Correlation and Causation

(This is an adaptation of a Swedish blog post I wrote a couple of days ago.)

People who are in favor of gun control probably don’t read this blog. It is simply too obvious that criminals prefer disarmed victims to armed ones. It is equally obvious that dictators and would-be dictators prefer a disarmed population to an armed one. Not understanding this is stupid – and I wouldn’t insult my readers by assuming they are stupid, would I?

But there is a certain argument one hears once in a while: If one points to statistics that confirm that fewer crimes are committed when people are allowed to wear arms, one will hear that this is an invalid argument, because “correlation isn’t causation”.

Now, correlation isn’t necessarily causation. Some statistical correlations are mere coincidence. At best, correlation shows that there some causal connection to look for. To take a familiar example, smokers contract lung cancer more often than non-smokers. That means one should look at the possibility of a causal connection. On the other hand, not every smoker contracts lung cancer – and sometimes even non-smokers contract lung cancer. What this implies is that there is a causal connection to look for, but that there are also other factors involved.

On the other hand, causation always and necessarily implies correlation. For example, the law of gravity implies that the vast majority of things one drops will fall to the ground, and if some things do not fall to the ground, one will have to look for the factor that counteracts gravity. If a leaf or a feather does not hit the ground, or does it with a delay, this is explained by air resistance. If birds and airplanes manage to fly, it is because of a cause that counteracts gravity, and therefore birds fall to the ground only when they are shot, and an airplane (or a space ship) only when its motor for some reason stops working properly.

And in the case of gun control failing to avert crime and even causing crime, the cause is equally obvious. Criminals may be intelligent or stupid, but they are never so stupid as to choose armed victims when there are disarmed victims to attack. Neither would a dictator, or a would-be dictator, fail to realize that an armed citizenry would be a formidable obstacle. Not even a madman on a shooting spree would miss this.

It has been pointed out, time and time again, that mass shootings in the vast majority of cases have been perpetrated in “gun free zones”, and that they never occur at shooting ranges where every potential victim is already armed. It has also been pointed out that crime rates rise when guns for self-defense are outlawed. It is simply ridiculous to say that this is a mere statistical coincidence and that it is a correlation that does not prove causation. We know the causation and should not be surprised by the correlation.

Even proper ideas can be misused, and this is an example.

Taxing the Rich Makes Us Poorer

That taxing the poor makes the poor even poorer is not exactly rocket science. It would be a great boon to the poor man if the income tax and the value-added tax were simply abolished. In Sweden (and I believe in most countries) alcoholic beverages and tobacco products are heavily taxed; those taxes obviously hurt the poor much more than the rich: the poor man may have to quit drinking and smoking just to be able to afford his daily food and paying the rent for his apartment; while the rich man may enjoy his vintage wines and his Habana cigars without it making a dent in his fortune. (In the category of “rich” are also included the politicians who levy the taxes.) The rationalization for this is that it is necessary to preserve the poor man’s health.

At least here in Sweden, gasoline and electricity are also heavily taxed; this is part of the effort to “save the planet” from the results of industrialization. The relatively poor – those who can at least afford a car – are made to pay extra for driving to and from their work; but it does not make a dent in the fortune of Al Gore, who is able to afford a well-lit mansion and to drive in a limousine or fly by private airplane while traveling the world to preach austerity to the rest of us.

But what about exclusively taxing the rich and hand the money out to the poor (after a handsome deduction for paying the politicians and their henchmen other public servants)? Here is a quote from Ayn Rand:

In view of what they hear from the experts, the people cannot be blamed for their ignorance and their helpless confusion. If an average housewife struggles with her incomprehensibly shrinking budget and sees a tycoon in a resplendent limousine, she might well think that just one of his diamond cuff links would solve all her problems. She has no way of knowing that if all the personal luxuries of all the tycoons were expropriated, it would not feed her family – and millions of other, similar families – for one week; and that the entire country would starve on the first morning of the week to follow. […] How would she know it if all the voices she hears are telling her that we must soak the rich?

No one tells her that higher taxes imposed on the rich (and the semi-rich) will not come out of their consumption expenditures, but out of their investment capital (i.e., their savings); that such taxes will mean less investment, i.e., less production, fewer jobs, higher prices for scarcer goods; and that by the time the rich have to lower their standard of living, hers will be gone, along with her savings and her husband’s job – and no power in the world (no economic power) will be able to revive the dead industries (there will be no such power left). (“The Inverted Moral Priorities” in The Voice of Reason, p.  274.)

This is what taxing the rich will inevitably accomplish: less investment, fewer jobs, higher prices, scarcer product, and in the end (if practiced consistently enough) starvation.

This point is also stressed by “Austrian” economists, especially by George Reisman. There is an essay by Reisman on the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s web site, called Anti-Obamanomics: Why Everyone Should Be in Favor of Reducing Taxes on the “Rich”, from which I quote:

The progressive personal income tax, the corporate income tax, the inheritance tax, and the capital-gains tax are all paid with funds that otherwise would have been saved and invested. All of them reduce the demand for labor by business firms in comparison with what it would otherwise have been, and thus either the wage rates or the volume of employment that business firms can offer. For they deprive business firms of the funds with which to pay wages.

By the same token, they deprive business firms of the funds with which to buy capital goods. This, together with the greater spending for consumers’ goods emanating from the government, as it spends the tax proceeds, causes the production of capital goods to drop relative to the production of consumers’ goods. This implies a reduction in the degree of capital intensiveness in the economic system and thus its ability to implement technological advances. The individual and corporate income taxes, and the capital-gains tax, of course, also powerfully reduce the incentive to introduce new products and improve methods of production. In all these ways, these taxes undermine capital accumulation and the rise in the productivity of labor and real wages, and thus the standard of living of everyone, not just of those on whom the taxes are levied.

And later on:

Starting with tax cuts for the so-called rich — based on equivalent reductions in government spending — is the only hope for the resumption of significant economic progress, indeed, for the avoidance of economic retrogression and growing impoverishment. Because of this, it is actually the quickest and surest road to any major reduction in the tax burden of the average wage earner. It holds out the prospect of the average wage earner being able to double his standard of living in a generation or less. The average standard of living would double in a single generation if economic progress at a rate of just 3 percent a year could be achieved. Such economic progress would also mean a halving of the average wage earner’s tax burden in the same period of time — if government spending per capita in real terms were held fixed, for then he would have double the real income out of which to pay his present level of taxes. And then, of course, once all the taxes that most stood in the way of capital accumulation and economic progress were eliminated, further reductions in government spending and taxation could and should take place that would be of corresponding direct benefit to wage earners, that is, show up in the reduction of the taxes paid by them.[1]

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But if there should be no taxes on the poor and no taxes on the rich, what taxes should there be? Who, then, should pay the salaries of our politicians and their henchmen other public servants? Or should there be no politicians and no government at all? Should the proper functions of government (as some anarcho-capitalists suggest) be taken over by insurance companies? At least, they would not levy taxes but be paid voluntarily.

Well, as you probably know, Ayn Rand addresses this question in her essay “Government Financing in a Free Society” in The Virtue of Selfishness. I quote parts of it:

In a fully free society, taxation – or, to be exact, payment for governmental services – would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government – the police, the armed forces, the law courts – are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.

And here is her proposal:

As an illustration (and only as an illustration), consider the following possibility. One of the most vitally needed services, which only a government can render, is the protection of contractual agreements among citizens. Suppose that the government were to protect – i.e., to recognize as legally valid and enforceable – only those contracts which had been insured by the payment, to the government, of a premium in the amount of a legally fixed percentage of the contractual transaction. Such an insurance would not be compulsory; there would be no legal penalty imposed on those who did not choose to take it – they would be free to make verbal agreements or to sign uninsured contracts, if they so wished. The only consequence would be that such agreements or contracts would not be legally enforceable; if they were broken, the injured party would not be able to seek redress in a court of law.

And later on:

When one considers the magnitude of the wealth involved in credit transactions, one can see that the percentage required to pay for such governmental insurance would be infinitesimal – much smaller than that paid for other types of insurance – yet it would be sufficient to finance all the other functions of a proper government.

And:

Men would pay voluntarily for insurance protecting their contracts. But they would not pay voluntarily for insurance against the danger of aggression by Cambodia. […] A program of voluntary government financing would be amply sufficient to pay for the legitimate functions of a proper government. It would not be sufficient to provide unearned support for the entire globe.

And I have to quote this paragraph:

It may be observed, in the example given above, that the cost of such voluntary government financing would be automatically proportionate to the scale of an individual’s economic activity; those on the lowest economic levels (who seldom, if ever, engage in credit transactions) would be virtually exempt – though they would still enjoy the benefits of legal protection […] These benefits may be regarded as a bonus to the men of lesser economic ability, made possible by the men of greater economic ability – without any sacrifice of the latter to the former.

So under this proposal, the taxes would, predominantly, maybe even exclusively, be paid by the rich. But it certainly wouldn’t have the effects that taxes on the rich have today.[2]

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What, then, are the chances of such a tax reform ever being implemented? Pretty slim, I would say. In today’s world, non-existence. But maybe in some distant future. As Ayn Rand writes in her essay

…the principle will be practicable only in a fully free society, a society whose government has been constitutionally reduced to its proper, basic functions. […] Any program of voluntary government financing is the last, not the first, step on the road to a free society – the last, not the first reform to advocate.

If we were to argue for such a reform today, would the politicians even listen?

One obvious stumbling block[3] is that a fully free society would mean fewer politicians and government employees than we have today – fewer by a large extent. Would today’s politicians and government officials voluntarily step down, take their place in the market economy and leave the rest of us alone and only interfere in our lives when our rights have been violated?

A political career is quite lucrative today. Politicians grant themselves quite handsome salaries – and when they are voted out of office (which does happen, sometimes), they also grant themselves quite handsome pensions; they do not even have to begin looking for other jobs, if they don’t feel like it. And if they do feel like it, they take well-paid jobs as lobbyists, without having to relinquish their handsome pensions. (At least, this is the case here in Sweden, but I do not think it is much different in the rest of the Western world.) With a government “constitutionally reduced to its proper, basic functions”, this would not be possible.

So, judging by the situation today, I have to be pessimistic. And the distant future is – well, distant.

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[1]) This part of the essay is adapted from Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, p. 308-310.

[2]) Ayn Rand’s essay does not seem to be available on the web, so you will have to buy the book. – There is a good elaboration on her essay by Craig Biddle of The Objective Standard; if you are not a subscriber, you can download it for the modest price of $3.95.

[3]) Another stumbling block is (to use George Reisman’s words) “massive ignorance of economics”. It will take, at best, a generation to uproot “mainstream” economics and replace it with sound, “Austrian” ideas.

Communism vs. Capitalism

This is an old Soviet poster depicting the difference between communism and capitalism. To the left, the exploited worker under capitalism; to the right, the same worker under communism. See anything wrong here?

I got this picture from Wladimir Kraus on Facebook. I quote his comment:

This Soviet poster describes lives under capitalism and socialist USSR.

Under capitalism: the overworked worker is barely able to survive on his meager wage, while the fat capitalist sits on sacks of gold–wealth serving his greed and war lust.

Under socialism: a well-fed and well-dressed worker is happily carrying loads of merchandise; in the background are university, cinema, factories–wealth serving the masses.

Of course, by now everybody knows that nothing could be further from the truth. It is, to be precise, exactly the opposite! Still, it seems that little has changed in the public’s fundamental understanding of how capitalism operates and whom it benefits.

Under capitalism capitalist wealth is at the service of the buying public, i.e. the workers. Workers far from being exploited by that capital are directly benefited by the wealth of the richest capitalists precisely because they do not keep that wealth in the form of cash (or gold) but invest it in capital goods and use it to pay wages.

My own comment is that this would be funny, if it weren’t tragic. There are still people who believe the worker is exploited under capitalism and that communism will pour a horn of plenty on him. That this is praxeologically wrong may be hard to see for those unacquainted with sound economics; but is it really hard to see that it is empirically wrong?

”Royal Swedish Envy”

This is a common expression in Swedish: Whenever a Swede shows signs of envy, another Swede rushes in and says this is an example of “Royal Swedish envy” – as if envy were an emotion particularly and peculiarly Swedish, not to be found in Denmark, Norway, Finland, much less then in countries outside of Scandinavia.

Why blog about this? Well, The Economist recently published a short piece called Who’s Shrugging now, dealing with Ayn Rand’s influence in Sweden. I quote:

Sweden might seem an odd place to foster a Randian movement. In 1976 she decried its welfare state as “the most evil national psychology ever described” […]

So how did Ayn Rand arrive at this conclusion? Did she travel extensively in Sweden and talked to many Swedes to discover what our national psychology is like? Well, no.

The quote is from Ayn Rand’s very last Ford Hall Forum lecture, “The Moral Factor” (April 11, 1976), also issued in pamphlet form. Among other things, the lecture discusses the case of Ingmar Bergman, who was arrested in 1976 on a charge of tax evasion. I quote from the pamphlet:

Harry Schein, chairman of the Swedish Film Institute, and a friend of Mr. Bergman, said: “’There is something very Swedish about this whole case. The idea of people saying “you can’t get away with anything.” We call it “the royal Swedish envy,” and it’s 400 years old.’ He added: ‘One of the reasons Swedish equality is so advanced is that the motive behind it is not just socialism, but an active dislike of people who are supposed to be better. You have to cut people down. Everyone must be equal. Make someone who’s exceptional feel unexceptional.’”

This, I submit, is the most evil national psychology ever described. This is the bottom of the moral abyss. Many of you have read my essay on “The Age of Envy,” which deals with what I regard as the lowest evil: hatred of the good for being the good. It is shocking to read of an entire nation committed to that kind of hatred. Yet such is the base of the Welfare State and the motive required to hold it together.

It is, indeed, “shocking to read of an entire nation committed to that kind of hatred”. It is even more shocking to hear this of the nation where I was born and have lived most of my life – and to learn that throughout my life, I have been surrounded by “haters of the good for being the good”, without even noticing it. What does this tell about my powers of observation, and of my ability to induce from my observations, even in a case where there is an abundance of concrete instances to induce from?

Enough sarcasm. – Certainly there are some bad people in Sweden, just like everywhere else. And certainly a majority of Swedes support the welfare state. But I believe in most cases, this is simply because they do not understand better. A few of them might be motivated by this “hatred of the good for being the good”; but those people are in a minority in any nation or culture.

What is the line of reasoning here? There is a slightly jocular expression in the Swedish language; this is taken to be representative of the national character, or national “sense of life” of the Swedish people; and then the conclusion it that Sweden is the most envious country on earth.

I am not much of a patriot; but neither do I think the entire Swedish people should be condemned on such a flimsy basis.

Is Life Worth Living?

You may think I must be severely depressed to even ask such a question, but I am not; it was prompted by an excerpt from Human Action (the very last chapter of the book) which was recently posted at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. I quote:

Science does not value, but it provides acting man with all the information he may need with regard to his valuations. It keeps silence only when the question is raised whether life itself is worth living.

This is eminently true. If you were to ask this question of yourself, no science could tell you the answer; the only one who can answer it is you. – But if you even read this, this is proof enough that you do find life worth living; if not, you would already be dead: you would have committed suicide in any manner available, including stopping eating.[1]

Not even the science of ethics could tell you the answer. This science (and I refer here, of course, to the Objectivist ethics) can tell you that there is an inextricable link between “life” and “value” – that it is only to living beings that values are possible and necessary – and it can tell you that life is the ultimate standard of value. And then it can offer you advice about how to go about living successfully to make it even more worth living: use your reason, use your own mind, be productive, honest, just – all the things enumerated in the catalog of virtues in Galt’s speech. And you have to apply this as best you can to all the concrete situations in your life (which is not always easy). But if you really think that “life is not worth living”, all this is of no avail. If life itself loses its value, what else could be of value?

Mises repeats his point a little later in the text:

It is true, praxeology and economics do not tell a man whether he should preserve or abandon life. Life itself and the unknown forces that originate it and keep it burning are an ultimate given, and as such beyond the pale of human science. The subject matter of praxeology is merely the essential manifestation of human life, viz., action.

Praxeology and economics can tell you many things – for example, it can tell you why capitalism is the proper social system and why socialism is doomed to fail. But this, too, is based on the idea that life is worth living: if it were not, what would it matter if you live in a free society or under tyranny and slavery? If your life were truly not worth living, neither would it matter whether you are free or a slave.[2]

This far, I agree with Mises. (The point is virtually self-evident, so I have merely elaborated on a self-evidence above.) Now to a “bone of contention”: Mises’ insistence that science is – and should be – wertfrei or value-free. In other words, science does not, and should not, pass judgments of value. Such judgments are outside the scope of science. Wherever they belong, they do not belong in science; neither in the natural sciences, nor in the humanities.

Well, the natural sciences do not make value judgments – for example, physics does not tell us whether gravity is good or bad; it just tells us that there is such a phenomenon as gravity. But even so, it tells us that it is a bad thing to jump from an airplane without the aid of a parachute. But this concerns the implications of scientific knowledge, not the content of the science. – And the very pursuit of science is based on the idea that knowledge is a value. But that concerns the scientist’s motivation in pursuing science, not the content of the science.

But is this true about economics as well? (Or about the humanities in general, but I want to focus on economics.) Well, the economist as well as the natural scientist must be motivated by the idea that knowledge is a value; and the knowledge, once acquired, implies “oughts” and value judgments. For example, once an economist has arrived at the insight that capitalism leads to prosperity and socialism to misery, it would be ludicrous to abstain from saying that we ought to have capitalism, and that socialism is bad.

But what about the content of economics, apart from the motivation to study it and the implications of it? This is what Mises has to say:

While many people blame economics for its neutrality with regard to value judgments, other people blame it for its alleged indulgence in them. Some contend that economics must necessarily express judgments of value and is therefore not really scientific, as the criterion of science is its valuational indifference. Others maintain that good economics should be and could be impartial, and that only bad economists sin against this postulate.

The semantic confusion in the discussion of the problems concerned is due to an inaccurate use of terms on the part of many economists. An economist investigates whether a measure a can bring about the result p for the attainment of which it is recommended, and finds that a does not result in p but in g, an effect which even the supporters of the measure a consider undesirable. If this economist states the outcome of his investigation by saying that a is a bad measure, he does not pronounce a judgment of value. He merely says that from the point of view of those aiming at the goal p, the measure a is inappropriate.

Observe that the word “bad” here expresses a value judgment. But the economist should not have used this word? He should have used words like “undesirable” or “inappropriate” instead? This may be semantic hair-splitting, but certainly those words, too, express value judgments.

There is no escape from value judgments. As Ayn Rand explains:

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought”. (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 17.)

And later in the same book:

Moral evaluations are implicit in most intellectual issues; it is not merely permissible, but mandatory to pass moral judgments when and where appropriate; to suppress such judgment is an act of moral cowardice. But a moral judgment must always follow, not precede (or supersede), the reasons on which it is based. (P. 143.)

In my own words: Value judgments, or moral judgments, must never be divorced from the facts of reality.

But saying this in a modern philosophy class is like swearing in church. Modern philosophy takes it for granted, even axiomatic, that values are divorced from reality. No “ought”, it teaches to young, defenseless minds, can ever be derived from an “is”; no value can ever be derived from facts.[3]

I think this idea is the most stupid idea ever uttered in the whole history of philosophy. Anyone who has not yet passed through a modern philosophy class (and punished with a lower grade for disagreeing with this idea) knows that an “ought” is derived from an “is”. To take an example I have used before: what clothes you should wear is determined by the weather; when it is 30^o cold outside, you don’t go out in shorts; when it is 30^o warm, you don’t put on your fur coat. But modern philosophy teaches you this does not matter; not even the fact that you might freeze to death matters.

Every time anyone makes an analysis of the facts and then makes a recommendation based on this analysis, he is deriving an “ought” from an “is”. He may study gravity and then recommend a parachute, to repeat the example above. Or he may be an economist and be asked to analyze the pros and cons of taxation; if he is a good, “Austrian”, economist, he will find that taxes are harmful and that taxes on “the rich” will eventually harm “the poor” as well. So he will recommend lower taxes, or even the abolishment of taxes.[4] But on the premise that an “ought” must not be derived from an “is”, he cannot allow himself to make that recommendation!

I will not insult Mises by calling him a “modern philosopher”; but in this case I believe he has bought the Humean idea of the is/ought or fact/value dichotomy.

In case someone should think I am unfair to Mises, that I have refrained from quoting some good stuff, and that my criticisms are mere nit-picking, I would like to end by quoting George Reisman:

Even on the occasions when I found it necessary to disagree with him […] I always found what he had to say to be extremely valuable and a powerful stimulus to my own thinking. I do not believe that anyone can claim to be really educated who has not absorbed a substantial measure of the immense wisdom present in his works. (Ludwig von Mises: Defender of Capitalism.)

He is a powerful stimulus to my thinking, too. And you are not educated until you have read him.

This blog post is getting long; an “is” that implies an “ought”: that I should stop here.

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[1]) Old people often lose their appetite when death is approaching. Unlike suicide, this is not a choice; it is nature’s way of telling that life is about to end.

[2]) One famous philosopher has claimed that it is one’s duty to preserve one’s life only when life has become unbearable – before that, preserving life is just an “inclination”. But this amounts to saying that life is worth living only when it is not worth living any longer. I could hardly agree less.

[3]) The origin of this idea is David Hume; but you already know this.

[4]) For the question how the legitimate functions of government should be financed, I refer you to Ayn Rand’s essay “Government Financing in a Free Society” in The Virtue of Selfishness.

Ludwig von Mises on Free Will

I am currently reading (or rather re-reading) Ludwig von Mises’ Theory and History. I may have more to say about it later; but for now I will just take up his views on determinism and free will. But first my own view:

“Free will” means the ability to choose between alternatives. Where there are no alternatives, there can be no choice; but where there are alternatives, man has to choose between them. (He may choose not to choose, but that too is a choice.) But what is free about this choice? The alternatives merely present themselves; and the consequences of the choice one makes, for good or for evil, are inescapable. What is free is merely the very act of choosing.

Take a trivial example: I wake up in the morning with a slightly sore throat. Now I have two alternatives: getting up and go to work despite the sore throat (hoping it will get better during the day) – or to report sick and stay in bed. The sore throat makes it necessary to make this choice; this necessity is determined by the circumstances. The consequences are inescapable: if I go to work, it may happen that my throat gets worse; reporting sick and staying in bed will result in the loss of one day’s pay; those possible outcomes are, at least partly, determined by my choice. The only thing that is truly free is the choice itself. And if someone were to ask me what caused the choice, the only possible answer is that I caused it; I made the choice.

It is often claimed that free will or the power of choice is in conflict with the law of causality; so that either free will is an illusion or that, if there is free will, this is an exception to the law of causality and proves that there are “uncaused” or “random” events in the universe. But it is not an exception to causality; it is a special kind of causality.[1]

Now to what Mises has to say (all quotes are from pp. 76–78, the section on “The Free-Will Controversy”):

Man chooses between modes of action incompatible with one another. Such decisions, says the free-will doctrine, are basically undetermined and uncaused; they are not the inevitable outcome of antecedent conditions. (Emphasis mine.)

This is of course precisely what I answered in presenting my own view of free will above. I cause the choice, I determine what it will be; it is caused and determined by me.

Determinists reject this doctrine as illusory. Man, they say, deceives himself in believing that he chooses. Something unknown to the individual directs his will. He thinks that he weighs in his mind the pros and cons of the alternatives left to his choice and then makes a decision. He fails to realize that the antecedent state of things enjoins upon him a definite line of conduct and that there is no means to elude this pressure. Man does not act, he is acted upon.

This is the standard determinist argument one hears all the time: you merely fool yourself if you believe in free will; in fact, you are a puppet and will always remain a puppet. (Determinists disagree over what you are a puppet of; it may be your genes, your environment, the material productive forces, your toilet training, or even God.)

Also, “determinism” is an ambiguous term. When contrasted to “indeterminism” it means simply that causality is omnipresent throughout the universe; there no such thing as a “contingent” or “random” event. But then it is also used in contrast to the idea of free will. This equivocation on the term “determinism” has played a lot of havoc. The determinist says to the free will advocate: “So you don’t believe in causality?”, and the free will advocate can only retort: “So you believe you’re a puppet of forces you cannot control?”; and the debate just stops there.

But since Mises accepts the idea that our choices are “undetermined and uncaused”, he has to give the determinists a slightly different answer:

Both doctrines neglect to pay due attention to the role of ideas. The choices a man makes are determined by the ideas he adopts.

True enough; but it is also a choice to adopt a certain idea! One hears a new idea; and then there is the alternative of accepting the idea or rejecting it. What determines which ideas one chooses, except oneself by making the choice?

One still may ask: What makes a man adopt a new idea? (It is not a matter of tossing coins or adopting it arbitrarily.) It may be that the new idea agrees with other ideas already held: it is seen as an implication of the old idea or a further development of the old idea or something that sheds new light on the old idea. But the old idea must at some time in the past have been adopted by choice. This reasoning seems to lead to an infinite regress (the choice to adopt idea A depends on earlier having adopted idea B, which in its turn depends on even earlier have adopted idea C, etc., ad infinitum).

So where does this regress stop? Probably with the first idea within a given field that a person decides to pay attention to.

But I’m digressing. Back to Mises:

The determinists are right in asserting that everything that happens is the necessary sequel of the preceding state of things. What a man does at any instant of his life is entirely dependent on his past, that is, on his physiological inheritance as well as of all he went through in his previous days.

I could add to this that it is also dependent on all the choices he has made in his previous days. A man’s character is shaped by the choices (big or small) that he has made. A man becomes brave by making many brave choices; and he becomes a coward by making many cowardly choices (just to take one example).

Yet the significance of this thesis is considerably weakened by the fact that nothing is known about the way in which ideas arise.

Very little is known. I said something earlier about how ideas arise, but it is just a preliminary sketch. (And what Mises has in mind is the fact that we know very little about the relation between what goes on in our mind and the neurology of our brain.)

The free-will doctrine is correct in pointing out the fundamental difference between human action and animal behavior. While the animal cannot help yielding to the physiological impulse that prevails at the moment, man chooses between alternative modes of conduct.

This, of course, is true. Animals are goal-directed in the sense that they act (or react) to preserve their lives and the life of the species (by procreating); but it is only man who can consciously set goals and purposes and who has to do this consciously in order to survive and prosper.

There is another quote later in the book about this crucial difference between man and the other animals:

Free will means that man can aim at definite ends because he is familiar with some of the laws determining the flux of world affairs. There is a sphere within which man can choose between alternatives. He is not, like other animals, inevitably and irremediably subject to the operation of blind fate. He can, within definite narrow limits, divert events from the course they would take if left alone. He is an acting being. (P. 179.)

Agreed. Mises continues:

The will is unbendable and must not yield to any violence and oppression, because man is capable of choosing between life and death …

“Life and death” is the fundamental alternative for all living organisms, including man, but man is the only organism that needs to be aware of this alternative. – I’d like to add that most choices we make are not literal “life-or-death” choices: when we make our choices and weigh pro and con, we simply take it for granted that the choice we make should be the most life-promoting choice; if we have a choice between an edible mushroom and a poisonous one, we do not even bother to consider picking the poisonous one. There is one exception:

…and of preferring death if life can be preserved only at the price of submitting to unbearable conditions.

It is very rarely that death is actually preferable to life. One instance is if one is suffering from a painful and incurable illness. But I don’t think this is what Mises has in mind here; it is more likely that he thinks of risking one’s life fighting against tyranny. It reminds me of that famous Patrick Henry quote: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

This blog post is beginning to meander, so I stop here. For the time being. And this choice was mine to make.

(Scandinavian readers may also read Mises och determinismen and Spridda tankar om den fria viljan.)

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[1]) Leonard Peikoff discusses this at some length in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, pp. 62–69.

Self-Lovers and Self-Loathers

About a year ago I wrote a blog post, Aristotle on Egoism, with extensive quotes from The Nicomachean Ethics. In a nutshell: the egoism or self-love of a good man is good; the egoism of a bad man is bad – and he cannot even experience self-love, since there is nothing to love in him. A bad man has to experience self-loathing.

I came to think of this again yesterday, when I saw the following comment in a discussion thread on Facebook:

All Ayn Rand did was to give the OK for pricks all over the world to tell selfish assholes that it’s OK to be selfish.

You must have heard this kind of “objection” to Objectivism many times before; but perhaps not in this colorful language.

Only in a world populated exclusively by “pricks” and “assholes” would this statement make sense. But OK: there are some “assholes” in the world; and only a “prick” would advise them to also be selfish “assholes”; for the rest of us it would better to advise them to be totally selfless; then they would go sacrifice themselves, and we would get rid of them.

Good men and women, on the other hand, should certainly tell other good men and women that it is OK to be selfish. We are neither “pricks”, nor “assholes”.

I won’t delve further into this issue; it is a case of “examining a folly”, and it is enough to realize it is a folly.

The art of quoting Ayn Rand out of context

The fact that vice-president candidate Paul Ryan has cited Ayn Rand as a major influence on him has engendered a flurry of comments on the net. The positive thing about this is that Ayn Rand will come to the forefront in the coming election; the negative thing is that we will see even more of the smears of her that we are already too familiar with, and even more of the complete misinterpretations of her views that we are also too familiar with.

Here is a typical quote:

Rand has […] been elevated to a central figure in conservatism. Business moguls have embraced her because of her frank worship of wealth. “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue,” she said. And her contempt for government, with its regulations and taxation, was just what America’s reckless and self-centered class of business executives wanted to hear.

What does it mean to say that “money is the barometer of a society’s virtue”? To Ayn Rand’s detractors it obviously means that a man’s wealth is a measure of his virtue, regardless of whether he has earned it by productive work or by loot-and-plunder. They see no difference between honest work and robbery: both are just ways of grabbing money.

The quote is from Francisco d’Anconia’s “money speech” in Atlas Shrugged. So let me quote the full paragraph:

Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit your country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

And another quote:

Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

It is statements like this that the detractors of Ayn Rand simply have to ignore or evade and not let come to public knowledge in order to smear her.

(More from Francisco’s “money speech” and other Rand quotes on money in The Ayn Rand Lexicon.)

Learning from History

There is an old adage that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And recently several people (including myself) have posted this picture on Facebook:

It has been suggested that those who do study history should make an effort to educate the rest of us. But this presupposes that the rest of us are willing to listen and be educated, which I think is rather doubtful.

But I see a wider and deeper problem here. It is not enough to know what has happened in the past; one must also have some understanding of the underlying causes; otherwise one would just know what happened, not why it happened. Understanding those causes and then explaining them to others is the big challenge. And, as Ludwig von Mises once wrote, “Facts don’t speak; they have to be spoken about by a theory.”[1]

One small example of this from economic history: America had a depression in 1920–21, but it was over in about a year’s time. The depression that began in 1929, on the other hand, went on for a decade or more. Why? In 1921 there was no or little government meddling with the economy; by 1929 president Hoover had introduced a lot of interventionist measures, which were then continued and expanded by FDR. Will today’s politicians and economists learn from this experience? No. They cannot learn from it, because they either don’t know or reject the Austrian Business Cycle Theory.[2]

There are many theories of history, but most of them are simply false (and even bizarre). There is the theory that all of history is a manifestation of God’s will; and there is Hegel’s variation on this theme, that interprets history as a series of steps whereby the World Spirit seeks its own self-realization. And there is of course dialectic materialism. The first two theories do not explain anything (unless one is able to read the mind of God or the World Spirit); and the last one leads to severe misinterpretations of history. (And people who are steeped in this theory will stick to it, no matter what the facts are.)

Objectivism does have a theory of history, but unfortunately it is not developed in any detail (the exception to this is Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels). The theory is that history is ultimately determined by philosophical ideas, and history is, in Leonard Peikoff’s words in OPAR, a “duel between Plato and Aristotle”. And one has to stress that it is the ultimate cause, because there are so many other factors that have an influence on history.

One may also object to this theory that history did not start with Plato and Aristotle, so what determined history before their time? Well, there have always been philosophical ideas; most often they have been religious ideas, but religion is the precursor to philosophy. And if one takes Plato and Aristotle as symbols for an other-worldly orientation versus a this-worldly orientation, it does make sense.

One last remark: theories themselves ultimately have to be derived from facts. But I believe they have to be derived from facts that are very simple and basic, even self-evident. A case in point is what “Austrians” call the “axiom of action”, the fact that man is a being who acts purposefully and does merely react the way animals do. This, I think, we learn directly from introspection and from observing other human beings. Much can be deduced from this simple axiom, but the axiom itself is not deduced; it is a matter of direct observation. (As to the idea that this is “a priory” knowledge, not derived from experience but preceding experience, I refer to my earlier blog post Is action an a priori category?)

PS. Objectivism is not the only philosophy that sees history as a struggle between Platonism and Aristotelianism; Lyndon LaRouche (and his followers) hold the same idea. The big difference is that they take the side of Platonism and regard Aristotle much the way Objectivists view Immanuel Kant, as the arch-villain of philosophy.

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[1]) I’m quoting this from memory; I have forgotten where in Mises’ writings I read it. Maybe some Mises expert can remind me.

[2]) You can read about this in Robert P. Murphy’s The Depression You’ve Never Heard of: 1920–1921 in The Freeman, and in Thomas E. Woods’ The Forgotten Depression of 1920 on The Ludwig von Mises Institute’s web site.

What did Ayn Rand Know About Adverbs?

The reason I ask this question is the following excerpt from Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology:

Adverbs are concepts of the characteristics of motion (or action); they are formed by specifying a characteristic and omitting the measurements of the motion and of the entities involved – e.g., “rapidly”, which may be applied to “walking” or “swimming” or “speaking”, etc., with the measurement of what is “rapid” left open and depending, in any given case, on the type of motion involved. (ITOE, p. 16f.)

If this is meant as a definition of “adverb”, it is far too narrow. Yes, it applies to the example of “walking (swimming, speaking) rapidly”; but the vast majority of adverbs in the language have nothing to do with the velocity of motion or any other characteristic of motion. Let me give some examples:

“Here” and “there”, “now” and “when” are adverbs; but they have very little to do with motion. Take the simple sentence “I sit here now (in front of my computer).” But “sitting” is not a motion, it is an absence of motion, a state of rest. Well, I sit here typing, and I can type slowly or rapidly, but the “here” and “now” still do not apply to my speed of typing, nor to how well or badly I type, or to any other imaginable characteristic of typing. They apply solely to my location in space and time: when and where do I type?.

In modern English, the words “here” and “there” signify either location (“I sit here”, “I was there yesterday”) or direction (“I came here”, “I will go there tomorrow”. – Incidentally, in Swedish we have different word for location and direction; we still make the distinction between “here” and “hither”, “there” and “thither”, which seems to have been lost in modern English.

Or take the sentence “I’m thinking about adverbs, therefore I write about adverbs”. “Therefore” is an adverb answering the question “why?”. But is it about motion? Well, maybe the motions inside my mind. – And I might as well say “I write this for a reason”. “For a reason” is not an adverb but an adverbial phrase and serves the same function as the single adverb “therefore”.

So what is an adverb? – I was taught in school many years ago that an adverb answers (or asks) certain questions, such as “where?”, “when?”, “how?”, “why?”, “to what degree?”, etc. (They don’t ask or answer the questions “who” or “what”; nouns or pronouns answer those questions.) A more precise definition (taken from a dictionary) is:

1. A part of speech, comprising a class of words that modify a verb, adjective or other adverb. 2. A word belonging to this class. (The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language.)

Most often, an adverb modifies a verb (this is why it is called an “adverb”). It may modify an adjective, as in the phrase “she is very beautiful”, where the “very” tells you the degree of her beauty. (You may think of your own examples. If you think really hard, you will find that “hard” modifies “think”, telling you the degree of intensity of your thinking, and that “really” in its turn modifies “hard”, telling you more about how hard you think.)

“Yes” and “no” are also adverbs – at least they are classified as adverbs in the dictionaries. They answer such question as “Is this true or not” or “Do I agree with this or not.” But there connection to motion is tenuous, at the very least.

What measurements are omitted when we form a concept that is an adverb? That is fairly easy to answer. “Here” must be some place, but it could be any place. “Now” must be some point in time, but it could be any point in time. “Therefore” must be some cause or reason, but it could be any cause or reason. “Yes” and “no” must be the answer to some question, but it could be the answer to any question.

“Well” is an adverb that is often used as a preamble to a sentence (“Well, I don’t think so” or “Well, you may be right”) and may be said to modify the whole sentence rather than some single word. But here, I simply cannot put my finger on what is the exact meaning of “well”, much less then what measurements are omitted.; I have to confess it eludes me. (In Swedish we have a whole host of such adverbs – something that I think gives translators headaches.)

I hope this is enough to show that Ayn Rand’s definition is far too narrow (“far” and “too” being adverbs modifying the narrowness of the definition but having nothing to do with motion or any characteristic of notion).

The adverbs I have mentioned this far are adverbs “in their own right”, but there are also adverbs that are derived from adjectives, turning an adjective into an adverb. In English, this is done by adding a “-ly”; Romanic languages typically add a “-ment” or “mente”, and in Swedish we add a “-t”.  – Also, in those cases, it is easy to re-write the sentence and turn the adverb back to an adjective; e.g. “I think slowly”; “I am a slow thinker” or “Ayn Rand writes beautifully”: “Her writing is beautiful”. One cannot do this with “here” and “now” and those other adverbs I mentioned. – But his does not change anything in my reasoning; it is just an interesting observation.

Quibbling and nit-picking? Maybe – but I get frustrated when I discover a mistake in Ayn Rand’s writings, and I have to get if off my chest. And grammar is a subject I know fairly well.

I may return to other aspects of Ayn Rand’s theory of concept formation later, because I have some question marks that I would like to straighten out.

(For Scandinavian speaking readers, I write about this in Filosofiska smulor; you have to scroll down a bit to find it. Also, I take up some of those other question marks I have.)