The “from the neck up social stuff completely overrides biological stuff” is not true. Our social capacities are both enabled and constrained by our biology. Yes, we are the blankest slates in the biosphere but we are not blank slates. Our capacity to choose is the widest of all species, but one still sees patterns of behaviour which are clearly a result of our evolutionary heritage—the differences in cognitive and behavioural patterns between men and women, for example.
Economics, like history, has, for the past 50 years, been immersed in the idea of change being due to collections of individuals. This assumes that the individuals have access to information relevant to the change. This raises the question: Who is suppressing information about the relationship between worker supply and wages? We have the same question about housing in the UK: Who is suppressing the relationship between house prices/rentals and population growth?
It comes back to power and wealth. It is not the Marxist workers who ultimately control society. It is the rich and powerful. It is here that the disconnection occurs between the biology of the individual and the social experience of the individual. We live in a fantasy world where the narratives favour oligarchs who wear T-shirts and rattle on about their philanthropy whilst manipulating everyone for their own benefit.
Bravo! Delusional ‘thinking’ about the effect of wage-pool growth on earners in the lower echelons is such a major (and ubiquitous) obstacle to productive dialogue. Thanks for the well reasoned retort. Maybe the pinheads on my side of the political football - the left - can finally start getting hip. Because their pathetically weak political skills are hobbled by their self-delusion on this issue more substantially and consequentially than any other.
This requirement that economics is conciliatory with biology underscores how elegant and useful the methodological dualism employed by Mises with praxeology really is. It is also useful and interesting to look under the hood with evolutionary psychology and get context clues from anthropology, but if you're generating models that aren't conciliatory with the basic logic of human action you open the door wide for self-deception, especially if you're a parasitic affiliate of the professional managerial class.
I can't speak for Lorenzo, but in my view, von Mises' use of praxeology and deduction--rather than empirical studies--to determine economic principles is fraught with danger. The main problem with social science across the board is its refusal to engage with empirical science (here, biology & its evolutionary implications). Anything that leans into that tendency is a worry.
As you get closer to the study of human beings, the opportunity for motivated reasoning to do its work just increases. Keeping the field of economics to deduction helps to address that. It also helps traditionally religious people engage more. As soon as you start talking about evolution, that is a non-starter for a lot of people. What I've found is that using praxeology as an analytical tool allows for the identification of principles that can then be tested empirically to ensure that they are conciliatory with, say, evolutionary psychology. I run into very few people that have a robust appreciation of evolutionary psychology AND praxeology, and I think that if this were to change it would make it easier to build larger coalitions political and otherwise to resist the great reset folks.
I agree with Helen Dale’s comment. It is years since I read any of Human Action, but I found Mises’ methodology unpersuasive. I appreciate the strong historical bent of Austrian economics, but I remain unpersuaded.
Its just another tool. Just like chemical physics is cumbersome and has limited utility, using evolutionary psychology and anthropology to understand what interest rates, money, and bureaucracy are at a fundamental level is onerous. It isn't that it is impossible, it just doesn't facilitate ratiocination (that's one of my favorite Mises words :).
> Yet, you do not see the nannies, gardeners, and other personal services to the rich in anywhere near the same scale in Australia as in the US and the UK. Australian car washes are still mechanised.
Here in the far reaches of Sydney's North Shore Line, mechanised car washes slightly less common than manual ones. I think I know where there is one nearby, overall they are much less common than in the '90s. Also, like other educated middle-class families struggling to pay the mortgage we have a nanny, a gardener and a cleaner.
I don't think this country is all that different from the rest of the Anglosphere.
All the car washes I have seen in Melbourne are mechanised. Cleaning and gardening services in Melbourne seem to be organised on fairly standard business models. In the case of gardening, usually on some version of the Jim’s franchising system. I don’t know of anyone in Melbourne who has a nanny. But I do not move in particularly elevated circles.
The lack of a surge in the wages in low end jobs has, however, been noticeable compared to what happened in the US and particularly the UK.
> All the car washes I have seen in Melbourne are mechanised.
Interesting. That's a pretty big difference. You don't have the hand carwashes at shopping centre carparks? They've been in Brisbane forever, so it's not just a Sydney thing. What might be a Sydney thing is the places that serve you coffee while they wash you car.
> Cleaning and gardening services in Melbourne seem to be organised on fairly standard business models.
And I bet, like here there's also word of mouth for more informal services. Nannies are expensive, though not vastly more expensive than daycare. So it;s a function of people's life situation and level of Covid hysteria.
Haven’t seen the hand car washes while shopping, although I am now not sure all the car washing spots in car parks I have seen have been fully mechanised/self-service.
I wonder if the US or the UK have the equivalent of Jim’s franchises.
If they don't have something like Jim's it'll be because of some stupid law that de-facto bans it. But as you point out on Arnold Kling's blog the real difference is that the service workers here likely to be native-born.
The “from the neck up social stuff completely overrides biological stuff” is not true. Our social capacities are both enabled and constrained by our biology. Yes, we are the blankest slates in the biosphere but we are not blank slates. Our capacity to choose is the widest of all species, but one still sees patterns of behaviour which are clearly a result of our evolutionary heritage—the differences in cognitive and behavioural patterns between men and women, for example.
I approve of evolutionary psychology as a research program. I just don’t think they have entirely embraced what is needed to do so.
A stimulating article.
It is amusing that the Bank of England freely admits that wages are linked to the supply of labour (See http://www.thereandwhere.com/images/wagesandworkforce.png ) but the UK/USA mass media denies this.
Economics, like history, has, for the past 50 years, been immersed in the idea of change being due to collections of individuals. This assumes that the individuals have access to information relevant to the change. This raises the question: Who is suppressing information about the relationship between worker supply and wages? We have the same question about housing in the UK: Who is suppressing the relationship between house prices/rentals and population growth?
It comes back to power and wealth. It is not the Marxist workers who ultimately control society. It is the rich and powerful. It is here that the disconnection occurs between the biology of the individual and the social experience of the individual. We live in a fantasy world where the narratives favour oligarchs who wear T-shirts and rattle on about their philanthropy whilst manipulating everyone for their own benefit.
Bravo! Delusional ‘thinking’ about the effect of wage-pool growth on earners in the lower echelons is such a major (and ubiquitous) obstacle to productive dialogue. Thanks for the well reasoned retort. Maybe the pinheads on my side of the political football - the left - can finally start getting hip. Because their pathetically weak political skills are hobbled by their self-delusion on this issue more substantially and consequentially than any other.
This requirement that economics is conciliatory with biology underscores how elegant and useful the methodological dualism employed by Mises with praxeology really is. It is also useful and interesting to look under the hood with evolutionary psychology and get context clues from anthropology, but if you're generating models that aren't conciliatory with the basic logic of human action you open the door wide for self-deception, especially if you're a parasitic affiliate of the professional managerial class.
Not sold on praxeology. But agree otherwise.
Why not? Its just logic applied to human action. Do you not find it a useful level of analysis?
I can't speak for Lorenzo, but in my view, von Mises' use of praxeology and deduction--rather than empirical studies--to determine economic principles is fraught with danger. The main problem with social science across the board is its refusal to engage with empirical science (here, biology & its evolutionary implications). Anything that leans into that tendency is a worry.
As you get closer to the study of human beings, the opportunity for motivated reasoning to do its work just increases. Keeping the field of economics to deduction helps to address that. It also helps traditionally religious people engage more. As soon as you start talking about evolution, that is a non-starter for a lot of people. What I've found is that using praxeology as an analytical tool allows for the identification of principles that can then be tested empirically to ensure that they are conciliatory with, say, evolutionary psychology. I run into very few people that have a robust appreciation of evolutionary psychology AND praxeology, and I think that if this were to change it would make it easier to build larger coalitions political and otherwise to resist the great reset folks.
I agree with Helen Dale’s comment. It is years since I read any of Human Action, but I found Mises’ methodology unpersuasive. I appreciate the strong historical bent of Austrian economics, but I remain unpersuaded.
Its just another tool. Just like chemical physics is cumbersome and has limited utility, using evolutionary psychology and anthropology to understand what interest rates, money, and bureaucracy are at a fundamental level is onerous. It isn't that it is impossible, it just doesn't facilitate ratiocination (that's one of my favorite Mises words :).
> Yet, you do not see the nannies, gardeners, and other personal services to the rich in anywhere near the same scale in Australia as in the US and the UK. Australian car washes are still mechanised.
Here in the far reaches of Sydney's North Shore Line, mechanised car washes slightly less common than manual ones. I think I know where there is one nearby, overall they are much less common than in the '90s. Also, like other educated middle-class families struggling to pay the mortgage we have a nanny, a gardener and a cleaner.
I don't think this country is all that different from the rest of the Anglosphere.
All the car washes I have seen in Melbourne are mechanised. Cleaning and gardening services in Melbourne seem to be organised on fairly standard business models. In the case of gardening, usually on some version of the Jim’s franchising system. I don’t know of anyone in Melbourne who has a nanny. But I do not move in particularly elevated circles.
The lack of a surge in the wages in low end jobs has, however, been noticeable compared to what happened in the US and particularly the UK.
> All the car washes I have seen in Melbourne are mechanised.
Interesting. That's a pretty big difference. You don't have the hand carwashes at shopping centre carparks? They've been in Brisbane forever, so it's not just a Sydney thing. What might be a Sydney thing is the places that serve you coffee while they wash you car.
> Cleaning and gardening services in Melbourne seem to be organised on fairly standard business models.
And I bet, like here there's also word of mouth for more informal services. Nannies are expensive, though not vastly more expensive than daycare. So it;s a function of people's life situation and level of Covid hysteria.
Haven’t seen the hand car washes while shopping, although I am now not sure all the car washing spots in car parks I have seen have been fully mechanised/self-service.
I wonder if the US or the UK have the equivalent of Jim’s franchises.
https://www.jimsmowing.com.au/?gclid=CjwKCAjwrJ-hBhB7EiwAuyBVXezWJcRwFyN-a5g7fIDHXzHi_Y8bufHUtT3yPN8vHwzb3L27h1LbnxoCcJgQAvD_BwE
If they don't have something like Jim's it'll be because of some stupid law that de-facto bans it. But as you point out on Arnold Kling's blog the real difference is that the service workers here likely to be native-born.