The Larry Lessig Boys Choir Story

Wow. Like Sleepers, but for real...

The Bush PR Strategy

From slate: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."—George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

Real Damage from Prisoner Abuses

There were a trio of interesting articles on CSM today. First, this story on the marked decline of class mobility in America. A troubling trend that underscores, again, the danger in relying on capitalism to deliver social justice. There tends to be an implicit assumption that in a free market everyone gets what they deserve. If there are structural barriers to class mobility, that assumption becomes less valid.

The next story, a happy one for a change, discusses various much-needed efforts at reforming the jury system. As the article notes, there is a great deal of variation among the states (and some are doing nothing at all). Hopefully some of these programs will prove successful and spread to other states.

The story I most wanted to comment on, however, discusses the frightening perceptions among Arabs of our treatment of prisoners in the war on terror. The story focuses on recently leaked pictures of Saddam in his underwear. It also comments on the Newsweek Koran flushing story and the recent NYT story on abusive treatment leading to the deaths of two prisoners, as well as the light sentences and lack of high level accountability for Abu Ghraib. While the Newsweek retraction provided a high profile opportunity for the scoring of political points, I hope that we haven't lost sight of the very real problem that our cavalier treatment of prisoners is creating. These are not isolated incidents. University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin has been keeping a watch for torture stories on his blog. A sampling:

- U.S. takes hostages to coerce relatives into surrendering
- Guantanamo prisoner claims to have suffered violent sexual assaults and near drowning during his captivity.
- Guantanamo prisoner claims that Gitmo tapes would be as explosive as the Abu Ghraib photos
- Guantanamo prisoner claims innocence, details physical mistreatment
- Guantanamo prisoner claims prisoners were handcuffed naked and attacked by dogs
- 15-year-old Guantanamo detainee claims abuse
- Pentagon inquiry confirms use of sexual tactics in interrogations
- Military lawyers at Gitmo try and fail to end physical abuse of prisoners.
- Afghan prisoner, left exposed to the elements by the CIA freezes to death.
- Gitmo prisoner claims torture, assault, near-suffocation
- Mother Jones story details many claims of torture at hands of U.S.
- Navy disgusted by abusive treatment at Gitmo.
- Terror prisoners claim to have been beaten and abused at New York's Metropolitan Detention Center.
- Iraqi prisoner hung from the wrists until dead (Abu Ghraib related)

These are stories that may not get much play in the U.S., and to be fair, many of them are unconfirmed allegations. However, they almost certainly draw attention from Al-Jazeera and other Arab outlets. As the CSM story notes, U.S. treatment of prisoners is having a strong impact on Arab public opinion. It is difficult to believe that high level decisions (such as the DoD memos exposed after Abu Ghraib) within the administration are not fostering such treatment. Unless I've been grossly misinformed, these sorts of actions do not typify American treatment of prisoners in past conflicts. Moreover, it is difficult to see what we gain from all of this. There have been few claims that we've gained critical intel from this abuse, and many claims to the contrary. I simply don't understand why we aren't doing anything about this. Abu Ghraib never got any real reaction within the administration or the DoD, and all of these stories roll by without attracting any significant attention. Aside from the fact that this treatment is shameful in view of Americans' generally shared values of human rights and human dignity, it seems ruinous from a strategic PR standpoint. But no one in the administration, and few in the press, are paying attention. Whatever stupid things Newsweek may have done, that's the real story here.

Re: The Military Spending Debacle

Thanks to Joe for pointing out the continuing profligacy of US government spending, in particular on defense. I would also add that we could get rid of the failed/untested missle defense system. The Bush administration has already spent some $30 billion on this with more increases in spending requested. As Joe points out, however, who would be opposed to spending more money on the security of our nation? Worded as such, the answer is obvious. The problem of course is that government spending seems completely dissociated from the individual American. If Congress spends an additional $50 billion on defense, do I notice its impact on me? Perhaps a program elsewhere will be cut (in the ideal world) or perhaps the continuing debt will destabilize the dollar and eventually the economy. Yet I will have difficulty drawing the connection between the two. We need some mechanism to tie the effects of government spending to the individual American. If you raise my gas price by 10 cents per gallon, I would probably take notice. It is wishful thinking on my part that such an obvious link would ever be made by Congress or that they might impose spending restrictions (e.g. tying budget increases to inflation).

In the bigger picture, I worry about the ever increasing cost and size of our government. It reminds me of Windows and the ever-increasing amounts of code added without simplifying the existing code first. Inefficiency and waste only grow in this scenario. Are we reaching a point where government operations become compromised by their own complexity?

The Military Spending Debacle

CSM has an article with a broad discussion on current military spending and various proposed changes. It's really a fairly absurd situation. The article notes that we will spend $667b in the next year. It mentions that the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget proposes $53b in cuts, and $40.5b in additional spending. It also discusses the proposed base closings. In inflation adjusted dollars, we are spending more on defense than we have since WWII. Adding to the absurdity of the situation, Donald Rumsfeld does want to make cuts (as per the base closings) to manpower at a time when Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched manpower perilously thin, thus leaving Congress in the position of opposing the one budget-slimming measure of an otherwise aggressively spending administration (not to mention the always pork-barrel sensitive matter of base closures).

I think any analysis of the defense budget needs to start from the recognition that the U.S. military is light-years ahead of any other in the world. Our nuclear arsenal itself is enough to ensure that U.S. will never be attacked by any nation-state. And there is not a conventional military on the planet that the U.S. could not steam-roll over. In light of these things, Rumsfeld's plans for a lighter, slimmer military make a lot of sense. However, it doesn't seem feasible to make these cuts while we are digging deep into the reserves and National Guard to keep enough troops in Iraq.

But it seems there must be places to cut, given that we had 500,000 troops in south-east Asia with a lower defense budget than we have now. Perhaps there is something to the quote in the article that we're doing a very poor job of getting reasonable prices from defense contractors (on whom our military has grown increasingly reliant). Certainly there seems to be a disturbingly incestuous relationship between the public and private military sectors (starting in the VP's office). Some of the big ticket programs (nuclear bunker-busters) seem wasteful and unnecessary as well.

Unfortunately the current politics of national defense are such that neither party could feasibly propose any significant cuts. Moreover, it is difficult to see how this could change any time soon. There was no significant focus on fiscal problems in 2004 by either side, and it seems that budget deficits would need to take an immeasurably higher profile in order to compete with the terrorist-mania that governs politics. There is a very real argument that our fiscal situation poses a greater threat to American dominance and security at the present time than terrorists, but I don't see that as a politically salable idea. It's a bloody mess, no doubt about that.

Disaster!! ShunTV Nailed

Bastards. "The MPAA says it wants to encourage legitimate download sites instead." I'm sure you did all of the nonexistent legitimate download sites a ton of good. Thanks.

Buh-Bye to the Broadcast Flag (for now)

Just wanted to update a story mentioned here a couple months back. On Friday the D.C. Circuit shot down the FCC's broadcast flag requirement. (decision here) The court had ruled to give the challengers (library associations and the EFF) additional time to demonstrate that at least one member of their group had standing to sue in their own right. The library associations satisfied the court on this point, and the court denied the FCC's request for Chevron deference, stating that the agency had never been delegated authority to regulate hardware devices except to the extent they are incidental to transmitting the TV signal. Noting that the TV's work just fine on unencrypted signals with the demodulator turned off, clearly the demodulator is not involved in the actual transmission. The flag order imposes regulations on what the devices do after the transmission has been received, which is outside the FCC's delegated authority. As per the WaPo story, the MPAA is pissed, and I'm sure this is not the last we'll hear of the broadcast flag.. But for now, hurray for the good guys!

A Brief Moment for Ethics

I'd like to note how deeply I'm enjoying the Delay scandal. Not just because he's a scumbag and deserves it, but because it makes me happy to see the Congress concerned with ethics, even if they're only doing it to score political points. Already various Congresspeople are rushing to get their records in order. There are a lot of good lobbyists in Washington (take, for example, the Center for Democracy and Technology), but by and large the Congress-lobbyist network is a cesspool of corruption. The Republicans have threatened to retaliate by exposing ethical lapses of Democrats (Nancy Pelosi's name has come up a few times). I say more power to them. Although the partisan infighting of it may be distasteful, I would find bitter partisanship palatable in a contest of ethical purity. It might not make the politicians actually become ethical, but at least forcing them to follow the formalities of ethics guidelines would be a step in the right direction.

Time Warp

Following politics recently, I'm starting to feel that we've been time warped back to August, 2001. As you may recall, at the time, after passing a flurry of bills that he had campaigned on, President Bush had largely stalled out, and Republicans were beginning to wonder if the President's critics were right. Bush spent the next three years riding support for his anti-terror agenda. But at this point, the public has gotten the sense that the war on terror will be a long, hard (and often dull) slog. The insurgents in Iraq are back in full force after a post-election lull. Global terror attacks are up significantly in the past year. The new Iraqi government has been slow moving and is mired in conflict.

With foreign policy no longer providing a safe refuge, Bush has had to return to domestic policy. He's now simultaneously trying to prop up Tom Delay against ethics charges, support his nomination of John Bolton, push his social security program, and back Senate Republicans in eliminating the filibuster, all issues on which he has little public support and on which Democrats feel they can capitalize. Add to that the failed and unpopular gambit to intervene in the Schiavo affair, and the Bush presidency appears to be a key setback or two from descending into irrelevance. His party is wavering and beginning to drift. This looks much more like Bush the bumbling amateur politician of mid-2001 than Bush the avenging war hero of more recent times.

Undoubtedly the Bush team still has a few tricks up their sleeve. In political cycles it's a long time until 2008 and Bush will have ample opportunity to try to reinvent himself. I can't even speculate which direction he might turn, but it does seem that much of his difficulties are related to his stubborn, hard-line approach to policy and his close relationship with the Religious Right, and I have a hard time picturing him compromising on either point. Time will tell. Perhaps the best hope of the administration at this point is that the Democrats will fumble the ball, as they did in the election last year. I can't say I have a great deal of confidence in them, but the Democrats can't screw up all the time. They'll get it right eventually. Everything is set up for them right now. All they've got to do is bring it home. I've got my fingers crossed..

Is It Paternalism When You're Right?

This interesting (but factually thin) article on CSM on Americans' bad investment choices puts me in mind of our frequent paternalism discussions. The author aptly comments at the end that the problem isn't really that people couldn't be good investors, but they don't bother to do it. I'd add that it probably isn't a matter of sheer laziness, but that there are a hundred other common areas where people fail similarly, and they have only so much time and attention to go around. And, of course, there's the factor that economists have been known to be spectacularly wrong from time to time as well...

Bad Blood

I'm overdue to post something on the ongoing tiff between China and Japan which is being followed very closely by a certain member of my household. Japan has never repudiated the atrocities they committed in WWII the way Germany has and this has been a continuing source of tension between Japan and Korea (North and South) and China. While post-war Japan has emerged as a major donor nation, with much of their contributions targeted to nations harmed by them in the war, they have been careful to characterize those payments as donations rather than reparations, and Japan has consistently glossed over their wartime atrocities in their textbooks and historical accounts. China and Japan have never been particularly close, and this insult is one that China is not willing to drop. The recent discussions of UN reform, with the strong possibility of Japan gaining a permanent Security Council post, has brought things to a head. Japan does need to own up to their past, but I'm not sure the U.S. will care to push that point. Tension between the two nations hardly hurts us, allowing the U.S. to act as mediator, deepening Japan's dependence on the U.S. for military and diplomatic support, and strengthening U.S. influence in the region. It will be interesting to see if they can move past this, as China and Japan could both profit greatly in many regards from closer ties. The pull of profit seems to be slowly healing old wounds between China and Taiwan, and it may do the same between China and Japan.

Re: A Critique of Social Science (Hank's Response)

I just wanted to draw to the Board's attention a comment on one of Henry's posts, by someone posting as "vox humama" (was that meant to be "humana"?). It reads:

I am out here in the hinterland with the rest of the "rational" population, so reading this was the equivalent of mental weightlifting. I am happy to state that I not only got it done but actually feel stronger for it. As a member of the over 50 age group, my eyes were not well served by the experience. (BIGGER PRINT WOULD BE APPRECIATED!)
It would be hard for me to make any comments of a sufficient intellectual rigor to feel worthy of this discussion. But my question would be, Is the academic world, particularly or especially the "disciplines" of the social or soft sciences, engaged in this kind of discussion? Or is it the elephant under the proverbial rug?

I will give Joe or Henry the first shot at a substantive answer, but I agree with the commenter that we should consider making the default setting a little easier to read (note, however, that one can always change the text size in the browser). I am happy we have a reader beside ourselves!

Re: Federal Courts

I don't know whether a survey of the empirical evidence would demonstrate the number of appellate court cases has increased relative to the number of cases the Supreme Court hears, though my observation matches Joe's. Yet I do not see that trend--if there is one--as posing a problem to the stability of the system. The courts of appeals are certainly aware of decisions of other circuits (the parties make sure of that) and the courts are, as a general matter, hesitant to create a circuit split unless the reasoning of another circuit is really flawed. To the extent that circuits disagree, the Supreme Court can step in to resolve the controversy after the courts have had a chance to work it out themselves. I think the system is sufficiently dynamic to respond to the increased reliance upon courts of appeals. In my view the existing structure could only be characterized as broken if people believed the courts of appeals were unable to handle the added burden, but in my view they are doing just fine.

My two cents.

Federal Courts

CSM has a decent article up summarizing the state of the federal appeals courts as it pertains to the nomination battles. The commentary is fairly worthless, but numbers are interesting. In particular I wonder how sound the system is where the Supreme Court, which supposedly provides appellate review of all the circuit decisions, only handles about 0.1% of the number of cases handled by the circuit courts (that doesn't even take into account state cases that SCOTUS may also review). My understanding is that the caseload of the Supreme Court has been in decline for some time now, even as the size and caseloads of the circuit courts have been increasing. The obvious implication is an increasing balkanization of the federal legal system as the unifying influence of the Supreme Court on the circuits wanes. It's a topic I've never read about or heard discussed in class, so it's hard for me to assess how problematic this is (if it's a problem at all), but I find it curious and may have to poke around and see what's out there (I would be surprised if there isn't a fair amount of literature on this)...

India Begins To Assert Itself

Here's a bit of an interesting development on the international front. After the U.S. decided to sell F-16's to Pakistan, India was understandably upset. To make amends, the U.S. somewhat cynically, offered to sell F-16's and F-18's to India as well. India refused the offer, and instead announced $746 million in military purchases from Russia, Germany, Italy, Israel, and Qatar. Additionally, India has recently stated that it wants no part of a U.N. Security Council reform that would not give them veto power, stating that they wanted equal footing with any other permanent members. With China also becoming far more active in regional affairs (although still suprising meek on global issues), the next decade or two are likely to see some major changes in the geopolitics of south and south-eastern Asia.

For Those With MP3 Players

Following a lead from slashdot I've found a free lecture archive on audible.com that includes the Library of Congress Series on the Digital Future, which features presentations by David Weinberger and Larry Lessig, among others. Not only is it free, but due to audible.com's Red Tag Sale, it's also 50% off! What a deal!

ps. I don't know if audible.com allows deep linking, if it doesn't work, do a search on audible.com for Lawrence Lessig, click on the Library of Congress Speech, then click on the link to C-SPAN on the speech page, then click on See All Matches.

Sheer Brilliance!

An alarm clock that hides from you when you hit snooze. I need one of those!

Round 2: Social Sciences (Part I)

Henry's response does an excellent job of moving our discussion along. I accept wholesale his explanation about complexity and chaos, so I'll focus on the second half regarding economic theories.

I like Henry's interpretation of Mises, and I can see where he found support for it and I think this is the correct interpretation, but I'd like to note for the record that Mises' statement regarding action necessarily being rational and that the term rational action is pleonistic does not jive with Henry's explanation. Mises is actually asserting that volitional action is necessarily rational. I disagree with him even on that point, but it is a far more defensible position than stating (as Mises does) that all action is rational.

Given this interpretation of Austrian subjectivism, I think there are two approaches through which behavioral criticisms could be viewed. The first would be to assert that even volitional actions can be irrational. The second is to suggest that there may be more economically significant actions than Mises would suppose that are not volitional. I think these two approaches are just different sides of the same coin. I'd like to preface my discussion of these criticisms by agreeing with Henry, that behavioral critique does not render Austrian economics (or neo-classical economics for that matter) invalid, but merely offers a refinement. The assumption of rational preferences and action that characterizes neo-classical economics and Austrian economics is for the most part (as stated in my Round I:Part I response) a good assumption. This assumption is the critical insight on which both theories are based (as well as many political theories) and yields a great deal of useful theory, theories which have validated themselves quite well in actual practice. The behavioral critique is merely an effort to define some possible boundaries for the operation of these theories.

~> Read More!
Coming around then to the criticism, I think the first step is to question the realm of possibility. We don't know precisely how cognitive processes work, and probably won't any time soon. However, we know enough to speculate. Based on current knowledge I think it is valid to speculate that all cognitive processes may not be equal. We know that the brain is a mechanistic device, that neurons fire in networks, that different parts of the brain are engaged for different purposes. We also know from information theory (as was brilliantly illustrated in Henry's chaos discussion) that some calculations are more difficult than others, and that there are many different methods to achieve approximate results and many degrees of precision which can be applied to calculations for approximation. We also know from computer science that many of the tasks of calculation in which the brain engages are phenomenally complex and difficult from an information processing standpoint. Even given equivalent processing power, human programmers would face immense difficulty trying to program something that could accomplish all that the brain does. Taken altogether, I conclude from this that the brain employs many wonderful shortcut algorithms (heuristics) to allow it to perform with the remarkable efficiency that it does.

From here we need to note a few things about heuristics. We know that (by definition) in the act of approximation, some precision is lost. From experience in mathematics and computer science we know that each heuristic has certain limiting characteristics; each heuristic has varying strenths and weaknesses. In some cases one algorithm for compressing an image file will outperform a second algorithm, where a different image file may yield the reverse result. We also know that it's usually (but not always) the case that the more efficiently a heuristic performs, the greater the loss of precision.

At this point we might make a few conclusions and assumptions about brain operation. Due to its use of various heuristics, it is likely that the brain performs more efficiently on some types of calculations than others. Perhaps more importantly, if we are willing to contemplate that the brain may use more than one unique heuristic to solve the same problem in different situations, the brain may yield a varying quality of results to the same question based on which heuristic is applied at a given time. The final step needed to reach the behavioral position is to suppose that external factors may consistently (and non-volitionally--I'll come back to this) trigger the use of one heuristic over another.

There are a lot of assumptions involved here, and I don't ask you to accept them all as true. I would only ask that you consider them as reasonable proposals not obviously contravened by present knowledge about cognitive processes (and I would be entirely happy to hear any criticisms you have on this point). What you are looking at is the central premise of the deductive argument of behavioral theory. It is a theory which Henry rightly states cannot be proven at this point.

The experiments carried out by behavioral psychologists, as Henry notes, do not fully eliminate the possibility of interfering factors (including rational volitional reasons for the actions taken). However, these data are not meant to prove anything, but rather to offer some support, by whatever limited means are available to us, to the premise above. I again disagree with Mises' position that because we cannot know how cognitive processes work nor definitely predict what action they will produce we must treat them as ultimately opaque and (while accepting Mises' own assumptions on cognition) question no further. His assumptions about which actions are volitional and that volitional actions are rational are no less a reach than the assumptions of behavioral theory. As an unknown quantity, cognitive processes remain open to deductive argument and to experimentation such as it is.

From my perspective, I find the assumptions made by behavioralists to be emminently reasonable. They very much conform to my own intuitions about cognitive processes and my knowledge of data processing and heuristic algorithms and my observations of human behavior. I find that behavioral experiments, although they vary in quality (and I agree that the VCR one is particularly weak), do offer at least some support for behavioral theory. The results of many of them are difficult to interpret as anything but the application of a weak heuristic in a decision which, in other circumstances, humans are capable of applying a stonger one.

To determine, finally, how behavioral theory plays with Austrian subjectivism requires behavioral heuristics to be placed within the context of actions, volition, and rationality. This may be a discussion about cognitive processes, but I see it as rather more a matter of semantics. The key cognitive insight (and a largely subjective one at that) is that we don't generally think in terms of heuristics. I had been planning on making an argument of this, but arriving here I realize that this argument would probably equal in length the rest of this post and I'm not up for that at the moment. Feel free to challenge this premise and I will flesh it out at a future date. For now, suffice it to say that the immense amount of effort invested by cognitive scientists, behavioralists, and computer scientists to uncover the heuristics utilized by the brain speaks volumes about our conscious awareness of the heuristics applied on our behalf. While we do experience a conscious phenomenon of weighing decisions before us, resulting in volitional action, the selection of heuristics and the application of them in the weighing process appears to be entirely subconscious.

The rest of the analysis descends into a semantic morass. In undergrad I took a 500-level philosophy course that dedicated an entire semester to a single question: What is agency (i.e. how do we define a person's actions)? Based on my experiences therein I'll offer the following conclusion to the above conundrum: Nobody has the first fricking clue what any of this means. At some point in the discussion the level of detail is such that we have no remaining useful intuitions about the basic terms (action, volition, intent, etc.) and they become maleable and in some senses interchangeable. But I'll try...

First, going back to my initial theory of rational as "consistent with or based on reason," I conclude that the variation in outcomes caused by the application of various heuristics are irrational. The output of the more precise heuristic here represents a rational action. By contrast the output of the subpar heuristic is simply not consistent with or based on reason. It is rather the product of, in essence, a cognitive defect. There is a sense in which you could say even the better heuristic is irrational, since it also is frequently an approximation, and it is only by comparison to the subpar heuristic that it appears rational. In other words, there is a danger here that I am calling any nonoptimal (in some ultimate sense) decision irrational. That is not my intent. I think there is something noteworthy about the supposition that a) the human mind can apply heuristics of varying quality to the same problem and b) external stimuli can consistently alter which heuristic is applied. I do not assert that the reasoning relied on needs necessarily to be optimal to be rational, but only that the subpar heuristic is inconsistent with that individual's own ability to reason through the problem (applying their own subjective values and objectives in the process), and that the subpar heuristic is applied not due to a rational choice (i.e. I don't have time to think this through), but as the result of the nonvolitional impact of seemingly irrelevant external circumstances. It is this quality that makes it irrational.

Next, in these cases the action is volitional in any meaningful sense, and yet the decision is framed by heuristic analysis which is subconscious and involuntary. What does that mean? One could say that this infection of nonvolitional framing which resulted in an irrational act caused the act to be effectively nonvolitional. This would fit with Mises' view of action (being nonvolitional, it is no longer assumed to be rational), although the scope of behavioral impact on economic actions would remove from his theories many actions that I think he would have thought covered by them. The alternative, which seems rather more straightforward to me, is to consider this a volitional action, but an irrational one, hence my basic conflict with Mises' assumption.

In either case the results would be the same. In the former, we've just removed a lot of economically significant actions from Mises' theory. In the latter Mises' theory would need to be amended to cover only rational volitional actions and the same thing occurs. In either case we now have a whole class of actions for which we need to reformulate existing economic theories.

Whew. Well, that shoots my afternoon. :)

Re: A Critique of Social Science (Hank's Response)

Henry has been having some trouble with blogger, so I'm posting this for him. JB.

First I would like to thank you for taking the time to consider and criticize my writing. I allowed myself a little break after I read Joe's first response and feared that I might be a bit overwhelmed when I noticed upon coming back that there were three further additions. But to my relief these have merely refined the earlier arguments and done much of my work for me. So I will continue in my informal fashion and address the concerns that have arisen thus far.

The Issue of Inclusivity and the Barrier of Complexity

In terms of inclusivity I am largely in agreement with those criticisms that have so far arisen.

I am inclined, as Barry suggested, to declare that we ought to consider the physical or hard sciences those to which my criticisms are of little relevance. Everything else would then be soft science. There is of course the underlying philosophical issue, which Joe recognizes, that fundamentally, my arguments are universally applicable. That is, when I say, for instance:

"Many things will be nearly constant among the study populations… the effects of these factors will not be averaged out, nor will the experimenter have any sense as to which of them are significant."

There is no way that we can be certain that such a complaint could not be leveled against any experiment whatsoever. The constant that modifies the force of gravity may only appear constant. We have only been making physical observations for a very short period of time and there may certainly be significant variables that we have not accounted for because they change so slowly that the difference has been unnoticeable in the last hundred or thousand years (these are after all cosmologically miniscule time frames).

~> Read More!
Or, as Joe noted, the relations that we observe may be entirely superficial and coincidental and the real variables that govern the behavior of the phenomena we seek to understand could yet be entirely unknown to us.

In either case we must recognize that technically my arguments apply to all knowledge. All human knowledge is fundamentally uncertain. Thus we must fall back upon practical certainties. For the phenomena that we most thoroughly understand we cannot imagine any variables which we have failed to consider, and regardless of whether or not we fully understand the true basis of the phenomena we are at least able to make virtually perfect predictions as to the outcomes that the phenomena in question result in. Though the earlier arguments apply to our understanding of gravitation we can still use our knowledge of it to weave the paths of space probes in intricate patterns through the gravitational fields of the bodies of our solar system with uncanny precision.

With regard to what we may practically label as soft sciences this is not true. In the case of these sciences we can easily conceive of variables that may be significant but for which we are not accounting. Likewise in these sciences we regularly experience failures in prediction. Thus I would say that although in a strict sense all science is soft we might with a fair degree of certainty arrange them into the practical categories hard and soft.

I would also pause to note that the traditional classification of various types of science are largely arbitrary and, well, merely traditional. There are certainly fields of study that we yet call physics because they have grown out of the earlier fields of physics but which deal with such complexity that we must call them soft. I would also agree with Joe in seeing the medical sciences as existing on both sides of the boundary. I would not say that this is the argument that applies to string theory and advanced cosmological theories; these are merely speculation and as such are not science. I think their popularity largely arises from the same causes as that of the social sciences. This is not to say that there is no place for such theories or that their proponents are fools. Merely that they are speculations the validation of which is yet pending and thus are not posited (at least, not legitimately) in any way as scientific facts. They are neither hard nor soft.

As to the boundary of complexity itself this discussion should be illuminating. As we can never be certain that we are accounting for all of the significant variables, we can never be certain as to how complex an event is. In this strict sense there is no barrier. All phenomena are potentially too complicated for us to arrive at certain conclusions with regard to them. But of course we must consider the barrier not in the absolute sense but in the practical sense. Thus it is the line that I have already defined between hard and soft. I do not pretend that in the marginal regions this line is well defined. I do however maintain that the majority of cases are not marginal. Most of the principles of physics are predictive in an absolute sense; they will describe the future states of the system in proportion to the detail of the input data. For these phenomena we cannot conceive of any variables for which we are not accounting. We can say with just as much conviction that these things are false with regard to the social sciences in general.

I will conclude this section with a caveat that bears within itself the seed of a related argument. I have said that the social sciences are, in general, soft. Sometimes it is true that we may arrive at principles with regard to social phenomena which are relatively absolute. I will posit a general principle with regard to human behavior: Human beings abhor the touch of flame and they will strive to prevent themselves from being consumed by it. As much as any statement we may make with regard to human behavior as it occurs in the world this is certain (of course the exceptional phenomena of self-immolation is troublesome to this postulate; it would be a serious blow to the credibility of physics if objects occasionally fell up). Yet the question remains, of what use is this fact to us? The questions which we wish to solve with regard to social life involve the full complexity of human social interaction: what will be the interest rate on ten-year federal bonds 3 years hence? What political party will best enhance the well being of the people? How do we avoid social strife and physical violence? The acknowledgement of the initial fact does not help us to understand the more complex phenomena of which it is only a small part. We may understand the behavior of gravity and this may allow us to predict the path that a projectile will follow, but only if that path involves minimal interference. A cannon ball that is affected only by the wind will follow a relatively predictable path. An elastic rubber ball bouncing downhill on a roughly paved street in heavy traffic will not. Regardless of the fact that we know that the ball will follow roughly parabolic paths between collisions we are helpless to predict its actual overall path with any semblance of accuracy. Our fact about the behavior of men would likewise be useful if we were placing bets upon whether the man we are about to light on fire will attempt to extinguish the flames or rather quietly submit to their consumption of his flesh. Yet it is of little use in solving more broadly the questions related to human action. This point was implicit in my earlier arguments. For instance, I did not claim that the individual assertions upon which Matthew Rabin's paper was based were necessarily false in and of themselves, merely that in the context of the wider problem they were pitifully insufficient.

Chaos and the Transit of the Complexity Barrier

Here I will talk a bit about complex and chaotic systems. I am not an expert but I believe that I understand enough to cover the points that are relevant to our discussion. I would encourage you to engage this subject with confidence, as I don't think that it is at all beyond the average person to understand these things. As I stated in my first paper, the essence of mathematical ideas is best expressed in plain English; we need resort to equations only for the purpose of calculation (and as we don't need to make any calculations we won't need equations except as conceptual examples).

We must begin with systems that are neither complex nor chaotic. These rare systems are those for which we may discover exact solutions.

An example here would be two spherical objects moving through space exerting gravitational forces upon one another. We can write out the force acting upon each body exactly. The force will always be in the direction of the other body, it will be proportional to the product of the masses of the two objects, and it will be inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. If we have an equation for the acceleration (the force equation that I just mentioned) we can integrate it to find an equation that calculates the velocities of the objects. Once we have the velocity equation we can integrate again to get an equation that will tell us the positions of the objects at future times. This position equation will allow us to plot the exact trajectory that the objects in question will follow given any initial setup (combinations of masses, initial positions, and initial velocities).

The preceding scenario was only made possible by our ability to integrate the equations in question. This is far from given. Equations that we can integrate are actually quite exceptional in real world problems. In the case above it is possible to do the integrations, but if there had been three objects instead of two it would not have been so. In taking such a step we move from the realm of exact solutions to the realm of approximate solutions.

I will step briefly aside to illustrate the concepts of exact and approximate solution.

[Imagine an object being thrown upward (we must neglect air resistance, so imagine we're on the moon). As before we can come up with the acceleration equation immediately: a = -g. That is to say, gravity is always pulling down with a constant force g (g is negative as I have defined the downward direction to be negative and up to be positive). In fact the gravitational force diminishes as the object moves upward (away from the body attracting it) but we are assuming that we can't throw it high enough for such changes to be significant. By integrating we can discover the velocity equation for the thrown object: v(t) = -g x t + vi. That is to say, the object has an initial velocity vi imparted by our throwing it and over time that velocity is reduced by the operation of the acceleration g. Vi is positive, as we have thrown the object upward. Here t is meant to signify time. Thus our velocity, v is reduced by g for each unit of t. Thus after one second (assuming that our unit of time is the second) v(1) = vi - g. If our initial velocity upward (vi) was 20 and g was 4 then it would take five seconds before our actual velocity (v) was reduced to zero (this is the point when the object ceases to move upward and it is the moment before it begins to move downward, thus it corresponds to the highest point of flight). Now by integrating once again we may discover the equation for the position, or height of the object: h(t) = 1/2 x -g x t ^2 + vi x t + hi. Now we have multiplied the first term by t to get t^2 and we have multiplied it by one half (or divided it by two). We have done this in order to calculate the change in position that results from the acceleration g. -g x t tells us what change in velocity g has resulted in (and this is why we have -g x t in the equation for v). Since initially g had had no effect this component starts at zero but by time t the acceleration g has generated a contribution to velocity equal to -g x t. So the average velocity due to g between time zero and time t is (-g x t + 0)/2 or (-g x t)/2 hence the factor of 1/2. In order to figure out how much distance was traversed due to this component of velocity we must multiply the average velocity by the time that the object has been traveling at this velocity t. Hence the additional t and thus we get 1/2 x -g x t^2. The we have vi x t which is easily understood, as the vi component of velocity is unchanging, thus we merely multiply vi times the time t to figure out what distance vi has caused the object to traverse. And finally we have the initial height hi which is the position that the object was thrown from: if t = 0 then hi = h.

This is the simplest example of something similar to the two-body problem described in the third paragraph of this section. The main purpose of it for now is to illustrate that when integration can be done we get nice equations, equations that we can simply plug numbers into in order to get exact solutions. Now I will solve the same problem imagining that we knew only the acceleration equation and that we could not arrive at the velocity and position equations using integration. This will require an approximate or numerical solution.

We know that we have an object beginning at a height hi traveling at an initial velocity vi and being accelerated downward at an acceleration g. We wish to know where this object will be at a future time t. Well, we know that at time t = 0 its position h will be h = hi. We also know that its velocity at t = 0 is v = vi. Thus we could assume that, for discrete periods of time, everything in the problem remains constant. Let us use intervals of one-tenth of a second. Thus we presume that for the first tenth of a second v = vi. If this is the case then at time t = 1/10 our height h will be h = hi + vi x 1/10. Our new velocity will be v = vi + -g x 1/10 and now this velocity will be constant for the next tenth of a second. So after two tenths of a second (t = 2/10) the object's height h = hi + vi x 1/10 + (vi + 1/10 x -g) x 1/10 and so on for each consecutive tenth of a second. If we wish to figure out where the object is 4 seconds after it is thrown we must execute 40 iterations of this process to find the answer. This is obviously much more difficult than simply plugging numbers for t, g, hi, and vi into the exact equation: h = 1/2 x -g x t ^2 + vi x t + hi. Furthermore, it is less accurate than doing so. The numerical answer will only be approximately accurate whereas the exact solution will be as accurate as the values of the inputs. You can, of course, increase the accuracy of the numerical method by reducing the length of the intervals between iterations but you must exchange the time required to make more calculations for the accuracy gained. ]

Now that we may use the concept of exact and numerical solutions we can proceed with the first step away from the most simple phenomena--those that yield to exact solutions--and toward more complex phenomena--those that require numerical solutions. The problem of three spherical bodies moving in space influencing one another via the force of gravity does not have an exact solution. There is no equation into which we can plug the initial conditions in order to find precisely what the subsequent states will be. We must utilize a numerical solution to solve this problem. This is manageable. Modern computers were designed for the express purpose of performing such numerical solutions (and business calculations which are different) and they greatly facilitate this procedure. But the important thing to recognize is that the transition from the two-body to the three-body problem does not involve a 50% increase in computational involvement but rather a manyfold increase.

After the transition from exact to numerical solutions we continue for some time along the complexity continuum without encountering a similar barrier. In this region additional factors will increase the overall computational complexity of the system faster than linearly but not in the exaggerated way that it jumped when we crossed the barrier of exact solution. When we move from the three-body problem to an equivalent four-body problem the computational complexity increases by more than thirty three percent and here is why.

In the three-body problem we have to do three sets of calculations per iteration, one for each body. For the four-body problem we need four sets of calculations. If they were the same calculations as before we would expect the computation to take 33% longer, but the fourth body increases the complexity of all of the computations for each of the other bodies. With three bodies we had to take into account the position of only the other two, now with four we need to take into account the position of three other bodies in order to calculate the resultant force on each body for each iteration. The inclusion of the fourth body, then, not only requires that we make an additional set of calculations each iteration but it also makes each individual set of calculations more involved. Further, with four bodies we have to make four approximations per iteration and the resulting increase in error is compounded with each iteration. Thus we are required to further reduce the intervals between iterations in order to achieve the same level of accuracy.

We can see that the more complicated a system is, the greater the complexity will be increased by an additional element.

So long as we can make a wide variety of approximations this is still not too troublesome. Experience has shown that we can engineer a wide variety of useful systems using numerical computation techniques and our powers of computation are rapidly rising; although a doubling in computing power may fall significantly short of resulting in a doubling of the complexity of the systems we may explain, progress is being made.

Now we arrive at the realm of the chaotic. It is frequently said that chaos theory is a misnomer and we must agree. Chaotic systems are not truly chaotic; that is, random and unruly. They are merely systems of such extreme complexity that numerical modeling is bound to fail because the inevitable approximations result in very significant errors. They are only chaotic in the sense that they are utterly unpredictable to us.

For our chaotic system imagine a two dimensional surface. Imagine that this is the surface of a turbulent pool of water; it contains a wide variety of flows and whirls. Now we place a bit of cork on the surface of the pool and our goal is to predict where the cork will be at some future time t. We can define the cork's location on the surface with two coordinates; let us call them x and y. We can define the flows over this surface as an equation that maps an x and a y input to a two dimensional vector. That is, for a given point on the surface (x1, y1) there will be a corresponding vector that describes the direction and magnitude of the current in this location. We can assume that the cork does not have significant momentum and that its velocity is always exactly that of the current on which it is resting. Thus at point (x1,y1) the velocity vector of the cork is identical to the current vector for the same point . We can use numerical methods to calculate the trajectory of the cork. If the cork is at (x1,y1) then its velocity at this instant is . We can multiply the velocity vector by a time interval t in order to determine the approximate displacement for that interval. We add the changes in x and y to the original position (x1,y1) to get a new position (x2,y2) = (x1 + dx, y1 + dy). We can enter the new position of the cork into the equation for the flows over the surface to find the direction and magnitude of the current at this new position. From here we may repeat the process through subsequent iterations in order to plot a trajectory for the cork.

So long as the system is not complex enough to be chaotic this method will work. Here is how we might determine whether or not it is chaotic.

With a system that yields properly to numerical computation we find that the results brought about by subsequent reductions in the time between iterations approach a final value. The paths get smoother, the final answer gets more precise and our knowledge is increased. But with a chaotic equation this is not the case. We begin with intervals of 1/10th of a second and get a tentative trajectory for the cork. When we reduce the interval to 1/100th of a second we get an entirely different trajectory. When we reduce it to 1/1000th of a second we again get an entirely different trajectory. The values do not tend toward some definite path. Now let me quote from my first commentary:

"The American Heritage Dictionary provides the following as the mathematical definition of chaotic: A dynamical system that has a sensitive dependence on its initial conditions."

Hopefully this is more meaningful now. Depending on what interval length we choose we will get a different position after the first iteration. Working from these variations on the second point (x2,y2) we arrive at entirely different trajectories. A seemingly insignificant change in the initial conditions brings about results so different that there appears to be no correlation between the initial and the later states of the system. Of course, there is a correlation. The flow equation is perfectly determinate, but, due to the impossibility of exact solution and the failure of numerical methods, we are at a loss to say what it determines. Again I quote myself:

"The formula that those economists are looking for is infinitely complex and chaotic and if they were ever able to discern it, its implications would be incalculable. Seemingly insignificant variables would form endlessly diverse combinations to trigger extremely significant events."

We know precisely the equation that describes our hypothetical pool yet the trajectory described by the cork is as mysterious as ever. Likewise, if the economists were able to derive perfectly the equation that would describe the level of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (something that I maintain is an impossibility) it would be useless to them, as its implications would remain incalculable.

Now we must discuss what precisely chaos theory is. Up to this point I have only said that chaotic systems are necessarily mysterious. If this summed up chaos theory it would not be very impressive and I would indeed be an expert. But, of course, chaos theory has more to say about chaotic systems. Chaos theory attempts to determine if there are things that we can say about chaotic systems even though we cannot predict future states with precision. With regard to our pool con bobbing cork they might be able to say that when placed in region A the cork always shoots into the upper right corner of the pool and bounces around for a while. With regard to a particular whirl there may be a region in which placed corks will always leave the whirl through the bottom half. Chaos theory then gives us an assortment of rules that we may glean from the flow equation, making it not entirely useless to us. Thus if we could arrive at equations that perfectly map the reality of economic systems then perhaps chaos theory could teach us something about the actual operation of the system even though we could not calculate actual future states.

My warning with regard to the applicability of chaos theory to social phenomena is that chaos theory, like exact solution and numerical computation, yields results only as sound as the equation that you are working from. There are many mathematicians attempting to apply the principles of chaos theory to economic problems but I do not believe that they will succeed, as the equations they are working from are insufficient (and are necessarily so as the perfect equation would require a practically infinite number of variables): garbage in, garbage out.

As to the transit of the complexity barrier, it is safe to say that this barrier is significantly mobile. It is undoubtedly true that this barrier has shifted quite noticeably in our own lifetimes. But then again, sixty miles an hour is, to us, a noticeable velocity, while the universe would end before we reached the nearest star traveling at such a speed. This is to say that though the progression of the barrier is clearly occurring it need not be significant in terms of problems which are the complexity equivalent of intergalactic distances. In the next one hundred years our computational abilities may increase one hundred trillion fold, and this would certainly allow us to solve, to our great advantage, many problems that are currently beyond us, yet our progress would still be unnoticeable in terms of ultra complex social phenomena.

I will finish with a couple of examples that ought to add heuristic weight to these arguments.

One I have stumbled across at random. I quote:

"For a single spoonful of air we would need to know the position and velocity of 1020 molecules bumping into one another about 6 x 109 times a second. The physicist Michael Berry considered a collection of oxygen molecules at atmospheric pressure at room temperature. He imagined a single electron placed at the edge of the known universe (somewhere around 1010 light-years away). After how many collisions would a given molecule in the oxygen miss a collision with another molecule which it would not have missed had the electron not been there? Remember that the electron is affecting the oxygen only by its gravitational field, which must be so weak that we can virtually discount its effect. You might think so, but in fact Berry calculated that the oxygen molecule would miss its collision after a mere 56 collisions."

I couldn't find an original source for this, so I cannot know what calculation results in this fact. Even if Berry were off by several orders of magnitude one could not predict the position of his oxygen molecules, even a fraction of a second into the future, without accounting for every particle in the universe. This is complex interdependence. Such unpredictable interactions are undoubtedly percolating up from the microscopic world at every moment.

We may also consider again the elastic rubber ball bouncing down a roughly paved street in heavy traffic that I mentioned at the end of the previous section. Perhaps thirty meters down the hill the ball is struck by a fast moving minivan and it ricochets over a nearby building. This is a very significant event in the course of the phenomenon we wish to understand. So we attempt to trace the cause of the minivan's appearance. Its driver, a middle aged woman, is traveling to the grocery store to buy a cake. This is because the cake that she had planned to serve was ruined. This is because a vase full of flowers fell upon it. This is because her housecat, in the pursuit of a buzzing housefly, bumped into the vase. The fly had entered the house because a whiff of delicious cake odor had been wafted out the window by a gentle breeze that would not have occurred had not a star located a billion miles away gone super nova a billion years ago last summer. This, again, is the sort of complexity that I am talking about. A researcher trying to understand why the ball behaves the way it does would have a wide field of study indeed. They could write papers on different types of cars. They could develop classification systems for potholes. They could explore the motivation of house cats. They could write papers about the reasons that people drive children to school or they could contemplate the effects of deep space astronomical events on gentle breezes. Quite simply, every researcher, in every university on earth, could devote all of their time to studying the problem of the bouncing ball and the poorly maintained street, and such could remain the case for a million years, and yet, they would be nowhere near exhausting the subject of study and nowhere nearer to predicting the trajectory of the ball. I do not see how anyone could believe that the GDP of the United States in 2006 or the causes of the next world war would be any less complicated than the bouncing ball (for all we know the bouncing ball could (along with an infinite number of other factors) cause the next world war or economic collapse).

Simply put, physics succeeds because it considers unimaginably simple systems in isolated situations. The social sciences fail because they cannot explore such simple systems because the most basic element of their study, a human being, is extremely complicated. It brings into the experiment all of the experiences it has ever had, it is necessarily impressed by an infinite number of uncontrollable and unique circumstances. So far as social scientists can arrive at definite conclusions these are only tiny facets of the larger equation that explains the actual system in question (a bouncing ball researcher may be perfectly correct in asserting that a reason for a vehicle to be on the road is because its occupant may be on the way to a movie, but so what?); the equation that, even if we had it, still would not be very useful. This refers back to the illusion of progress section of my original essay; the accumulation of social scientific knowledge appears promising but in reality we could fill countless libraries with such information without getting any closer to solving such questions as: How should we educate our children? How do we reduce criminal behavior? How do we enhance the satisfaction of mankind?

Deduction in General and Ludwig von Mises in Particular

Joe rightly notes that the social sciences clearly make use of deduction. Now I did state that deduction is an essential part of the scientific method, that induction only arrives at postulates and so far as scientists ever reach new conclusions and hypothesis they must use deduction; so I don't think its fair to suggest that I did not allow that the modern social sciences use deduction at all. But I do not suppose that this is what Joe meant; rather he was referring to my argument that Homo Economicus is used for modeling and not purposes of deductive argumentation. Although I do admit that my point in this regard is a bit fuzzy (this is one of the reasons that I did not give you the Rabin paper as my original contribution; it didn't hold together that well), but I think I can at least bolster it up for the time being. Before I do though I have a quick unrelated response.

I would like to say that I did not suggest that "Rabin's paper [was] purely a quixotic exercise attacking a long-defunct economic model." Indeed I think the fact that the majority of modern economists utilize this principle was clearly implied in my paper. My writing "This [assumption that men rationally strive toward the maximum fulfillment of stable and well-defined preferences] is not, therefore, the basis of any sound systems of economic reasoning" does not imply that the majority of modern systems of economic reasoning do not rely upon this principle; it merely states that such systems are unsound. Nor does the statement, "The presumption that man acts always to maximize his rational self-interest is undoubtedly the single most frequently and most easily criticized tenet of any economic theory" imply that this tenet is not integral to the dominant economic theories of our age; it is only meant to say that these theories are frequently and easily criticized, and rightly so. I was not trying to suggest that Homo Economicus was a straw man in the sense that no one used him in their arguments; I was suggesting that he was a straw man in the sense that he is admittedly faulty and his explosion in no way affects the conclusions of proper (though perhaps not popular) economic theories.

In order to defend my characterization of Homo Economicus I will need to deal with some finer points of the definitions involved. In doing so I will draw upon Mises, so this section will also deal with the criticisms of Misesian/Austrian Theory that arise in Joe's response number III.

The definition that will be most important to us here is that of the term 'rational'. As Joe rightly points out Mises relies upon something that appears quite similar to Homo Economicus. The difference between what Mises proposes and the rational actor Homo Economicus is quite subtle. In fact, virtually all of the ways in which Mises differs from the classical economists are quite subtle, as they must be, for the classical economists were no fools. But it is most often Mises' most brilliant insights that are most quickly criticized by those who cannot help making the same mistakes that the classical economists have made. It is certainly true that on page nineteen of Human Action Mises states:

"Human action is necessarily always rational. The term "rational action" is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless."

It is also true that this statement is absolutely fundamental to the entire body of work that is Human Action, but it is not true that the behaviorists can successfully criticize this statement. It is a definitional, not an objective, statement. His goal is to define human action, and here we must consult what he means by 'rational' as is elaborated on page twenty:

"When applied to the means chosen for the attainment of ends, the terms
rational and irrational imply a judgment about the expediency and adequacy
of the procedure employed. The critic approves or disapproves of the method
from the point of view of whether or not it is best suited to attain the end in
question. It is a fact that human reason is not infallible and that man very
often errs in selecting and applying means. An action unsuited to the end
sought falls short of expectation. It is contrary to purpose, but it is rational,
i.e., the outcome of a reasonable—although faulty—deliberation and an
attempt—although an ineffectual attempt—to attain a definite goal. The
doctors who a hundred years ago employed certain methods for the treatment
of cancer which our contemporary doctors reject were—from the point of
view of present-day pathology—badly instructed and therefore inefficient.
But they did not act irrationally; they did their best. It is probable that in a
hundred years more doctors will have more efficient methods at hand for
the treatment of this disease. They will be more efficient but not more
rational than our physicians."

This is to say that, by rational, he means that action is considered and supported by reasons. He is contrasting conscious action with unconscious physical response. When one ingests a toxin one does not weigh reasons and costs in determining whether or not to use one's biological defenses to attempt to break down the poison. You do not consider the pros and cons before blinking when an object comes flying at your face. These are not actions in the sense that Mises is speaking of. The principles that he demonstrates in Human Action are only true of conscious, volitional, and, in this sense, rational action. They are absolutely true with regard to action, as such, and they are of no consequence with regard to unconscious response. This is what Mises means when he says " Human action is necessarily always rational." In this sense the statement truly is pleonastic. The statement understood in this way cannot be refuted by behavioral observation.

It is in using a very different definition of rational in a very similar context that the employers of Homo Economicus make a concession to modeling. Although I must admit that this error was originally made by the classical economists who reasoned largely in a deductive fashion. It could only have been necessary for the development of objectively true predictive models. That is, the definition used by Mises is actually indisputable and hence, is an excellent building block for a deductive argument. The alternative, which we have labeled as Homo Economicus, is easily disputable and as such is not a suitable premise for deduction. But it does have other merits. If we assume rational to refer to a specific set of behaviors, those ideally suited to the achievement of specific goals, we can model human behavior. We can say that given goal A, there is only one behavior B, which is ideally suited to the achievement of this goal. If we then assume that man is, in this sense, rational, we can, given his preferences, predict exactly his behavior. The assumption that man is rational in this sense is indisputably false.

Now moving on to the criticisms of Human Action not related to Homo Economicus. We arrive at the quote:

"Concrete value judgments and definite human actions are not open to further analysis. We may fairly assume or believe that they are absolutely dependent upon and conditioned by their causes. But as long as we do not know how external facts--physical and physiological--produce in a human mind definite thoughts and volitions resulting in concrcete acts, we have to face an insurmountable methodological dualism"

Again only by misinterpreting this quote can it be criticized. It comes from the section explaining that we must consider human action to be an ultimate given. This is true because we do not understand its causes. We cannot penetrate the barrier of human action in our economic reasoning so we must acknowledge this fact. We cannot say, based upon our analysis of the firing of neurons, whether an individual will buy a Ford Taurus or a Honda Accord. We cannot predict whether a person will choose to work overtime or go golfing. Thus "concrete value judgments and definite human actions are not open to further analysis", and they will remain so "as long as we do not know how external facts--physical and physiological--produce in a human mind definite thoughts and volitions resulting in concrete acts". I did not think that the behaviorists had achieved such things but perhaps I am just ill informed. Indeed, the sentences that complete the paragraph from which the above quote was taken make it quite clear that Mises does not necessarily consider understanding the underlying causes of human behavior as "futile" (as I do), but merely as a task yet to be accomplished:

"Concrete value judgments and definite human actions are not open to
further analysis. We may fairly assume or believe that they are absolutely
dependent upon and conditioned by their causes. But as long as we do not
know how external facts—physical and physiological—produce in a human
mind definite thoughts and volitions resulting in concrete acts, we have to
face an insurmountable methodological dualism. In the present state of our
knowledge the fundamental statements of positivism, monism and
panphysicalism are mere metaphysical postulates devoid of any scientific
foundation and both meaningless and useless for scientific research. Reason
and experience show us two separate realms: the external world of physical,
chemical, and physiological phenomena and the internal world of thought,
feeling, valuation, and purposeful action. No bridge connects—as far as we
can see today—these two spheres. Identical external events result sometimes
in different human responses, and different external events produce sometimes
the same human response. We do not know why.

In the face of this state of affairs we cannot help withholding judgment
on the essential statements of monism and materialism. We may or may
not believe that the natural sciences will succeed one day in explaining
the production of definite ideas, judgments of value, and actions in the
same way in which they explain the production of a chemical compound
as the necessary and unavoidable outcome of a certain combination of
elements. In the meantime we are bound to acquiesce in a methodological
dualism."

Even if the behaviorists where to explain the underlying causes of human behavior the act would render Mises' work incomplete rather than false.
Before going, for a moment, on the offensive I will cover the final Mises quote in III:

"whether or not the means chosen are fit for the attainment of the ends aimed at." (p. 21)

This statement is not, originally, used in reference to human behavior or human rationality, but with regard to the science of human action itself. Putting the quote into context is again quite useful:

"In this sense we speak of the subjectivism of the general science of human
action. It takes the ultimate ends chosen by acting man as data, it is entirely
neutral with regard to them, and it refrains from passing any value judgments.
The only standard which it applies is whether or not the means chosen are fit
for the attainment of the ends aimed at."

In fact, if one were to assume that human action where always perfectly suited for the attainment of the ends aimed at, this statement would be nonsensical, as the science of human action would be entirely superfluous. Mises is not an idiot. He is saying that the science of human action is neutral with regard to ends and that its object is to help man choose means that are suitable to attain his ends whatever they might be.

Now I would like to take a moment to analyze the following statement from III:

"It is precisely the claim of the behavioralist that an individual's actions do not rationally correspond to that individual's own value judgments. It is not a matter of imposing outside values (which Von Mises here argues against), but merely questioning the validity of assuming the rationality of action as defined by consistency with the desires and value judgments of the actor."

How do the behaviorists determine what a person's value judgments are? I suppose they must ask the individuals. But then, responding itself is an act. How can the researchers be certain that it is in the response to the question "What are your value judgments?" that an individuals true interests are represented rather than in their subsequent actions? Is it not possible that a person's value judgments change with time and that their actions are consistent with their valuations at the moment of action? Could the truth not also be that people are not generally capable of (or willing to) accurately identifying their own value judgments? If a man says that he values, above all else, his income, and then, on Sunday morning, he goes to church is he acting irrationally? Or is he simply more clearly aware of his desire for income than his desire for a reduction in his fear of death and uncertainty, or perhaps his valuation of social approval and conformity. If a man (who states that his objective is to maximize the quality of the VCR he purchases relative to his dollar cost) buys the more expensive of two VCRs when, had a third option, cheaper than the other two, been available, he would have chosen the middle alternative, is he truly acting irrationally or, is it possible, that he is optimizing preferences that he did not know how to express. Perhaps he should have said that he would also prefer not to have to spend too much time learning about VCRs. In accordance with such a preference he may have made his decision based upon a rule of thumb that is different in a case where three options are present than if two are. Perhaps one rule is that one should never buy the lowest cost alternative for such a product is generally shabby and inferior and the ownership of such a thing is popularly regarded as shameful. The second rule of thumb is that one need not purchase the most expensive option, as this is extravagant and wasteful. In a case where only two alternatives exist the two rules cannot be satisfied simultaneously and the first rule is a more significant value for this individual than the second. Thus he buys the more expensive VCR. In the case with three options he may satisfy both rules and thus he buys what in the first case was the least expensive VCR. One cannot say that, within the context of these explicit valuations, his decision was irrational. One might say that it is irrational to hold the contradictory values of trying to obtain the finest product for the least money and making the purchase while learning as little about the product as possible, but this would require the observer to impose a value judgment upon the actor.

Indeed as a heuristic exercise view yourself introspectively. In every action are you not optimizing your own satisfaction? If you tell others that you are striving to succeed in a given course and then you skip class, or ignore an assignment, have you done so out of a failure to recognize that the action will bring about results contrary to your goal? Or is the case merely that you have experienced a preference that overrode your initial desire to succeed in the course, such as a desire for leisure, a desire to spend time with a girl, or a desire to go drinking with your friends? Is it reasonable to expect that, asked the question, "What are your preferences?" you will accurately enumerate all of your actual preferences and be able to order them in such a way that will be universally true? It seems far more rational to say that if in circumstances A I choose to skip class and stay in bed the action itself represents my true preference. At the moment that I declared my intention to succeed in my class I may have been absolutely sincere, but I am equally sincere in my valuation of sleep over the class when I turn off my alarm and roll over.

Returning to the case of the VCRs, we have seen that to choose two different VCRs in what are technically the same circumstances can be a rational action. There is no objective way to determine which VCR was a better value in an absolute sense, and from the perspective of the buyer the cases were substantially different; he operated in accord with his actual values. A person may act differently in a crowd than they would if they were alone, but are they violating their preferences or are their preferences for conformity and acceptance overriding the preferences that would have been dominant in the absence of the crowd? To declare that a person's actions contradict their values and desires presumes that the critic understands the actor's values and desires; a premise that I hope I have demonstrated is highly suspect. It is just this sort of false certainty that deludes the followers of the social sciences. Mises' work is truly scientific because of the extraordinary care that he takes not to assume the veracity of what is not certain.

Post Script

Thank you again for taking the time to consider my ideas. I understand that I have been running a bit long but it is a great pleasure for me to put these ideas into writing. I hope that you will continue to spend some time in critical response. There is no better catalyst for clear thought than external challenge and review.

I would briefly like to advertise the work of Ludwig von Mises. As Joe indicated, his primary work Human Action (and many secondary ones) is available for download at www.mises.org. It is a bit long and you might prefer to buy a hard copy but it is well worth the read. In the context of my experience I would say that it is the finest philosophical work of the twentieth century. You may disagree, but if you are a logically minded person you will not be able to stop yourself from admiring the rigorous consistency and conceptual breadth of his work.

Re: A Critique of Social Science

Once again, I find myself strapped for time (the Madness of March has inflicted me) and so I can only offer limited comments on the very heady posts of late. My objective in this post is to highlight my views and concerns, particularly where they may differ from Henry's or Joe's. I hope this conversation keeps going so that I can add more later without the conversation having long past into the archives.

First, Henry, your post was very impressive and thought-provoking. My immediate concern is that I am not really sure what are the dividing lines between the physical sciences and the social sciences. My best guess is that you would say that a social science is that which is not susceptible to the scientific method -- if in fact that is your position, I would recommend the term "humanities" instead. Social sciences like psychology and sociology have made important advances through the scientific method, and I believe it is unfair to discard the entire field because not all academic inquiry within a field meets rigorous scientific inquiry.

Second, I believe that the softer sciences play an important role in the development of understanding, although I readily agree that many conclusions that social scientists reach extend too far. As Joe noted in a recent post, the same can be said for the frontier of natural science. In my view the criticism you make is better framed as one of overreaching. Yet that overreaching is what causes the next generation of the curious to challenge existing claims and add to knowledge.

Third, I disagree that the objects of study within social science are chaotic, at least any more so than the materials studied within the natural sciences. I recognize that strictly, a system cannot be "more" or "less" chaotic, but I believe what we see as an impenetrable morass of complexity may become coherent through advances in technology. For instance, neuroscience has allowed us to better understand human behavior and will continue to add to our genuine knowledge. Even if there are many variables that play into a complex system, there may be ways to isolate one or several events to demonstrate a causal relationship. I do not understand chaos theory that well, and maybe someone with better understanding of the subject could explain, but it seems to me that understanding a complex system must begin somewhere, and chaos theory allows a starting point.

I think Henry's post will give us fodder for discussion for a long time to come. I would find it helpful to take a point at a time, and Joe has offered some good counterpoints (most of which I stand behind) with respect to behavioral economics. Maybe we can focus on that point for starters and work from there.