Calculation and Knowledge

If you've wanted to read Human Action, this is your opportunity to hear it explained by great economists and scholars!

The economy is not primarily about the adjustment of capital investment across industries and firms, but about the determination of which industries and types of production will exist—and who will be involved in this future production.

Economics is not intent upon pronouncing value judgments. It aims at a cognition of the consequences of certain modes of acting.

I.

In terms of economics, what currently is should be of very little importance: what matters, and that we should seek to understand, is the process that brought it about and that will create what will be in its place.

It is possible to determine in terms of money prices the sum of the income or the wealth of a number of people. But it is nonsensical to reckon national income or national wealth.

Judgments of value do not measure: they arrange, they grade. If he relies only on subjective valuation, even isolated man cannot arrive at an economic decision based on more or less exact computations in cases where the solution is not immediately evident. To aid his calculations he must assume substitution relations between commodities. That's where exchange value and prices come in.

Rule-following and hierarchy, as decision-making and coordination mechanisms, can enrich the Austrian theory of the firm.

It's possible for investors and entrepreneurs to make a lot of money in markets without understanding the economic theory behind their actions.

Central planners like Cass Sunstein think our alleged "irrationality" means we need the government to intervene in our daily lives.