Not would they, but would they attempt to. I was too general. Say this person is aware of the amount in his bank, and writes a bounced check deliberately. Or that this person is allergic to a given food, but decides to try it anyways. That analogy can be applied to macroeconomics, I imagine. History shows deficit spending doesn’t help all that much, yet here we are. So can you predict arbitrary decision making or measure how arbitrary decisions are in the market by trying to explain the decision making process logically?
But without application, praxeology is useless. It cant be said that the taxation (in practice) is uneconomic when there is no methodology of determining the praxeological implications of it.
If there is no absolute way, then statistics, probability theory, some model must be used to get some kind of answer to the question, otherwise we only know that we dont know and it is mental masturbation without connection to real world. So Austrian economics, to maintain connection to real world instead of being a model for the sake of itself, has to have a framework of that.
But without application, praxeology is useless.
Learn what thymology is and your problem is solved.
I think many people also underestimate the degree to which animal action is purposive and rational (in the Austrian sense). Animals are stupid, but they are not clockwork machines or computers running on pre-programmed instincts.
To give an example I heard from John Searle at a Wittgenstein conference, when my dog thinks someone is at the door it’s the same thing as me thinking someone is at the door.
I think another example can help.
Take for instance the fact that many people are given their tastes and opinions by forces like (marketing, propaganda, entertainment, ect). People are persuaded into certain behavioral patterns. However this does not contradict praxeology as those people are consciously making the decision to engage in that behavior by the very fact of their action. This action is rational in the sense that their applying purposeful means to achieve ends. The fact that their action is “artificial” in the sense of being manufactured does not concern praxeology. Also the fact that these people don’t fully think critically about their motivations is the place for psychology.
Bingo! Saved me the trouble.
So if a hypnotizer made everyone to destroy their personal belongings that would be the most economical course of action?
So if a hypnotizer made everyone to destroy their personal belongings that would be the most economical course of action?
Given their value judgments and ideas about means/ends frameworks, yes. There is no extrapersonal way to judge the ‘efficiency’ of economic action.
Yes, theirs. Pfffffffff
the origin of a value judgment is irrelevant to its role as a value judgment. Economics is a descriptive science, not a normative one.
Seems more like irrelevant nonsense to me they way you describe it.
Seems more like irrelevant nonsense to me they way you describe it.
You remind me of the Millian liberals who insist that someone’s choice is not free because he has adopted his methods from those presented by society.
There is no ‘authentic’ person; only the real, bodily, acting person.
Sometimes I wonder whether the general impression by other individuals (society? culture? et al) matters the most when applying appraisal to the actor, in extension being all there is for the basis of “rightness” or “wrongness” when it comes to acting within a community. In that mode of thought, anarchism would eventually develop wherever the cultural incentive for its establishment was greatest. Blatantly statist politicians have a better time getting elected in cultures that are prone to providing approval to collectivism and tradition, ala Greece’s Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement, or the U.K.'s Labour Party. The greatest example would be the completely free democratic election of the Nazi’s into power.
I’m just saying that individuals’ reasoning is polluted by cultural values that may be irrespective of logical fallacy. So their value judgements are, in their expression, fundamentally flawed. And thus appraisals are flawed. Etc
It’s analogous to economic action. It was culturally-significant for large U.S. corporations to overreach with superfluous amounts of credit and to leverage high levels of risk in the “game”, in pursuit of more profit. The outcome might be different in a society that has different appraisals of economic action’s consequences. But our State feels it necessary to facilitate this form of unstable State-sponsored capitalism, and the Americans enabled it all - even if they weren’t actually conscious of the implications of buying credit from this or that bank, or acquiring loans through what would become a risk-laden institution.
Read it from Theory & History and its more epistemological basis, but not practical information as to how to determine whether observed human behaviour is itself an action or part of some other action, in order to understand whether praxeological implications can be aplied to it.
“but not practical information…” I don’t think you’re not going to find that. This stuff is all rationally deduced. And what’s “practical” mean?
Practical as in the application of the praxeological theoretical framework to actual human behaviour. IE the problems like the walking example and how praxeology applies to it.
I think your problem was “what’s the difference between observed behaviour and human action?”
Can we define the terms “observed behaviour” and “human action”? I think that would be a good start.
Behaviour as any physical activity of life forms.
Human action as an attempt to change a perceived change of affairst to an imagined better one.
Since AE is all about the latter and strictly such, emphasizing its difference from any generic behaviour, making empiric difference between the two is of utmost difference for implications AE to apply to real life.
nandnor,
You’re misaggregating actions in your analysis.
How?
And where is the theory that describes applicability of praxeology on actual behaviour, human or otherwise, and the determination of praxeological units(actions) in time domain and in their relation to property. All we hear from Mises on this is assertive claims with no backing.