I’m left wondering something. Does this forego the possibility that a person can attribute numbers to the severity of their discomforts?
Imagine a crusoe economy where someone is all alone and just has to fend for himself:
There is no external measurement of his wants. He doesn’t use these numbers to put a monetary price on anything. He just uses these numbers to reason out how badly he wants something.
This is just one possible scheme for how a person would figure out their valuations of things they want. Other schemes are possible.
Are there any problems with this in that it violates austrian economics?
This is pretty much it. Basically, valuation is only meaningful within the context of actually felt values. There are no ‘values’ exogenous to actually holding values. So to talk about an amount, scale or type of value other than with reference to the subject who actually experiences it is nonsense. This actually predates the Austrian school, it is what I usually call Continental Subjectivism. But the Austrians were the firsts to rigorously apply this to economic science.
First of all people don’t value entire categories like “satisfaction of hunger” and “alleviation of cold”. Nor do they value entire categories like “that which satisfies hunger” or “that which alleviates cold”. They rank, in order of preference, concrete quantities of goods according to the specific extent to which that concrete quantity relieves a felt uneasiness.
If the matter at hand truly is a question of quantity X of food vs. quantity Y of shelter, then he either prefers one or the other. There is no measurement involved. If, after deciding based on felt desires, which he prefers, and in a quantaphrenetic reverie, amuses himself by representing his valuations with numerical values, then he decides the numbers based on his felt valuation, not the other way around. The numbers are just a silly game he plays in his head. They play no role in determining whether he actually prefers X or Y.
Ok. So there is a matter of how much of each thing can be obtained, and the expectation that it can alleviate uneasiness. I suppose that brings in all the stuff about marginal value into the picture here. I’ll need to review some of that stuff to make sure I get the entire picture correct.
I’ll have some more questions regarding this stuff later.
Great. Makes perfect sense and is in line with what I was thinking.
Truth be told, I sometimes wonder if research will one day perhaps be able to give these things numbers. After all, feelings are coincident with a certain amount of chemicals released in certain parts of the brain. So is it not theoretically possible to measure the amount of discomfort chemical released when hungry, and when cold etc?
Now one may argue that intensity of feeling is not linearly proportional to the amount of discomfort chemical. OK, but there is SOME relationship, which theoretically can be discovered.
As an analogy, the amount of rust in a robots circuitry will tell you something about how much repair it needs.
I’m not saying it’s easy, or that what we know now is enough to make it practical or even possible. But there certainly is no praxeological theorem stating it is impossible for all time to do it. It’s not like saying 2+2=5.
