginning to understand SFEcon, their point is that economic theories should be determinant in the engineering sense before they deserve to be taken seriously in any sense. They claim to offer such a theory; and are clearly cautioning against the comprehensive application of anyone’s notions about material determinism.

Regards,

The Dean

[CDS]

The context of the article (not a NON-, but a POST- Marxian critique of Capitalism) seems to actually be summed up by the introductory paragraph, which concludes thusly:

“. . .it would be well to consider if (and, if so, how) politics might now restrain economics. . .” As I said, the impetus is avowedly the desire to justify the utility (and preferability) of a command economy: an economy subsumed to and dictated by the political structure.

If this is considered to again be an innacurate context - although I have established this context by using quotes fromt the site itself - please delineate what you see as the actual context. I see nothing other than a very explicit call for socialism. It may be dressed up with other conceptual baggage, but this is essentially its motivating sentiment.

However, I agree that this is all irrelevant because, as has been pointed out repeatedly in this blog, the debate never really has been over the ability to calculate a theoretical equilibrium (which is of course possible), but the fact that this equilibrium is necessarily hypothetical and impossible to establish in a real world setting.

[The_Dean]

Dear CDS:

It is well said that ‘disagreement is hard to find;’ and I sincerely appreciate your isolation of items upon which differences are clear. Clearly the phrase “… how politics might now restrain economics …” is causus belli to Austrian sensibilities. Though an economist, I am of the opinion that economic calculation should not comprise the whole of social thinking; and fear for the society content to define itself around rational materialism. I am willing to elaborate on this point; but I agree that the discussion is better served by advancing to the second and third points that you make.

“the debate never really has been over the ability to calculate a theoretical equilibrium (which is of course possible),”

Unless old Ludwig has bequeathed his followers exclusive rights in the phrases “of course” and “trivial” then I think the Austrian side of this debate owes the rest of us a formal statement of what you mean by an economic state (however hypothetical) having no impetus to change. I was attracted to this discussion by Mabel’s rather able description of economic stasis, and her assertion that this definition has been given quantitative expression. If anyone out there has an instance of the problem she describes having been solved, show me the numbers. I fear I am going to learn that the Austrian notion of equilibrium has been trivialized beyond anything recognizable to, say, Hayek; and that this triviality is now being taught to innocent young people.

I appreciate that you are a historian and not an economist; but if what you say is defensible, there should be an economist hereabouts to take up the challenge for you. I am very sincere in this challenge, and will take the time in either public and private exchanges to thrash the matter out with any interested party.

Your third assertion…

“the fact that this equilibrium is necessarily hypothetical and impossible to establish in a real world setting”

Is also worthy of debate (as opposed to being taught as a fact), but I suggest we hold that topic back until we have agreed on a definition of equilibrium. By then I should have acquainted myself with Mabel’s empirical case for the general optimum as an explanation for material conditions in the real world.

Regards,

The Dean

[Mabel]

To The Dean,

Thank you for examining my materials on the hyperbola.

And no, I do not think there is a vast rightwing conspiracy (though I hear SFSU’s econ department actually lists a bit to starboard). I do however think there is a vast rightwing culture that responds in sympathetic ways to certain stimuli.

I would like to take this culture seriously because its ideas are critical to the continuity of a civilization of which I would want to be a part. I observe this culture to be divided against itself in certain matters, and assume there is nothing traitorous about coming down on one side or the other in these divides.

Many on “our side” defend liberty’s ‘private property component’ on the ground that this is necessary to the most favored economic state. I object to this practice in two ways.

First, ‘liberty’ is whole, not a collection of components. If a society will not defend all aspects of liberty for their own sake, then other defenses are irrelevant.

I believe the self-interested disposition of private property is a proven practical means to an orderly process of economic adjustment toward an ever-improving general economic optimum. But I do not think economists who are good at explicating this process should be helping themselves to any sort of status as priests of liberty and righteousness. For one thing, economics’ accounts of how and why the economic order adjusts are tissue-thin. And then there is the small fact that our side is slowly losing the social debate, even though the economics should commend our agenda.

Second, private property is not necessarily the only means for keeping the economic state near its optimum. SFEcon’s robust portrait of economic adjustment demonstrates that the process can be modeled quantitatively and in the abstract. The very fact that such a model exists means that a clever enough collectivist elite could theoretically achieve the efficiencies of capitalism.

I am told (this is second hand) that our side, represented by Milton Friedman himself, once declared SFEcon to be “a fraud” even as a “mathematical possibility”. And anti-Semitism is well established among the motives for opposition to the premises of neoclassical economics. Coleman’s “Economics and its Enemies” has a whole chapter on this subject.

SFSU’s accusations against Roemer personally were (again, this is second hand) sustained and augmented by local neo-icon Quentin Kopp – ’s “conservative lion”, according to the SF Chronicle. Kopp has been a city councilman, state senator, radio shock jock, and superior court judge, i.e.: a small-bore Bill O’Reilly with police powers.

I am also told that an SF Examiner reporter identified the professor who made SFSU’s accusations, and found them credible. The Chronicle is our liberal paper; the Examiner is conservative. Kopp was Roemer’s state senator, entertained his appeal, and found for the faculty. Then some unidentified party summoned enough political power to have the FBI launch an investigation into Roemer’s alleged Nazi connections.

Though the FBI found nothing, later Judge Kopp seems to have remained on the case. He recently conducted a trial for no apparent reason other than to harass Roemer as a witness. Though the police and district attorney allowed that Roemer had been misidentified as a witness, and they never attempted to even contact the actual witness, Roemer was repeatedly summoned by police to testify without prior notice. Police were once dispatched to arrest him at home on a day from which the trial was continued.

The accusations of sexual misconduct originated at the (Catholic) , where Roemer (a Catholic) attempted to rebuild an academic career. These accusations were reviewed by then Archbishop William Levada, who found for USF. Our former archbishop is now William Cardinal Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – formerly known as the Office of the Holy Inquisition.

Naturally, I would expect the greatest number of our side would not tolerate such tactics for the sake of ideas that we value. But I cannot help but see all this as a local instance of what was done to Ward Churchill and Sami al Arian before a national audience by Horowitz, O’Reilly, et al.

I am grateful to this forum for its willingness to actually consider the science. That focus having been established, and the drive-by hopefully accounted for, let’s get back to the numbers and what they mean.

Cheers,

Mabel

[Anonymous_Coward]

Many on “our side” defend liberty’s ‘private property component’ on the ground that this is necessary to the most favored economic state. I object to this practice in two ways.

First, ‘liberty’ is whole, not a collection of components. If a society will not defend all aspects of liberty for their own sake, then other defenses are irrelevant.

I believe the self-interested disposition of private property is a proven practical means to an orderly process of economic adjustment toward an ever-improving general economic optimum. But I do not think economists who are good at explicating this process should be helping themselves to any sort of status as priests of liberty and righteousness. For one thing, economics’ accounts of how and why the economic order adjusts are tissue-thin. And then there is the small fact that our side is slowly losing the social debate, even though the economics should commend our agenda.

Is that the same as ‘freedom is slavery’? Without private property how does one define their liberty, they aren’t free to do anything without the permission of the real property owners who they must interact with to achieve even basic human needs. You need some food or a new suit then you must go to the local office of the Central Planning Board and see if your ‘needs’ fit within the quota of goods and services they dole out.

Second, private property is not necessarily the only means for keeping the economic state near its optimum. SFEcon’s robust portrait of economic adjustment demonstrates that the process can be modeled quantitatively and in the abstract. The very fact that such a model exists means that a clever enough collectivist elite could theoretically achieve the efficiencies of capitalism.

It is interesting how you ignore all the arguments against this and then change the rules of the ‘bet’ so you will only respond to the people who specifically comment on the science contained in your paper. A paper which isn’t publicly available but only through a vetting process by the way.

Naturally, I would expect the greatest number of our side would not tolerate such tactics for the sake of ideas that we value. But I cannot help but see all this as a local instance of what was done to Ward Churchill and Sami al Arian before a national audience by Horowitz, O’Reilly, et al.

I’m not a great historian of economics but none of the names you mentioned have any relation to the Austrian School. It is a horrible rhetorical device to lump ‘us’ and ‘them’ together and subscribe the behavior of a few select individuals to the grand ‘Us’.

I’m actually having a hard time defining ‘we’ and ‘our’ in the context of your argument. I would say, just randomly making up a number, that 99.999% of the people who associate themselves with the Austrian School would have exactly the opposite views of private property and planned economies that you ascribe to ‘our side’. In fact, I would say if you believe in the collectivist theories you put forth here you are diametrically opposed to the very basic principals which define a ‘free market’ in Austrian economics.

I am grateful to this forum for its willingness to actually consider the science. That focus having been established, and the drive-by hopefully accounted for, let’s get back to the numbers and what they mean.

Nope, sorry, you can’t dismiss the ‘drive-by’ that easily. Your limited model doesn’t even come close to demonstrating how the problem could be solved since it it presently limited to 40 or so industries and doesn’t solve the problems caused by the lack of a market in the means of production. Not even mentioning the essential role of the entrepreneur which would be replaced by the Central Planning Board which makes the mathematic models irrelevant since you fail to remove subjective decision making from the process.

I look forward to further dismissal of the points brought up so we can ‘get back to the numbers and what they mean’.

Cheers

[Inquisitor]

Good points Anonymous Coward.