WEBVTT NOTE Robbins vs. Harrod: The War Over Epistemology, 1938 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:11.000 Pat Barnett, who is the wonderful lady who coordinates all of these events, sent me an email two nights ago saying, 2 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:16.000 would I be needing a PowerPoint projection system? 3 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:26.000 And I pointed out to her that I've never learned how to use an overhead projector, so that this will be a true Austrian presentation. 4 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:33.000 No graphs, no charts, no equations. Just, just good talk. 5 00:00:39.440 --> 00:00:43.040 Hello, don't you know I'm in the middle of giving a speech? 6 00:00:43.040 --> 00:00:45.620 Hello? 7 00:00:45.620 --> 00:00:51.920 No, everybody clap. 8 00:00:51.920 --> 00:00:53.960 Can I talk to you later? 9 00:00:53.960 --> 00:01:07.100 Thank you. Bye. My wife. As an aside, I go to... Yeah, it was real. I will hear about 10 00:01:07.100 --> 00:01:15.560 this later. It was for real. I love to go to an offbeat entertainment which is related 11 00:01:15.560 --> 00:01:23.280 to Scottish background folks and they have a lot of bagpipes and there is a sub-phenomenon 12 00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:31.120 called a bagpipe rock and roll. It really does exist. It's quite lively. And whenever 13 00:01:31.120 --> 00:01:38.520 this one group stands up and begins, there'll always be one person whose phone goes off. 14 00:01:38.520 --> 00:01:42.120 And the lead guy who plays the pipe stops the pipe, not during, of course you can't 15 00:01:42.120 --> 00:01:48.120 hear anyone playing it, but he stops, walks into the audience, grabs the phone and says, 16 00:01:48.120 --> 00:02:02.120 Don't you know this is a bagpipe concert, and closes it, and you can see every other guy in the room clicking it to the off setting, so I understand it. 17 00:02:02.120 --> 00:02:14.120 The talk that I'm giving today is on epistemology, which is the famous philosophical question of what do we know and how can we know it. 18 00:02:14.120 --> 00:02:34.400 You would imagine that in academia, that this would be an important topic that would be introduced early, certainly by upper division level, in any program in America, in whatever field you're dealing with. 19 00:02:34.400 --> 00:02:44.960 Yet in terms of the actual curriculum programs across the country, it's almost never discussed. 20 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:52.560 At best, a student will be given a course on methodology, which means essentially, how 21 00:02:52.560 --> 00:02:55.040 do you do some research? 22 00:02:55.040 --> 00:03:01.700 If it's related to mathematics or pseudo-mathematics of the social sciences, there'll be discussions 23 00:03:01.700 --> 00:03:09.180 of How You Use Mathematical Terminology, How You Run Regression Procedures, and so forth, 24 00:03:09.180 --> 00:03:15.280 all on the assumption that the methodology in question leads to some kind of knowledge 25 00:03:15.280 --> 00:03:18.580 of the external world. 26 00:03:18.580 --> 00:03:24.380 But in terms of presenting the case for that, it is virtually never done. 27 00:03:24.380 --> 00:03:26.900 Even at the upper division level, you don't see it. 28 00:03:26.900 --> 00:03:31.340 Even at the graduate school level, you rarely have a course on it, and if anybody offered 29 00:03:31.340 --> 00:03:45.900 In Austrian economic circles, this is not true. 30 00:03:45.900 --> 00:03:52.940 Because many of us have come to our knowledge of economics by way of Mises and ultimately 31 00:03:52.940 --> 00:04:00.500 by way of human action, we always face that first hundred pages of human action, which 32 00:04:00.500 --> 00:04:05.760 which are all devoted to the question of epistemology. 33 00:04:05.760 --> 00:04:12.260 I believe those 100 pages serve much the same function as the book of Leviticus does for 34 00:04:12.260 --> 00:04:16.700 the guy who says I'm going to read the Bible cover to cover and he gets to Leviticus and 35 00:04:16.700 --> 00:04:19.340 he stops. 36 00:04:19.340 --> 00:04:24.840 Time and time again this is the problem facing the new student who is beginning to read Human 37 00:04:24.840 --> 00:04:30.940 in Action, and he can't get over that first hump of the section on epistemology. 38 00:04:30.940 --> 00:04:35.200 And there's no other book that I've ever found in any of the social sciences which 39 00:04:35.200 --> 00:04:40.400 devotes a comparable amount of space to epistemology and certainly not during the first hundred 40 00:04:40.400 --> 00:04:41.400 pages. 41 00:04:41.400 --> 00:04:42.400 It's unique. 42 00:04:42.400 --> 00:04:44.560 Now why is this the case? 43 00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:54.360 The reason for this is that Mises made a fundamental break in his lifetime, certainly by the middle 44 00:04:54.360 --> 00:05:04.840 of the 20th Century with what we know as the kind of experimental, step-by-step, inductionist 45 00:05:04.840 --> 00:05:15.860 approach that virtually all of modern economics, econometrics, all of the modern practices 46 00:05:15.860 --> 00:05:23.180 go to this collection of data and relating the collection of data to theories which may 47 00:05:23.180 --> 00:05:31.100 may or may not correspond to the data. It's the old line about, I've seen it happen, now 48 00:05:31.100 --> 00:05:36.420 I'm going to devise the theory to explain it. And Mises' approach, as you know, was 49 00:05:36.420 --> 00:05:42.940 deductivist. A handful of axioms, which he used then to deduce from a very simple number 50 00:05:42.940 --> 00:05:51.420 of axioms and few corollaries, this 900-page book, as Murray Rothbard said very early, 51 00:05:51.420 --> 00:06:00.140 on a Theory of Everything, and that was unique to Mises, and that is unique to our movement. 52 00:06:00.140 --> 00:06:06.580 So that when we focus on epistemology, we are not doing economics the way that most 53 00:06:06.580 --> 00:06:07.580 economists do it. 54 00:06:07.580 --> 00:06:10.860 Let me give you an example, which I did not know until this morning, but I thought I'd 55 00:06:10.860 --> 00:06:12.400 test it. 56 00:06:12.400 --> 00:06:20.620 You go onto Google and you search for economics epistemology. 57 00:06:20.620 --> 00:06:25.220 In the first ten hits, which is how most of us have our Google page set up, there are 58 00:06:25.220 --> 00:06:32.240 four references to Mises' book, Epistemological Problems of Economics. 59 00:06:32.240 --> 00:06:38.500 There is one link to my website on the Coase theorem and the other five, you have never 60 00:06:38.500 --> 00:06:41.360 heard of any of them. 61 00:06:41.360 --> 00:06:48.160 Now this is bizarre because Google, there are 900 and some thousand hits, but Mises 62 00:06:48.160 --> 00:06:54.520 is forty percent of the first page. This is unique to what we do. 63 00:06:54.520 --> 00:06:59.000 Now I say that as background because I'm going to be raising 64 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:02.440 the story of an issue and the issue is still a live 65 00:07:02.440 --> 00:07:09.240 issue but it is only folks like us to discuss the issue. 66 00:07:09.240 --> 00:07:14.120 Let's go back almost in fact almost exactly a century let us go back 67 00:07:14.120 --> 00:07:21.460 to 1912. Two books came out that year. We of course love the first one, The Theory of 68 00:07:21.460 --> 00:07:28.200 Money and Credit by Mises. The second one we are not so fond of, that's A. A. C. Pigou's 69 00:07:28.200 --> 00:07:38.280 book on the economics of welfare. In Pigou's book he extends an insight that was made by 70 00:07:38.280 --> 00:07:46.640 by Marshall, with respect to the doctrine of marginal utility, which of course is marginal 71 00:07:46.640 --> 00:07:54.440 declining utility, a fundamental feature of modern economic thought had been since the 72 00:07:54.440 --> 00:08:03.400 1870s when Menger and Jevons began reworking modern economic thought in terms of subjective 73 00:08:03.400 --> 00:08:11.000 Value Theory and, obviously, declining marginal value was an important point. 74 00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:20.600 And here is how the argument was used, both by Marshall, but especially by Pigou. 75 00:08:20.600 --> 00:08:33.260 The logic said if a millionaire gets one pound extra beyond his million pounds of income 76 00:08:33.260 --> 00:08:40.300 for the year. It is worth almost nothing to him. He's fulfilled all of the desires he 77 00:08:40.300 --> 00:08:47.060 had for the previous money. He's hardly aware of that extra pound. Now you take a man, poor 78 00:08:47.060 --> 00:08:55.100 man, making 25 pounds a year, and he gets an extra pound. That is a very, very valuable 79 00:08:55.100 --> 00:09:02.660 asset to him because he has many things he wants to buy, many unfulfilled desires. Then 80 00:09:02.660 --> 00:09:10.000 Then came the fast break, the sleight of hand. 81 00:09:10.000 --> 00:09:18.760 They said therefore if the government establishes a graduated income tax and redistributes that 82 00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:24.400 one pound of income from the millionaire to the man making only 25 pounds a year, there 83 00:09:24.400 --> 00:09:31.440 is a net increase of social utility because the millionaire will hardly miss that extra 84 00:10:01.440 --> 00:10:05.440 A Generation of Economists 85 00:10:05.440 --> 00:10:09.440 and Pigou got away with it for 20 years 86 00:10:09.440 --> 00:10:13.440 and then in 1932 87 00:10:13.440 --> 00:10:17.440 Lionel Robbins brought out his small 88 00:10:17.440 --> 00:10:21.440 book, classic book, an essay 89 00:10:21.440 --> 00:10:25.440 on the nature and significance of economic science. It is on the Mises website 90 00:10:25.440 --> 00:10:29.440 and it should be on the Mises website. This was a 91 00:10:29.440 --> 00:10:40.040 A revolutionary book, it had almost no equations, he kept it to 150 pages of argumentation, 92 00:10:40.040 --> 00:10:46.840 and he wrote it in order to be understood by non-economists, which is a unique set 93 00:10:46.840 --> 00:10:48.320 of propositions. 94 00:10:48.320 --> 00:10:58.280 And he was able, by the few pages in the final chapter, chapter 6, to deal with Pigou's 95 00:10:58.280 --> 00:11:05.720 and he argued as follows, while it is true that there is declining marginal 96 00:11:05.720 --> 00:11:11.920 utility for the income of an individual, there is no way to make interpersonal 97 00:11:11.920 --> 00:11:18.520 comparisons of subjective utility. There is no measuring device, objective 98 00:11:18.520 --> 00:11:24.400 measuring device, because modern economics teaches that all valuation is 99 00:11:24.400 --> 00:11:39.400 is subjective and there's no way to compare the value scale of one man versus another man or how he imputes value to his next pound or shilling of income. 100 00:11:39.400 --> 00:11:48.400 And so he said you cannot make a scientific statement based on the scientific logic of economics 101 00:11:48.400 --> 00:11:55.400 to justify the graduated income tax based on the theory of declining marginal utility. 102 00:11:58.320 --> 00:12:05.320 And in terms of what the original founders in the 1870s had said of the doctrine of marginal 103 00:12:06.720 --> 00:12:13.320 utility and that it did apply to an individual and they never branched out to say that it 104 00:12:13.320 --> 00:12:22.460 applied to something as broad and collective as social utility, the argument was consistent 105 00:12:22.460 --> 00:12:24.320 with the foundations of economics. 106 00:12:24.320 --> 00:12:33.780 And basically he overturned in just a few paragraphs the logic of both Marshall and Pigou. 107 00:12:33.780 --> 00:12:34.860 And there it stood. 108 00:12:34.860 --> 00:12:38.300 And it stood for six years. 109 00:12:38.300 --> 00:12:49.220 And then in 1938, Roy Herod, not yet Sir Roy Herod, just Roy Herod, the student, never 110 00:12:49.220 --> 00:12:53.740 really actually got a degree in economics, never got a Ph.D., but back in those days 111 00:12:53.740 --> 00:12:59.260 he got a great fellowship, so he was able to spend his life teaching economics, which 112 00:12:59.260 --> 00:13:03.980 in fact was following Keynes's tradition, who also didn't get a degree in economics. 113 00:13:03.980 --> 00:13:13.740 So they basically captured between them British economic opinion because Keynes edited the 114 00:13:13.740 --> 00:13:20.980 economic journal for years and then in 1945 Roy Herrod took over the editing of it and 115 00:13:20.980 --> 00:13:26.280 took it for another 15 or 16 powerful men intellectually. 116 00:13:26.280 --> 00:13:36.500 Inhered in a long article that was the outcome of a speech that he had given to what was 117 00:13:36.500 --> 00:13:43.360 peculiarly known as Section F, the British Society, which was the economics section of 118 00:13:43.360 --> 00:13:46.280 the British Association. 119 00:13:46.280 --> 00:13:47.280 He was the president. 120 00:13:47.280 --> 00:13:49.600 It was his presidential address. 121 00:13:49.600 --> 00:13:57.160 He gave a long paper and a longer speech called The Scope and Method of Economics, and it 122 00:13:57.160 --> 00:14:02.260 was published later in the year, in August, of the Economic Journal. 123 00:14:02.260 --> 00:14:07.700 Keynes put that one on a real fast track. 124 00:14:07.700 --> 00:14:12.460 And most of the article is imminently forgettable. 125 00:14:12.460 --> 00:14:13.840 It had no impact at all. 126 00:14:13.840 --> 00:14:22.280 But there was one section of the article in which he deliberately and specifically targeted 127 00:14:22.280 --> 00:14:29.680 Robbins and the argument that Robbins had presented in his book in 1932. 128 00:14:29.680 --> 00:14:41.260 And he said, well, if Robbins really believes this, that you cannot make interpersonal comparisons 129 00:14:41.260 --> 00:14:43.900 of Subjective Utility. 130 00:14:43.900 --> 00:14:51.660 And if he is really consistent with this position, then it is impossible for an economist in 131 00:14:51.660 --> 00:14:59.280 a scientific sense to make any kind of statement about the wisdom or lack of wisdom of any 132 00:14:59.280 --> 00:15:04.700 policy affecting more than one person, namely himself. 133 00:15:04.700 --> 00:15:12.380 that there is no scientific basis, therefore, for anything like practical advisory economics 134 00:15:12.380 --> 00:15:17.940 that there, in other words, there's no function for the economist whatsoever in any kind of 135 00:15:17.940 --> 00:15:22.340 a collective association. 136 00:15:22.340 --> 00:15:26.340 Now he didn't say the argument was wrong. 137 00:15:26.340 --> 00:15:29.260 He said the argument had implications. 138 00:15:29.260 --> 00:15:34.480 And then he backed off and he said, now let's tell you how we really do these things as 139 00:15:34.480 --> 00:15:42.040 as economists, we assume that there is an equality among men, and that men are sufficiently 140 00:15:42.040 --> 00:15:49.360 alike that we can make some kind of judgment about the effects of declining marginal utility 141 00:15:49.360 --> 00:15:53.120 in more than one individual, and of course what he was really saying, in the lives of 142 00:15:53.120 --> 00:15:56.640 millions of individuals if that would be necessary. 143 00:15:56.640 --> 00:16:03.720 That was his basic criticism of the position. 144 00:16:03.720 --> 00:16:08.040 Now that's a powerful argument, because it is consistent. 145 00:16:08.040 --> 00:16:13.840 It is consistent with the logic that Robbins had presented. 146 00:16:13.840 --> 00:16:19.300 That then it really means that you can't be in a position of making judgments or recommendations 147 00:16:19.300 --> 00:16:26.780 on policy unless you assume an equality in some loose sense unifying mankind. 148 00:16:26.780 --> 00:16:33.360 And once you make that assumption of equality, then you can make kind of accurate sort of 149 00:16:33.360 --> 00:16:40.320 of Reliable Judgments about the Redistribution of Income or anything else, Free Trade Policy, 150 00:16:40.320 --> 00:16:43.380 he gave that as an example. 151 00:16:43.380 --> 00:16:47.420 Now Robbins had to respond. 152 00:16:47.420 --> 00:16:57.380 And Robbins responded in December of 38 with about a six-page article defending himself 153 00:16:57.380 --> 00:17:02.060 knowing obviously that he was the target of it, and there's no doubt about it that he 154 00:17:02.060 --> 00:17:07.900 And he was the target of it because he had inflicted considerable epistemological pain 155 00:17:07.900 --> 00:17:11.220 on those Keynesians who were trying to redistribute income. 156 00:17:11.220 --> 00:17:15.420 So yeah, all right, they went after him. 157 00:17:15.420 --> 00:17:20.860 Now how did he respond? 158 00:17:20.860 --> 00:17:30.220 He responded by saying, well that's right, yeah you're right. 159 00:17:30.220 --> 00:17:40.740 And therefore, he said, the logic of economics, which is neutral and value free, cannot stand 160 00:17:40.740 --> 00:17:48.780 alone but must appeal to an ethical system that is outside the purview of economics and 161 00:17:48.780 --> 00:17:55.620 which is imported into economics in order to give meaning, ethical meaning, to the unified 162 00:17:55.620 --> 00:18:03.980 Humanity, who then we are going to provide advice for in the basis of the logic of value-free 163 00:18:03.980 --> 00:18:04.980 economics. 164 00:18:04.980 --> 00:18:10.180 That is, he surrendered the position of value-free economics with respect to any kind of policy 165 00:18:10.180 --> 00:18:18.220 matter and transferred it to an unnamed external ethical system, which he never defined and 166 00:18:18.220 --> 00:18:21.980 did not cite anybody as the example that he was going to use. 167 00:18:21.980 --> 00:18:27.900 He just said we will essentially all appeal to one ethical system or another and that 168 00:18:27.900 --> 00:18:37.580 within that framework then we will come back and give our advice as economists. 169 00:18:37.580 --> 00:18:38.580 That's the position. 170 00:18:38.580 --> 00:18:45.260 Now here's what I'm warning you if you are still in the game of citing footnotes hither 171 00:18:45.260 --> 00:18:56.780 Either and Yon, if you cite chapter six of Robin's classic book, you had better be aware 172 00:18:56.780 --> 00:19:03.620 of the fact that the critic will come back and say, by the way, in 1938, Robin's surrendered 173 00:19:03.620 --> 00:19:07.060 the position. 174 00:19:07.060 --> 00:19:12.380 Don't get caught flat-footed in this debate. 175 00:19:12.380 --> 00:19:17.700 And it went even beyond that. 176 00:19:17.700 --> 00:19:19.820 He went on to say the following. 177 00:19:19.820 --> 00:19:29.180 This was a kind of an interesting statement, I thought, as to what was bugging him. 178 00:19:29.180 --> 00:19:32.060 And he was bugged. 179 00:19:32.060 --> 00:19:35.500 He was deeply bugged. 180 00:19:35.500 --> 00:19:42.140 I want to quote directly from the paper. 181 00:19:42.140 --> 00:19:47.680 This is a long story about the genesis of two or three pages in an essay that was written 182 00:19:47.680 --> 00:19:55.020 some time ago and which was never expected to be the subject of much discussion. 183 00:19:55.020 --> 00:20:01.460 And if it were a matter of personal defense against all the accusations of imbecility, 184 00:20:01.460 --> 00:20:09.020 Social Indifference and even Sinister Interest, which have been made against their author. 185 00:20:09.020 --> 00:20:14.780 I certainly should not have thought it any more worthwhile writing now than at any time 186 00:20:14.780 --> 00:20:15.940 in the past. 187 00:20:15.940 --> 00:20:22.900 But I am distressed that anything that I have said should give rise to recurrent dispute 188 00:20:22.900 --> 00:20:28.940 which suggests to the outside world a disunity among economists which I am persuaded does 189 00:20:28.940 --> 00:20:30.820 not exist. 190 00:20:30.820 --> 00:20:44.140 My essay was meant to defend economics from lay misunderstanding, not to provoke new confusion. 191 00:20:44.140 --> 00:20:54.540 The book some time ago, a few pages, not really meant for public distribution, etc., etc. 192 00:20:54.540 --> 00:21:03.180 He had come under the gun and he was feeling the pain. 193 00:21:03.180 --> 00:21:11.500 Mises suffered from this through his entire career, Rothbard suffered from this during 194 00:21:11.500 --> 00:21:22.100 his entire career, and it in both cases made them probably meaner, tougher, more resistant 195 00:21:22.100 --> 00:21:29.480 to Criticism than they had been before. Some people are like steel and it tempers them, 196 00:21:29.480 --> 00:21:39.640 other people buckle. Lionel Robbins began the career of buckling. By 1946 and thereafter 197 00:21:39.640 --> 00:21:46.320 he became an open Keynesian. He had written the best book, probably the best short book 198 00:21:46.320 --> 00:21:56.280 ever written on the Great Depression in 1934 publicly repudiated that book, and finally 199 00:21:56.280 --> 00:22:00.280 towards the end of his life came to the conclusion that the best thing that they could do with 200 00:22:00.280 --> 00:22:07.900 British tax-paying money would be to subsidize students to go to public universities as a 201 00:22:07.900 --> 00:22:09.960 redistribution of wealth. 202 00:22:09.960 --> 00:22:29.360 Now I stand here under the name Lionel Robbins, which under that should say 1927 to 1937. 203 00:22:29.360 --> 00:22:30.840 People break under pressure. 204 00:22:30.840 --> 00:22:35.320 They break for many reasons. 205 00:22:35.320 --> 00:22:45.400 And if you think, when you look back at what he said, what he actually said, he was, in 206 00:22:45.400 --> 00:22:50.160 1932, he was really hardcore. 207 00:22:50.160 --> 00:22:55.180 He said, at first the plausibility of the argument is overwhelming, but on closer inspection 208 00:22:55.180 --> 00:22:58.780 it has seemed to be merely specious. 209 00:22:58.780 --> 00:23:05.160 Now that's not exactly standard academic language, calling an opponent, namely Pigou, 210 00:23:05.160 --> 00:23:32.160 He said the law of diminishing marginal utility, here invoked, does not follow in the least from the fundamental conception of economic goods and it makes assumptions which, whether they are true or false, can never be verified by observation or introspection. 211 00:23:32.160 --> 00:23:36.680 He made this fundamental to his epistemology in 1932. 212 00:23:36.680 --> 00:23:41.040 By 38, when Herod said, if you hold this, 213 00:23:41.040 --> 00:23:44.520 you can't give advice on anything, including free trade, 214 00:23:44.520 --> 00:23:45.300 he backs off. 215 00:23:45.300 --> 00:23:46.800 And he says, well, we're going to appeal 216 00:23:46.800 --> 00:23:48.680 to an outside ethical system, and then we 217 00:23:48.680 --> 00:23:51.520 can offer judgments in terms of the ethical system. 218 00:23:51.520 --> 00:23:54.120 And that raises the question, what kind of ethical system? 219 00:23:56.720 --> 00:23:58.480 Now, let's be reasonable about this. 220 00:23:58.480 --> 00:24:11.480 This battle still goes on in our groups because Mises came in the name of value-free neutral economics which did not appeal to ethics, correct? 221 00:24:11.480 --> 00:24:25.480 And Rothbard comes and says, yes you can use the methodology, which is value-free in terms of the logic of human action, but you dare not cut it off from ethics. 222 00:24:25.480 --> 00:24:48.480 So, Mises was holding to the older utilitarianism and Rothbard self-consciously goes to natural law theory and bases his entire system of analysis, social system of analysis, in terms of what he presents in the Ethics of Liberty, which is an ethics-based system. 223 00:24:48.480 --> 00:24:51.480 This fight goes on. 224 00:24:51.480 --> 00:25:01.480 Now, I like to go around bugging guys myself. I like to bug them saying, why haven't you written this and why haven't you written that and why don't you do a video series and so forth? 225 00:25:01.480 --> 00:25:16.480 So, David Gordon, who isn't here, David, you need to do a book on this question. You need to do a book, David, that takes it all the way back to 1871 with the development of marginal utility theory 226 00:25:16.480 --> 00:25:28.480 and take it right up to the present on the question of how does ethics interact with supposedly value-free economics based on declining marginal utility. 227 00:25:28.480 --> 00:25:33.480 This is a reasonable request. You got it, David? He's not here. I can say this. 228 00:25:33.480 --> 00:25:41.480 But I really mean it. Because David Gordon, I think, of any man that we have had in this movement for the last hundred years, 229 00:25:41.480 --> 00:25:46.600 is probably the most qualified philosopher to deal with this question and make it 230 00:25:46.600 --> 00:25:52.440 readable for the rest of us because he has that ability. These fights go on. They 231 00:25:52.440 --> 00:25:57.640 are not peripheral. The general economic teaching in your standard university, 232 00:25:57.640 --> 00:26:02.480 they know nothing of this. Nothing of this. They're not interested in this kind 233 00:26:02.480 --> 00:26:07.520 of question because, first of all, it's not stated in mathematical formula and 234 00:26:07.520 --> 00:26:10.520 And secondly, it raises the question of ethics. 235 00:26:10.520 --> 00:26:14.520 And they don't want either one. 236 00:26:14.520 --> 00:26:25.520 It is imperative that we keep struggling with these ideas and dealing with these ideas and not walk away with them, especially in our movement because this movement above all other movements, 237 00:26:25.520 --> 00:26:30.520 and this is really not an exaggeration, above all other movements in modern economics, 238 00:26:30.520 --> 00:26:36.320 This movement that is Austrian School of Economics is most committed to a systematic defense 239 00:26:36.320 --> 00:26:42.320 of an accurate epistemology. And if our guys abandon this battle and don't continue to 240 00:26:42.320 --> 00:26:48.240 work with these issues, then we've really spun our wheels for the last hundred years 241 00:26:48.240 --> 00:26:53.400 and I think that's probably not a very good idea. So if anybody wants to do a term paper, 242 00:26:53.400 --> 00:27:00.400 Large Report, Small Book, Video, Contact Jeff Tucker. He'll publish anything anyway. 243 00:27:02.400 --> 00:27:08.800 That guy wants to get content out so Google gets Mises Org up another notch. Do it. This 244 00:27:08.800 --> 00:27:14.560 is a live topic. It is not a dead issue and I encourage any of you, all of you, to get 245 00:27:14.560 --> 00:27:15.560 to work on it.