Man, economy and state by Rothbard

[benrickert]

Going down @jacob ‘s ‘big list of books’ I started reading ‘Man, economy and state (with power and market)’ by Murray Rothbard. Currently four chapters and about 300 (of 1400) pages in. Previously read his ‘America’s great depression’ and hazlitt’s ‘Economics in one lesson’ on the same subject, both which I enjoyed.

The book starts out with the very basics of economics describing transactions based on individual human actions/choice. I find it liberating in that it’s first principles. media’s and Wall Street economists’ aggregation of everything and spitting out data and conclusions using an assumed framework without much discussion of the basic principles seems to have led people’s understanding of things off on a scary tangent.

Anyone having read the book? What did you take away from it? Objections to his theories?

[guitarplayer]

I had two or three attempts but all of them failed. In retrospect, I think he laid it out so simply that I had a hard time to keep my focus as I was trying to extract from each page 'deep truths' which are perhaps not there on such a micro level. Actually, now that you have mentioned it, (and with a different general knowledge level), I might give it another go, this time reading at an imposed pace, like 'x pages a day' or 'finish in x weeks'.

I think these days, some people on the forum would say that this is a classic 'orange' text describing the economic man, but perhaps not taking into account or largely skimming through some other perspectives (the religious man, the cultural man, the physical man (and the world). A useful tool to triangulate (in the social science sense of the word; I remember reading an article about it for uni years back, just realized this word will find a good home here so will create another thread about it))

[jacob]

It's been nearly 20 years since I read it. It's an easier-to-read introduction to praxeology than Human Action. Being axiomatic, it can feel like the book is spending a hundred pages to prove that 1+1=2. However, it also gives an understanding of where all these rules are coming from. "What is supply?"... really! In standard/analytical economics, it's just described as a curve on a graph with units on one axis and price on the other; but it kinda skips over the cause of the curve.

I'd say that MES/praxeology describes economy in "left hand"-terms, that is, as an intersubjective (LL) solution to subjective (UL) states, whereas classical economics is being interobjective (LR) and framed in terms of analytical math (round peg square hole). IOW, praxeology describes economics as a subfield of psychology rather than subfield of "wannabe physics".

One danger is in getting sucked into libertarian thinking. The danger is not in the politics (whatever) but in deliberately developing a blind spot that "society doesn't exist and presuming that we're just a bunch of individuals operating in an interobjective system" due to zooming in (on the individual) too much. This leads to an economic understanding that deliberately ignores intersubjective connections (which is what society is).

[Lemur]

Never read anything about Rothbard but I did read 'Economics in One Lesson" a few years ago and found the book informative as a undergraduate level thinker in Economics. Basic stuff like supply & demand. If that book is in the same vein then I would say it is just as important to look at the opposite viewpoints from Keynes (1920s/1930s) but also more modern day criticisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Criticism

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_o ... ken_window that was probably my favorite takeaway ...

I don't have any book recommendations for modern economic thought.

[7Wannabe5]

IOW, praxeology describes economics as a subfield of psychology rather than subfield of "wannabe physics".

I picked up a copy yesterday. Rothbard describes praxeology as being quite distinct from psychology.

Praxeology, therefore, differs from psychology or from the philosophy of ethics. Since all these disciplines deal with the subjective decisions of individual human minds, many observers have believed that they are fundamentally identical. This is not the case at all. Psychology and ethics deal with the content of human ends; they ask, why does the man choose such and such ends, or what ends should men value? Praxeology and economics deal with any given ends and with the formal implications of the fact that men have ends and employ means to attain them.

However, he does also note that he believes verbal reasoning to be the appropriate approach to the explication of economics, as opposed to the use of pure symbolic logic or mathematics that would be more appropriate for a field such as physics.

I agree with guitarplayer that it is a classic Orange/Gray (libertarian) text. Rothbard's approach to the boundaries of violence and free contract as well as his take on ownership of "the original factors of production" (nature/land) time stamp the text as mid-20th century. For instance, consider the manner in which he blithly moves from a discussion on the horrors of slavery to an example of how Anyman "Jones" might achieve his end of consuming a ham sandwich as follows:

Typically, in order to produce a ham sandwich for Jones in his armchair, it is necessary for his wife to expend energy in unwrapping the bread, slicing the ham, placing the ham between bread slices, and carrying it to Jones.

IOW, he writes with no consciousness of how the reigning social construct might serve as a "violent" mechanism which limits the labor market opportunities of Mrs. Jones to the extent that she is unnaturally restrained from telling Jones to get his ass out of the armchair and make his own freaking sandwich.

Similarly, he completely (thus far in my reading) neglects "violent" externalities such as pollution when going on and on about how nobody would ever think to pay for the air they breath.

That said, if you can draw your own conclusions whenever he makes use of a phrase such as "Of course, it would be ridiculous..", it's definitely a more interesting, amusing and less completely wrong (due to abuse of mathematics) read than your typical Econ 101/102 textbook.

[Jean]

I really enjoyed reading it at the time.
To avoid becoming too dogmaticaly libertarian while enjoying the clarity of its reasoning, just remember that "unlimited ressources" is a much less correct approximation now than it was at Locke's time, or even Rothbard's time.