determinada de contaminante
5.4. Determinación de las ecuaciones cinéticas
also addresses later variants. Furthermore, I think, perhaps somewhat controversially2, that Mises’s original argument is actually the strongest challenge to socialism. Hayek remains vague on the kind of information that socialist planners might need and why it cannot be communicated to them. The model of socialism I propose in response to Mises only requires planners to have access to very specific information about available production techniques and inventories. This kind of information is not tacit and could easily be communicated.
The theory of entrepreneurial discovery (Kirzner 1997, Section IV) is fundamentally flawed too, because competition only decides which operations have been economical after the fact, when it becomes clear whether they have been profitable or not (Dapprich 2016, 20). Com-petition does not allow entrepreneurs to have better insight into future market conditions and thus does not ensure that production is more appropriate to those conditions. It thus does not lead to more informed production decisions than might be possible under socialism (Dap-prich 2016, 20). While much more can be said on this, and while I do not expect proponents of Hayek’s position to be convinced by these brief remarks, I have nonetheless decided to fo-cus the rest of this the chapter exclusively on interpreting and addressing Mises’s calculation argument.
6.2 O’Neill’s Interpretation of the Calculation Argu-ment
In the following sections, I will discuss two interpretations of Mises’s argument and argue that both versions fail to conclusively discredit the possibility of rational planning under socialism. O’Neill (O’Neill 1996;O’Neill 2003, 112-128;O’Neill 2006) interprets Mises’s
2O’Neill(1996) for example argues that Hayek had the better argument
calculation argument as being primarily about the nature of rational choice. For O’Neill, Mises relies on an ‘algorithmic’ conception of practical rationality which led him to believe that ‘rational choice between options requires their commensurability in terms of a single unit of value’ (O’Neill 1996, 433). Deciding between two alternatives would require measuring both of them in terms of a common unit, which is handily provided by market prices. Rational choice boils down to a comparison of monetary values.
We can understand O’Neill’s interpretation of and disagreement with Mises in terms of philo-sophical debates about commensurability (Anderson 1997, 1993, D’Agostino 2003,Chang 1997b,a, Regan 1997). Mises argues that commensurability of options (Raz 1986, 117) is necessary in order to make a rational choice. According toRaz(1986, 117), two or more op-tions are commensurable or comparable vis-a-vis each other if each option is better, equal or worse than each other option. Furthermore, Mises suggests that only a numerical scale like monetary valuation can make this possible and that there is no viable alternative to monetary valuation in a socialist economy.
I understand O’Neill (O’Neill 1996;O’Neill 2003, 112-128;O’Neill 2006) to disagree with Mises on both the supposed inadequacy of non-monetary decision-making, as well as the supposed adequacy of monetary decision-making. He does not accept that commensurabil-ity is necessary for rational choice, instead suggesting that some process of political-ethical evaluation be used in making decisions (O’Neill 1996, 437). But not only is monetary val-uation not necessary for rational choice, it is in fact inadequate, because it cannot capture the variety of factors relevant to a decision. In a sense, O’Neill thus believes the precise op-posite of Mises. Any decision-process based on a single scale ought to be rejected and only direct deliberation about options, taking into account multiple relevant factors, is an adequate process for making decisions (O’Neill 2003, 114).3
There is some evidence that commensuration of options really was part of Mises’s thinking.
O’Neill quotes Mises’s Human Action, where even individual decision making is thought to be impossible without monetary prices:
The practical man . . . must know whether what he wants to achieve will be an improvement when compared with the present state of affairs and with the advan-tages to be expected from the execution of other technically realisable projects which cannot be put into execution if the project he has in mind absorbs the avail-able means. Such comparisons can only be made by the use of money prices. (von Mises 1949, 209)
This view on the role of monetary prices in decision making is in stark contrast to that of Neurath, another early participant in the socialist calculation debate and the main target of
3O’Neill(2003, 125) also proposes the use of more formal multi-criteria decision analysis as an alterna-tive to monetary valuation.
Mises’s arguments. Neurath adopted many of the ideas of Marx and Engels in the develop-ment of his moneyless administrative economy (Neurath 1973c,2004a,b,c). Administration of the economy implies the setting up and execution of a universal production plan. The eval-uation of plans is done in accordance with their effects on the conditions of life, which are not to be measured in money, but in-kind, i.e. in terms of the abundance of food, quality of hous-ing, availability of education and entertainment and so on. While administrators might take into account statistics about available and used materials, energy and so on, Neurath believed that there ultimately are ‘no units that can be used as the basis of a decision, neither units of money nor hours of work. One must directly judge the deisrability of the two possibilities’
(Neurath 1973c, 145). O’Neill agrees with Neurath that ‘[r]ational practical thinking need not involve any single unit that reduces decision making to a purely technical procedure. It requires ethical and political judgment’ (O’Neill 1996, 437). He cites Neurath’s discussion of coal mining, an example Neurath directly took up from Mises:
The question might arise, should one protect coal mines or put greater strain on men? The answer depends for example on whether one thinks that hydraulic power may be sufficiently developed or that solar heat might come to be bet-ter used, etc. If one believes the latbet-ter, one may ‘spend’ coal more freely and will hardly waste human effort where coal can be used. If however one is afraid that when one generation uses too much coal thousands will freeze to death in the future, one might use more human power and save coal. Such and many other non-technical matters determine the choice of a technically calculable plan . . . we can see no possibility of reducing the production plan to some kind of unit and then to compare the various plans in terms of such units. (Neurath 1973a, 263)
Following Neurath, O’Neill argues that the existence of non-economic goods, such as envi-ronmental goods, demonstrates that decision making cannot be reduced to monetary valua-tion. In a passage from Socialism that is cited by O’Neill, Mises appears to admit this:
If, for example, we are considering whether a hydraulic power-works would be profitable we cannot include in the computation the damage which will be done to the beauty of the waterfalls unless the fall in values due to a fall in tourist traffic is taken into account. Yet we must certainly take such considerations into account when deciding whether the undertaking shall be carried out. (von Mises 1981, 90)
Rather than seeing this as a simple contradiction to Mises’s own position in Human Action, O’Neill understands Mises to advocate ‘putting a price on an unpriced good’ (O’Neill 2003, 117). In order to consider non-economic goods, Mises takes it to be necessary to assign them a monetary value, a practice O’Neill rightfully objects to.
To see why O’Neill is right in this rejection, let us consider another non-economic good con-sidered in the literature on commensurability (Anderson 1997,Chang 1997a), friendship. Is it possible to assign a monetary value to friendships? If a person is willing to end a friendship in order to gain an amount of $10,000, this might be seen as a demonstration that she values the friendship less than the specified amount. But what it merely shows is that when presented with the two options ‘maintain friendship’ or ‘terminate friendship and receive $10,000’ she will choose the latter over the former. This does not mean that she values the sum of money more than the friendship, because the options are more complex than could be captured by any amount of money. In particular, it depends on what she can and intends to do with the money. If she needs urgent life-saving surgery which she can otherwise not afford, her de-cision might be different than if she does not. Or maybe her life-long dream was to travel to West Africa to see her favourite animal, the western black rhino, in the wild. Since the western black rhino is now extinct, taking the money to be able to pay for travel expenses might be significantly less appealing to her.
The point is that when deciding between the two options she is being confronted with, she is not simply measuring the value of the friendship in monetary terms. She has to make a complicated deliberation about the various possibilities in both scenarios. The outcome of such a deliberation does not only depend on the sum of money being offered, but also on the various possibilities that might arise with access to this money under present circumstances.
In particular, it depends on what can be acquired with that money, and which of those things she might be interested in. In the end the deliberation is not simply about the ‘monetary value’
of friendship or even the particular friendship that is at stake.
Instead, it is a deliberation about two (or more) possible futures. In one the friendship is maintained, but surgery or travel cannot be afforded. In the other possible future, the friend-ship is lost, but surgery can be paid for or travel afforded. Even if the idea of sacrificing a friendship for monetary gain is not met with outright rejection, money only plays a very in-direct role in such a deliberation by virtue of being the medium of exchange required to pay for surgery, travel or whatever else one might use it for. So, whether the person in question accepts the money by itself says very little about how much she values friendship. Even if it did reveal the monetary value of friendship, the determination of the price would be highly circumstantial and ultimately the result of her deliberation about the various possible futures and not the other way around. So, we can conclude that knowledge of the monetary value of non-economic goods is not a necessary part of such a decision-making process. A rational decision in a scenario as the one described is always based on a direct comparison of the pos-sible outcomes. The same can be said for the environmental problems considered by Neurath and Mises.
Greenwood (2006) offers an alternative interpretation of Mises. He argues that the above cited waterfall passage precisely demonstrates that Mises recognised the existence of
un-priced goods, which nonetheless need to be considered in decision making. According to this interpretation, monetary calculation is a precondition of decision making because it informs us of the opportunity cost (OC) of preserving the waterfall. ‘[K]nowing OC is a necessary part of making a rational choice about the future of the waterfall’ (Greenwood 2006, 16), but it is not sufficient. That knowledge of the opportunity cost, but not the imaginary value of a non-economic good, is necessary for making a decision is certainly true and in a market economy this opportunity cost may be given in the form of money. Without knowledge of the opportunity cost, we remain in the dark about what our options are. In our friendship ex-ample, it is only because of knowledge of the offer being $10,000 that we can consider what might or might not be acquired if the offer were to be accepted. This does not mean that the same would have to be the case in a socialist society, not based on monetary exchange.
Consider a scenario in which socialist planners or the democratic electorate of a socialist so-ciety must decide between preserving a waterfall and utilising it to generate electricity for local schools and hospitals. Knowing the opportunity cost in this scenario does not require assigning a monetary value to schools and hospitals having electricity. The provision of elec-tricity itself is the opportunity cost of preserving the waterfall. While the decision in such cases does not have to be easy, monetary valuation does not help to make it.
Having to decide between various objectives is a constant reality for both individual actors and policy makers. In a market economy, monetary calculation might guide policy mak-ing because it can represent a resource constraint, but it does not help makmak-ing a choice on whether it is education or environmental conservation that should take priority when facing any particular choice. Such a decision can only be made by a direct comparison of the pos-sible outcomes. If O’Neill’s interpretation of Mises’s argument is indeed accurate, then he is certainly right in rejecting it. Monetary valuation is not a precondition of rational choice, and so a lack of market prices does not negate the possibility of rational choice under socialism.