Economic Calculation and Education

A key difference between Austrian economics and the neoclassical-mathematical economics developed in the mid-twentieth century by Paul Samuelson and others is the assumption by the latter that people are essentially omniscient. What neoclassical economists call “rationality” effectively means omniscience. When the agents in neoclassical models face any uncertainty, the uncertainty is always fully understood in advance; for instance, a stock’s value tomorrow might be drawn from a normal distribution with a known mean and variance. Without the assumption of omniscience, the Austrian school faces the important question of how people can make economic decisions in a complex, uncertain world.

Ludwig von Mises’ answer (see his 1920 essay, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth) was that capitalist entrepreneurs calculate in monetary terms. That is, they use the prices of the immediate past as their starting data, and attempt to direct factors of production in such a way as to maximize the spread between costs and revenues. If their predictions of price changes are good, they earn profits. If their predictions are bad, they earn losses. Thus, their direction of scarce resources is subject to immediate and consequential feedback allowing a selective process for only the best entrepreneurial forecasting methods. Without monetary exchange and prices, the problem of directing factors of production to their highest uses becomes intractable.

An interesting thing about Mises’ calculation argument is that it does not only relate to socialism, but to free, capitalist societies also. Mises states that, “Economic goods only have part in this system [of monetary calculation] in proportion to the extent to which they may be exchanged for money.” Thus, when a good cannot be exchanged for money, for any reason, it is subject to a Misesian calculation problem. Continue reading Economic Calculation and Education

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The Austrian Cult and Mathematical Economics with Ash Navabi

In this episode, Ash Navabi discusses whether the Austrian School of Economics is a cult and the value of mathematics in economic theory. Ash is an economics student at Ryerson University.

Ash wrote an article responding to recent criticisms of the Austrian school by Keynesian bloggers Noah Smith and Paul Krugman. Krugman approvingly referenced Smith’s attacks on the “hermetic system that is Austrians.” Just a week later he made the following telling comment about the economics mainstream:

“And modern academic economics is very much an interlocking set of old-boy networks; to some extent this has become even more true since the decline of the journals, with most discourse taking place via working papers long before formal publication. I used to refer to the international trade circuit as the floating crap game — the same 30 or 40 people meeting in conferences all over the world, reading and citing each others’ work; it’s the same in each sub-field. And to some extent it’s inevitable: there’s so much stuff out there, and you have to filter somehow, so you mainly read stuff by people you know and people they tell you are worth reading.”

Ash was quick to point out that, by the logic of the people who deride Austrian economists as “cultish” because they interact mainly with one another, each of the “old-boy networks” Paul Krugman refers to (that is, each sub-field of mainstream economics) must also be a cult. Continue reading The Austrian Cult and Mathematical Economics with Ash Navabi

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Mainstream Economists Rediscover the Marginal Pair

I have published my first blog post over at Mises Canada. The post relates Böhm-Bawerk’s price theory to modern job-matching models. Here are the key paragraphs:

[M]odern labour economists’ use of discrete reasoning in job-matching models should be lauded as a step towards greater realism. In these models, there are a discrete number of unemployed workers seeking to fill a discrete number of job openings. These models are summarized by Alvaredo, Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez:

“[I]n the now-standard models of job-matching, a job emerges as the result of the costly creation of a vacancy by the employer and of job search by the employee. A match creates a positive surplus, and there is Nash bargaining over the division of the surplus, leading to a proportion β going to the worker and (1 – β) to the employer.”[4]

In these models, as in the real world, workers and employers must find each other before they can engage in exchange. Often, the model is set up such that only one worker and one employer find each other at a given time, making their exchange a case of isolated exchange. If multiple workers or employers discover each other at the same time, then Böhm-Bawerk’s analysis of one- or two-sided competition applies. Both workers and employers form their valuations based on their expectations of the other opportunities they might find if they engage in further search.

However, while Böhm-Bawerk and his heirs in the Austrian school are satisfied to leave the determination of price unspecified within the range bounded by the marginal pairs, modern economists feel the need to uniquely determine prices within their models, thus the addition of Nash bargaining and the nebulous “β” term, the “bargaining power” of the worker. β must be precisely specified and known so that the homines economici in search models can form their valuations based on perfect knowledge of the random processes determining the future outcomes of search and of their exact payoffs under all possible matchings. If economists were to admit that the division of surplus is inherently idiosyncratic and unpredictable, their models would break.

Furthermore, simply by referring to “bargaining power,” economists imply more than their models can support. Suppose that the marginal pairs determined that the price of a given item should fall between $396 and $412. If the actual price attained is $400, should we conclude that buyers’ “bargaining power” is four times that of sellers, or that they settled on $400 simply because it is a round number acceptable to both buyers and sellers? One cannot know.

Read the whole thing.

Gold and the Great Depression with James Caton

In this episode, James Caton discusses the classical and inter-war gold standards. James is an economics PhD student at George Mason University.

Gold has many qualities that make it an ideal money: It is valuable, scarce, divisible, and easy to transport. It is also easy to verify the value of a given amount of gold: The Old Testament references weights and scales being used to measure gold. Ancient people could verify the purity of the gold by observing its water displacement.

Before 1870, only Great Britain was on a gold standard, while gold, silver, and other metals would circulate freely alongside one another throughout the rest of Europe. The classical gold standard began in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, when the victorious Germany demonetized silver in favour of gold and the rest of Western Europe followed suit (see Caton on the deflation that resulted from the demonetization of silver). America converted to the gold standard in 1879 upon redeeming the Civil War greenbacks for gold. Continue reading Gold and the Great Depression with James Caton

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