WEBVTT NOTE Fundamentals of Human Action 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.320 Now, Rothbard begins with a discussion of what action is. 2 00:00:05.320 --> 00:00:12.200 Remember, the fundamental axiom of praxeology is that man acts, human beings act. 3 00:00:12.200 --> 00:00:17.160 So, he defines action as purpose, he says on page one, 4 00:00:17.160 --> 00:00:23.760 human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior. 5 00:00:23.760 --> 00:00:27.280 And he then goes on to say that everybody acts. 6 00:00:27.280 --> 00:00:30.280 So this is a characteristic of human beings. 7 00:00:30.280 --> 00:00:41.280 Now, in the questions that the fellows submitted, there were some interesting questions about this. 8 00:00:41.280 --> 00:00:46.280 At this point, Alex Weller, I think, has some questions. 9 00:00:46.280 --> 00:00:57.920 He asks, supposing you have an investment firm that has a computer program that is able 10 00:00:57.920 --> 00:01:04.800 to make investments, would you say that the computers are then acting? Well, that would 11 00:01:04.800 --> 00:01:11.520 really depend on what views you might take about artificial intelligence. I would tend 12 00:01:11.520 --> 00:01:21.520 I begin to think that since one of the requirements for acting is that the person, that the actor have desires, the computers wouldn't be acting. 13 00:01:21.520 --> 00:01:34.520 I mean, there are various arguments on whether computers can reason or think, but I don't think they've got computers that have desires yet, so I'd say no, they wouldn't. 14 00:01:34.520 --> 00:01:43.320 Now, another question he had was, supposing someone is under medicine to control schizophrenia, 15 00:01:43.320 --> 00:01:47.520 would that, would his behavior still count as action? 16 00:01:47.520 --> 00:01:54.680 Well, I think it would, as long as he still had certain purposes that he was trying to 17 00:01:54.680 --> 00:01:55.680 achieve. 18 00:01:55.680 --> 00:02:03.040 It isn't a requirement for action that you have just unmodified purposes or purposes 19 00:02:03.040 --> 00:02:08.040 that aren't the result of someone else trying to induce you to do things. 20 00:02:08.040 --> 00:02:15.040 It's just that you have to have purposes in your behavior. 21 00:02:15.040 --> 00:02:16.040 You have purposes. 22 00:02:16.040 --> 00:02:22.040 Now, there was one question rather surprising, although it was a very interesting one, 23 00:02:22.040 --> 00:02:31.040 that was raised by Mr. McCaffrey, and he thinks there's a possible divergence between Mises and Rothbard, 24 00:02:31.040 --> 00:02:46.040 where Rothbard says that all human beings act. He says on page two, we could not conceive of human beings who did not act purposefully, who have no ends in view that they desire an attempt to attain. 25 00:02:46.040 --> 00:02:54.620 Now, Mr. McCaffrey points out that Mises says about, when he talks about the socialist economy, 26 00:02:54.620 --> 00:03:01.120 he says only the dictator acts, no one else acts, so he says, well isn't this a contradiction, 27 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:06.160 you know, because Rothbard is saying we all act, but Mises says in the socialist economy 28 00:03:06.160 --> 00:03:12.080 only the dictator acts, but actually there you see, I think Mises is using action in 29 00:03:12.080 --> 00:03:18.120 in a kind of a, he doesn't mean it in a strict way, Rothbard is, what he says, what Mises 30 00:03:18.120 --> 00:03:25.040 says in this passage, it's on, in Human Action, where he says that all the other people are 31 00:03:25.040 --> 00:03:32.080 following orders, it's only the dictator has original ideas, he's the one who's formulated 32 00:03:32.080 --> 00:03:37.840 the plan, everyone else is following orders. So following orders counts as action in the 33 00:03:37.840 --> 00:03:53.840 This is the sense Rothbard is intending. Of course, Mises uses this sense also for most of human action, but here in that particular passage he just means that people are responding to what the dictator says. 34 00:03:53.840 --> 00:04:07.840 So, action then is any kind of purposeful behavior, and Rothbard points out that it doesn't have to involve any doing something. 35 00:04:07.840 --> 00:04:20.840 If you're waiting, that also counts as action. You're just sitting, say you've decided you're just going to not do anything, you're going to stay where you are. 36 00:04:20.840 --> 00:04:26.840 or that counts as action. You don't have to change what you're doing to act. 37 00:04:26.840 --> 00:04:31.840 Now another point, it's interesting, I once heard this from a lecture by Elizabeth Anscombe, 38 00:04:31.840 --> 00:04:34.840 who's one of the great 20th century philosophers. 39 00:04:34.840 --> 00:04:40.840 Action, other than waiting, doesn't have to involve physical movements at all. 40 00:04:40.840 --> 00:04:48.840 For example, suppose I said all those who want to vote for me for president 41 00:04:48.840 --> 00:05:06.840 signify by remaining seated. So suppose you, I see everyone who voted for me will remain seated. So by remaining seated, you voted. That's an action, you see. So you don't have to actually, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to change your physical movement in order to act. 42 00:05:06.840 --> 00:05:18.240 Now, what Rothbard is going to do with this fundamental point that human beings act, he's 43 00:05:18.240 --> 00:05:27.920 then going to derive the whole body of economics from that axiom with a few, with help of some 44 00:05:27.920 --> 00:05:38.440 subsidiary axioms as well, such as that leisure is the good, which don't follow from the axiom. 45 00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:46.000 Now, some people have, a lot of people have problems with this view. They say, well, and 46 00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:52.320 there were some of the questions that we had were critical, were raising points on this. 47 00:05:52.320 --> 00:06:01.320 The main question was, how can you say that, if you, I think Edward Perry raised this point, 48 00:06:01.320 --> 00:06:11.320 how can you say that if you're talking about the empirical world, how can you say that you're deriving truth about it a priori? 49 00:06:11.320 --> 00:06:19.320 A priori would mean apart from experience, but then how can it apply to the empirical world? 50 00:06:19.320 --> 00:06:33.320 I think he also raised the point, doesn't Rothbard himself say that the conclusion of economics applies to the empirical world, so how can he then say that it's a priori? 51 00:06:33.320 --> 00:06:48.320 Well, here I think you have to, some people also ask, I think Mr. Diorio asked, isn't there a difference between Rothbard and Mises? 52 00:06:48.320 --> 00:06:55.320 He thinks that Mises sometimes allows that parts of economics is to be tested empirically, 53 00:06:55.320 --> 00:07:01.320 but Rothbard seems to want to derive all of economics deductively, thinks there's a difference there. 54 00:07:01.320 --> 00:07:11.320 So, I wanted to just say a few things on what's involved in the praxeology, the praxeological method. 55 00:07:11.320 --> 00:07:12.320 Method 56 00:07:12.320 --> 00:07:18.600 Now, when you say something is a priori, what you're talking about is how, say, proposition 57 00:07:18.600 --> 00:07:24.160 is a priori, you're talking about how you know the proposition to be true. 58 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:29.440 Say if you say 2 plus 2 equals 4, how do we know this is true? 59 00:07:29.440 --> 00:07:38.360 Well, you know it just by thinking about it, you see that it's true, you don't have to 60 00:07:38.360 --> 00:07:54.360 Test it out to see whether it's true. You don't have to keep taking collections of two objects, another collection of two objects, and adding them up to see whether you get four objects. You see right away, you realize the proposition is true. 61 00:07:54.360 --> 00:08:03.360 The key point to realize here is that, as I say, this is a matter of how you know that the proposition is true. 62 00:08:03.360 --> 00:08:08.360 It's not a matter of how you get the concepts that you're using. 63 00:08:08.360 --> 00:08:15.360 It isn't a requirement for an a priori truth that you don't get the concepts from experience. 64 00:08:15.360 --> 00:08:21.360 It's just how, once you've got whatever the concepts in the proposition, how you then know the proposition is true. 65 00:08:21.360 --> 00:08:27.160 So you see, here's the real difference between Mises and Rothbard. 66 00:08:27.160 --> 00:08:31.160 They're really the way they do it. The economics is the same. 67 00:08:31.160 --> 00:08:40.360 They start off with the action axiom, and then they deduce various theorems from it. 68 00:08:40.360 --> 00:08:47.760 And it's not true that, say, Rothbard thinks the whole of economics is deductive, 69 00:08:47.760 --> 00:08:55.400 because remember he says that the one that leisure is a consumer's good is not something 70 00:08:55.400 --> 00:09:01.040 that falls from the action, it's exactly the same, but the key difference is Rothbard thinks 71 00:09:01.040 --> 00:09:09.400 that we get our concepts from experience, but then once we get the concepts then we 72 00:09:09.400 --> 00:09:14.080 can think about them, we can reason about them, and we can realize that there's certain 73 00:09:14.080 --> 00:09:21.040 necessary relationships that apply among these concepts, but Mises was more influenced by 74 00:09:21.040 --> 00:09:27.600 Kant and he thought that the mind structures experience in a certain way, unless it's 75 00:09:27.600 --> 00:09:33.440 structured experience in this way, we wouldn't be able to have coherent experiences at all. 76 00:09:33.440 --> 00:09:41.120 So what Mises thinks is that what we're doing in our prior reasoning is just applying a 77 00:09:41.120 --> 00:09:49.680 a certain structure that the mind gives to experience, whereas Rothbard takes a view more 78 00:09:49.680 --> 00:09:56.680 from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, that we get our concepts by abstraction from experience. 79 00:09:56.680 --> 00:10:04.680 That's a rather three or four minute summary of differences between Kant and Aristotle. 80 00:10:04.680 --> 00:10:10.600 That's Walter that said I should give some jokes, so that would be my first joke trying 81 00:10:10.600 --> 00:10:16.600 I'm going to give a summary of those two philosophies in a couple minutes. 82 00:10:16.600 --> 00:10:28.600 All right, now, after Rothbard goes and explains what action is, he has a very important point about action. 83 00:10:28.600 --> 00:10:38.600 He says, page 7, another fundamental implication derived from the existence of human action is the uncertainty of the future. 84 00:10:38.600 --> 00:10:52.600 What does he mean by that? Well, supposing I want to do something, whatever it is I have some end in view and I have means that I propose to achieve it, 85 00:10:52.600 --> 00:11:00.600 I can't think that what's going to happen is fixed regardless of what I do. 86 00:11:00.600 --> 00:11:11.600 Say, if I say I want to end this lecture immediately, run out of the room, I have to think it's possible for me to do that. 87 00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:21.600 If I thought it was fixed that I couldn't possibly do that, that I have to remain here, then I wouldn't be able to, it would not make sense for me to act. 88 00:11:21.600 --> 00:11:37.600 The notion of action presupposes that the future is open, at least in the sense that I think it's possible for me to realize whatever it is I want to do. 89 00:11:37.600 --> 00:12:04.400 do. There are some economists like Ludwig Lachmann as an example, isn't it, who was an Austrian economist, and then G.L.S. Schackel, who was not an Austrian, but who was a friend of Lachmann, who take this in a very, this notion of uncertainty of the future, very radical, since they say we just don't know anything at all about the future. 90 00:12:04.400 --> 00:12:16.400 This is not part of Austrian economics. This is just a particular view that they hold, but this is not what Rothbard means by uncertainty of the future. 91 00:12:16.400 --> 00:12:27.400 All it means is that when you're acting, you have to allow for the possibility that what you want to do can be achieved. 92 00:12:27.400 --> 00:12:42.400 If you think that the course of the world is absolutely fixed, regardless of what you do, then it would not make sense for you to act. You think that everything is fixed. 93 00:12:42.400 --> 00:12:55.400 Now, in action, what we're doing is we have a choice between various goals that we want. 94 00:12:55.400 --> 00:13:05.400 We have alternative actions open to us. So what Rothbard contends is that we rank our alternatives. 95 00:13:05.400 --> 00:13:11.400 We say, what are the things I would most want to do? What are the alternatives to open to me? 96 00:13:11.400 --> 00:13:17.400 And we always choose the one that's highest on our list of preferences. 97 00:13:17.400 --> 00:13:26.400 Say, if I have a choice, say, between giving this lecture, say, going and checking my computer messages, 98 00:13:26.400 --> 00:13:33.400 well, I'm going to choose to give a lecture because otherwise I won't be paid for my week here, 99 00:13:33.400 --> 00:13:39.400 and we wouldn't want that to happen. That just, that wouldn't bear thinking about. 100 00:13:39.400 --> 00:13:47.400 So, what we do, we rank our alternatives and we always choose the one that ranks highest. 101 00:13:47.400 --> 00:13:59.400 Now, Rothbard points out that we can't, when we're ranking these alternatives, we're not, 102 00:13:59.400 --> 00:14:06.400 we're just ranking one above the other, we're not measuring them in any way. 103 00:14:06.400 --> 00:14:11.400 we're just saying one alternative is higher than the other so what he says 104 00:14:11.400 --> 00:14:17.280 it's an ordinal rather than a cardinal measurement or utility so we're saying 105 00:14:17.280 --> 00:14:22.080 this is first this is second this is third there's an ordinal measure cardinal 106 00:14:22.080 --> 00:14:30.160 measure would be saying I prefer this five times as much as the second 107 00:14:30.160 --> 00:14:41.480 Alternative. So Rothbard said, there isn't any such unit. It doesn't say that we have 108 00:14:41.480 --> 00:14:53.560 some sort of constant unit that we can measure all the actions, all the choices on. So this 109 00:14:53.560 --> 00:15:04.560 This really knocks out one type of moral philosophy, at least, I shouldn't say knocks it out, it just makes things difficult for certain types of utilitarianism, 110 00:15:04.560 --> 00:15:14.560 propose that the way we should decide things is to maximize the happiness or pleasure, something, whatever, something else we maximize. 111 00:15:14.560 --> 00:15:34.560 Some types of utilitarianism, not all of them, assume that you can measure utility, and even worse than that, if it's a sin to think you can measure utility, even worse is to think you can measure utility among persons, make interpersonal comparisons of utility. 112 00:15:34.560 --> 00:15:40.560 You can't do that according to Rothbard. You just rank the alternatives in order. 113 00:15:40.560 --> 00:16:10.560 Now, there's a very interesting question, I think, in Bob Murphy's excellent study guide, I think, in one of his study questions. I think it's number five. He asked something. This, he says here, let me quote this. He said, suppose someone said, I like steak more than burgers, and I like burgers more than hot dogs, but my preference for steak over burgers 114 00:16:10.560 --> 00:16:15.560 for Burgers is definitely stronger than my preference for burgers over hot dogs. 115 00:16:15.560 --> 00:16:19.560 What do you think Rothbard would say about this statement? 116 00:16:19.560 --> 00:16:24.560 And I think he naturally wants the answer. 117 00:16:24.560 --> 00:16:29.560 Rothbard would reject this because you can't have measurements of utility. 118 00:16:29.560 --> 00:16:33.560 But the question one might raise here is, 119 00:16:33.560 --> 00:16:39.560 aren't statements like that ones we make all the time? 120 00:16:39.560 --> 00:16:47.360 time, we would say something like, well, I really like watching professional wrestling. 121 00:16:47.360 --> 00:16:57.280 If the choice between wrestling and watching the Republican convention, I'm going to really 122 00:16:57.280 --> 00:16:59.360 like wrestling much better. 123 00:16:59.360 --> 00:17:00.360 Who wouldn't? 124 00:17:00.360 --> 00:17:08.600 So, all right, so we say that, and then suppose it's a choice though between watching one 125 00:17:08.600 --> 00:17:14.600 Program, and another you say, well, I really don't care that much which program I'm watching. 126 00:17:14.600 --> 00:17:20.600 Don't we make statements like that all the time? And you see, I think that's perfectly consistent 127 00:17:20.600 --> 00:17:25.600 with what Rothbard is saying, because what Rothbard's point is, when we make statements, 128 00:17:25.600 --> 00:17:30.600 would be when we make statements like that, we're not claiming there's some unit of measure. 129 00:17:30.600 --> 00:17:36.600 This is just in an ordinary language sense we can indicate we have strong preferences for certain things. 130 00:17:36.600 --> 00:17:42.680 and other things, that's not at all ruled out by ordinary, by praxeology, this is just 131 00:17:42.680 --> 00:17:46.320 an ordinary expression. 132 00:17:46.320 --> 00:17:53.920 Now we now, I want to get into one of the most important parts of Austrian economics 133 00:17:53.920 --> 00:18:01.480 that Rothbard discusses in this chapter, the law of marginal utility, diminishing marginal 134 00:18:01.480 --> 00:18:06.240 utility, which he derives from the concept of action. 135 00:18:06.240 --> 00:18:17.800 Now, he says, supposing we have a number of different units of the same good, now we have, 136 00:18:17.800 --> 00:18:23.200 here before we can go on with explaining a dimension, marginal utility, we have a problem 137 00:18:23.200 --> 00:18:28.040 here, and this is one I think Harry David raised this problem, other people have raised 138 00:18:28.040 --> 00:18:29.600 this also. 139 00:18:29.600 --> 00:18:36.880 Rothbard says, when you talk about units of the good, he says, page 23, in these examples, 140 00:18:36.880 --> 00:18:43.400 the units of the good have been interchangeable from the point of view of the actor, and he 141 00:18:43.400 --> 00:18:49.360 says later in that, in the same paragraph, when a commodity is in such a way available 142 00:18:49.360 --> 00:18:55.600 in specific homogeneous units, equally capable of rendering the same service to the actor, 143 00:18:55.600 --> 00:19:01.160 This available stock is called a supply. A supply of a good is available in specific 144 00:19:01.160 --> 00:19:08.560 units, each perfectly substitutable for every other. So, you have here the notion of supply. 145 00:19:08.560 --> 00:19:14.600 All the units are perfectly substitutable for each other. Now, the problem that Harry 146 00:19:14.600 --> 00:19:20.160 David raised is, well, isn't it also one of the teachings of Austrian economics that 147 00:19:20.160 --> 00:19:28.760 You can't demonstrate indifference in action, so if supposing you have two identical units 148 00:19:28.760 --> 00:19:34.600 of the same good, say you pick one over the other, wouldn't you have to at least think 149 00:19:34.600 --> 00:19:41.200 that one is somehow better than the other, otherwise you couldn't choose one over the 150 00:19:41.200 --> 00:19:42.200 other? 151 00:19:42.200 --> 00:19:45.360 So is there a problem here? 152 00:19:45.360 --> 00:19:56.040 This point actually was raised in an article by Robert Nozick, who was one of the outstanding 153 00:19:56.040 --> 00:20:00.800 great 20th century philosophers, an article he did called On Austrian Methodology. 154 00:20:00.800 --> 00:20:05.660 I think it came out originally around 1974. 155 00:20:05.660 --> 00:20:09.640 You can look at that in his book Socratic Puzzles. 156 00:20:09.640 --> 00:20:11.960 It's a very important article. 157 00:20:11.960 --> 00:20:14.840 Walter Block had a reply to this article. 158 00:20:14.840 --> 00:20:44.840 I think came out in a different, it knows its article, it created it out originally, a journal called SinFest and then I think Walter's article was in a different journalist theory and decision, but you see what the problem is, it's supposed to be, how could your, you can't demonstrate indifference in action, but according to Rothbard, you can have a supply where you have, you're considering all the units of the good the same, it's a homogeneous good, 159 00:20:44.840 --> 00:20:48.520 Incidentally, one thing people should watch, this is worthy of the death pouncy. 160 00:20:48.520 --> 00:20:53.120 Some people pronounce, instead of saying homogeneous, they say homogenous. 161 00:20:53.120 --> 00:20:58.120 I mean, that's, if that isn't worthy of the death pouncy, I don't know what is. 162 00:20:58.120 --> 00:21:05.040 I, I, although I, one could think of probably, one could think of worse things, 163 00:21:05.040 --> 00:21:08.440 but that's really approaching the bottom. 164 00:21:08.440 --> 00:21:13.480 But, you see, there isn't really, I don't think there are various ways 165 00:21:13.480 --> 00:21:23.760 The key to it is what Rothbard says on the next page where he says the interchangeability 166 00:21:23.760 --> 00:21:29.120 of units in the supply of a good does not mean the concrete units are actually valued 167 00:21:29.120 --> 00:21:36.240 equally. They may and will be valued differently whenever their position in the supply is different. 168 00:21:36.240 --> 00:21:43.360 So what's the case when you say that you have identical units of a good, you're not 169 00:21:43.360 --> 00:22:08.360 Valuing the good at all, it's that you're just considering them as units of good. Now, what happens, say, if you're assigning one that you have to pick one of these units, well, somebody said, bring me a copy of Man Economy and State. You see, there are a number of them on the shelf. 170 00:22:08.360 --> 00:22:15.080 Well, wouldn't you have to pick one of them, so wouldn't you have to value one of these more than the other? 171 00:22:15.080 --> 00:22:26.280 Well, I don't think that's what's meant when people are talking about choices as value is showing non-indifference. 172 00:22:26.280 --> 00:22:31.200 What there, you're talking about a choice between different goods. 173 00:22:31.200 --> 00:22:36.640 You're saying what you're really talking about is you're picking one value over the other. 174 00:22:36.640 --> 00:23:02.640 When it's a case of goods that you just regard as perfectly identical, it isn't a question of choosing one thing over the other, you're certainly picking one numerical unit that's different from the other, but that doesn't involve choice in the same way that's being used in this other proposition, when you say indifference can't be demonstrated in action. 175 00:23:02.640 --> 00:23:10.840 Now, so what happens then, suppose you do have units of the same good, then according 176 00:23:10.840 --> 00:23:17.100 to the law of diminishing marginal utility, well, what you do is you would apply the first 177 00:23:17.100 --> 00:23:23.720 unit of the good to your most valued use, then next unit would be to your next most 178 00:23:23.720 --> 00:23:52.720 The last unit would be your least valued use. Now supposing you lose one of the units, somebody takes away one from you, it doesn't matter which one they take away, you're going to change things around so that you're only going to suffer the loss of the least valued of the uses. 179 00:23:52.720 --> 00:24:00.720 This is, that's the marginal unit. Rothbard says that this is, this can be deduced from the notion of action. 180 00:24:00.720 --> 00:24:11.720 I think there was one of the questioners raised some question, how does this follow law diminishing marginal utility follow from the action action? 181 00:24:11.720 --> 00:24:19.720 Well, the way it follows, you see, remember you have human beings act, that action involves use of means to achieve ends. 182 00:24:19.720 --> 00:24:26.720 how we rank our ends in order we go for the, we try to achieve our highest valued end first. 183 00:24:26.720 --> 00:24:34.720 So then if we have units of a certain means, we'll apply that unit to the highest valued use. 184 00:24:34.720 --> 00:24:36.720 You see, that's the deduction. 185 00:24:36.720 --> 00:24:42.720 Now there was one question, I thought very interesting one, I think from Edward Perry, he asked the question, 186 00:24:42.720 --> 00:24:53.720 Supposing it wasn't true, as we'll later see how Austrian Economics explains it, that prices are determined by the people's subjective valuations. 187 00:24:53.720 --> 00:25:05.720 Supposing that wasn't true, supposing we had some objective measure of value, would the law of diminishing marginal utility still be true? 188 00:25:05.720 --> 00:25:12.040 So, I think it would be because, you see, even if, say, some, let's imagine some cost 189 00:25:12.040 --> 00:25:16.560 of production theory were true, some labor theory value were true, it would still be 190 00:25:16.560 --> 00:25:22.080 the case that when someone obtained certain units of the good, you'd apply the good to 191 00:25:22.080 --> 00:25:27.280 your first value use, then the next unit to your second value. So, regardless of how the 192 00:25:27.280 --> 00:25:34.120 price was determined, this law would still hold true. Now, there's a complication there. 193 00:25:34.120 --> 00:26:04.120 I like complication, most people don't, so I won't go into this too much. There is a complication that if you think that these laws of the Austrian view of price determination can be deductively established, you think it's necessarily true, then the question that was being asked is if this law isn't true, what would then be the case? It's a counterfactual condition with an impossible antecedent, and the semantics 194 00:26:04.120 --> 00:26:10.040 and that type of condition aren't very well understood, so you could get into all sorts 195 00:26:10.040 --> 00:26:17.920 of interesting complications there, but I'm not going to go into those, basically because 196 00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:26.360 I don't want to. So, all right, and probably people wouldn't find it that interesting anyway. 197 00:26:26.360 --> 00:26:35.800 So let me see, I think, I just touched on a few points, let me see what would be, oh, 198 00:26:35.800 --> 00:26:39.900 there was one point I touched on before, I think this will maybe be the last one before 199 00:26:39.900 --> 00:26:48.340 we open it up for discussion. Rothbard says that one of the extra assumptions that he's 200 00:26:48.340 --> 00:26:56.220 He's putting in that is not something deduced from concept of action, is that leisure isn't good. 201 00:26:56.220 --> 00:27:06.940 That's to say, he thinks we could conceive of a world in which people just devoted every spare hour 202 00:27:06.940 --> 00:27:12.060 that they physically could to laboring, they didn't value leisure at all. 203 00:27:12.060 --> 00:27:23.560 And he said, page 44, everyone would be eager to work to the maximum capacity, since increased work would lead to increased production of desired consumer goods. 204 00:27:23.560 --> 00:27:28.660 All time not required for maintaining preserving capacity for work would be spent in labor. 205 00:27:28.660 --> 00:27:34.560 And he said, well, this isn't the way the world is. We're not like this. 206 00:27:34.560 --> 00:27:39.860 Now, there is an interesting problem raised, I think, and Harry David was one to raise this. 207 00:27:39.860 --> 00:27:52.860 He said, well, in order to consume goods, don't we have to have, at least for most consumer goods, don't we have to have some leisure to consume them? 208 00:27:52.860 --> 00:28:03.860 So what would be the point of people just producing, as Rothbard says, to get desired consumers' goods if they wouldn't have any time to consume the goods? 209 00:28:03.860 --> 00:28:14.860 This is a very good question, and I think we could see that the denying that leisure is a good would have very radical consequences. 210 00:28:14.860 --> 00:28:20.860 I think we would have to say there that it would have consequences of what the type of good desired would be. 211 00:28:20.860 --> 00:28:28.860 The only consumer's goods, presumably, would be ones that would be needed for physical maintenance of the person, 212 00:28:28.860 --> 00:28:33.980 of the Person, so you would have people just constantly laboring to produce more and more 213 00:28:33.980 --> 00:28:40.300 goods they needed to maintain themselves or otherwise they would just save them all up, 214 00:28:40.300 --> 00:28:46.180 so that would be a very different world from the actual world. 215 00:28:46.180 --> 00:28:50.300 I think just one final point which I want to mention, I think it's a very important 216 00:28:50.300 --> 00:28:57.300 one which Rothbard is one of the keys to understanding the praxeological method that Rothbard discusses 217 00:28:57.300 --> 00:29:09.020 is on page 75, is why do you, why do we have in Austrian economics, why do we have a verbal 218 00:29:09.020 --> 00:29:15.660 logic, why we, we, in Austrian economics, everything is done through words, if you look 219 00:29:15.660 --> 00:29:23.580 at the text, standard textbooks in neoclassical economics, they'll all be equations, they 220 00:29:23.580 --> 00:29:31.580 It looks like a math textbook, except of course if it's in econometrics work, they look like railway timetables. 221 00:29:31.580 --> 00:29:40.580 But the neoclassical books look like math textbooks. So what's so great about verbal logic? 222 00:29:40.580 --> 00:29:44.580 And Rothbard has, I think, this is a very insightful passage, he says, 223 00:29:44.580 --> 00:29:54.900 What we're doing in verbal reasoning is each step of the argument is meaningful. 224 00:29:54.900 --> 00:30:00.420 Whereas in a math calculation, we're just interested in how do we get to the conclusion. 225 00:30:00.420 --> 00:30:02.500 We're trying to prove a certain conclusion. 226 00:30:02.500 --> 00:30:07.780 The steps are just applications of certain mathematical rules. 227 00:30:07.780 --> 00:30:11.140 They don't have independent meaning. 228 00:30:11.140 --> 00:30:41.140 He says, he says here, he's considering a suggestion which was raised to, that if, if economics is supposed to be deductive, why don't we make this in mathematical law, why don't we do economics as mathematical logic, he says, if a, if a logistic array of symbols were used, logistics is another term for mathematical logic, if a logistic array of symbols were used, each proposition would not be meaningful, 229 00:30:41.140 --> 00:30:51.140 Logistics, therefore, is far more suited to the physical sciences, where, in contrast to the science of human action, the conclusions rather than the axioms are known. 230 00:30:51.140 --> 00:30:56.140 In the physical sciences, the premises are only hypothetical, logical deductions are made from them. 231 00:30:56.140 --> 00:31:04.140 In these cases, there is no purpose in having meaningful propositions each step of the way, and therefore, symbolic and mathematical language is more useful. 232 00:31:04.140 --> 00:31:16.140 So he's saying each step is meaningful. Incidentally, it's unusual that Hegel makes exactly this argument where he criticizes mathematics on this ground. 233 00:31:16.140 --> 00:31:23.140 So Rothbard was generally opposed to Hegel, remember, in the second volume of his History of Economic Thought. 234 00:31:23.140 --> 00:31:33.140 He has a very good section, very critical of Hegel, but this particular case he was using the argument that Hegel had given before him.