Calculation and Knowledge

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.

Can sociology be integrated into Mises's epistemological distinction between theory and history? What can sociology accomplish as a historical discipline?

Much of the media discussion around the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall will focus on American military politics and the politicians of the time. But to truly understand why the Soviet system in Eastern Europe collapsed, we must look to Mises's pioneering work on economic planning.

Reason, equality, separation of church and state, and science and politics freed from religious dogma have characterized the Enlightenment. Have these ideas given us freedom, or cost us freedom?