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Post 0

Friday, September 16 - 12:19am

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Thanks Ed for a great summary of humanity's first forays into economics, made (as so many of our first forays were) by Aristotle. That he rejected -- over 2000 years ago -- an idea like the labor theory of value, which continues to confound and seduce both laymen and professional economic theorists to this day, is one more demonstration of his unparalleled brilliance.

Post 1

Friday, September 16 - 2:14am

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Thank you, Ed!

That was a great exposition. I never knew that Aristotle was such a father of economics! I had always referred to him as the father of logic and science, but even I see, now, that I have shortchanged (read: underrated!) him. Aristotle was so far ahead of his time. I'd love to see him debate the Keynesians!

That said, the 2 things that I see that he floundered on were:

1) the very real services provided by usury (as you mentioned)

and

2) The idea of a market teaching an agent how, when, and even where to spend their money. This dynamic -- of an agent being, increasingly, taught how best to trade -- is outlined by Rand as a socially objective theory of value (ie. the 'solution' to the problem of commensurability)

Still, I can't fault him for being merely 2100 years ahead of his time (and not 2300!).

Thanks again, Ed, it was a great exposition!

Ed

Post 2

Friday, September 16 - 3:38am

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I stand in awe. This is an excellent summary and critique. I have the Loeb Classic Library editions of Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. Younkins's work represents about two months of work if I were to have had the insight, which I did not. I printed this out and put it in a folder with other offprints on Aristotle.

This merits a Big Red Check, of course, but perhaps another kind of "check" is morally required.

Post 3

Saturday, September 17 - 5:01am

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This is a wonderful piece but it has one minor flaw--it lacks what I like to call control quotes from original sources. However trustworthy a scholar is, it is always helpful to readers to provide some direct quotations from the people he or she is discussing--in this case from Aristotle--so they can tell for themselves whether his or her account of the thinker's views squares with the text.

Post 4

Saturday, September 17 - 9:13am

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Thanks Andrew, Ed, Michael, and Tibor:

I am pleased you liked the essay.

It took a while to do. I started in May and kept leaving it it to write other essays and then would come back to tackle it some more.

Tibor, thank you for your great suggestion regarding the control quotes!!! I will put some in if and when I turn this into a more academic piece. I agree that it currently flawed due to the lack of quotes and other references.

Take care.

Ed

Post 5

Saturday, September 17 - 9:19pm

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These claims indicate some mighty reading efforts in Aristotle. I too would be interested enough to see you back this up with quotes and references. And I'm highly prejudiced against your referring to "Aristotle's economic writings" and "his economic thought" just because of how I'm used to thinking- ie that Adam Smith is the first man in history to be able to claim such a distinction.

You may just as well claim that Mercantilists were economic thinkers, or that Feudalistic pillaging was a form of politics and economics. Likewise, we sometimes dub muggers and thieves 'freelance socialists'. In a sense they are, and it's just a matter of taxonomy. But I don't mind quibbling about taxonomy!

Economics has graduated, in recent times, from more fundamental sciences into a discipline in its own right. Of course you can look to the past and pick out its emerging elements. You can do the same for ergonomics, or rocketry but who would call Hero a rocket scientist? I fully expect one could contrive to pick economic metatheory from The Bible just as well as from Aristotle's ghostwriters.

Young Thompson is getting a touch too excited. Lord Keynes would run rings around Aristotle.

Don't mean to be a downer. But I do have the Libertarianz-didn't-score blues.

Post 6

Sunday, September 18 - 9:00am

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Re Rick's last post, there is a difference between bad economics and no economics. There was plenty of economics before Adam Smith--Barry Gordon's Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith (?) (Barnes & Noble, 1965) is a fine work shoing this, as it the two volume Rothbard history of economic thought.

Post 7

Monday, September 19 - 10:52pm

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Rick brings up my youth as an inherent limitation to my wisdom. To this nostrum I spew back that while age and wisdom are correlated, they are not strongly correlated (alas, I'm much the wiser than many an octogenarian).

The kind sir Rick also quips that preludes don't count official. And that if they did, then conceptual analysis of anything and everything breaks down (in a tempest of boundary-less whim-worship, confirmation bias, and selective omission). How sir, I must ask this man of less years but of more 'wisdom' than I, am I to interpret the good book (Isaiah 65:22):

They shall not build and another inhabit;
They shall not plant and another eat;
For as the days of a tree, so shall be the days of My people,
And My elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

... if not as a bold argument for ethically-individualistic capitalism? Am I to refrain from judgment of verse -- because men had not yet slung together the timeless truths in question, into a unified, brandified whole? What of the contemporary, which may yet be unified further -- does it hold any epistemological weight? Does conceptual advancement demolish, or merely supercede, its predecessors?

Those grasping and, (through lexographic restatement) making permanent, the timeless truths that feed us -- deserve more than a proverbial pat on the back and 'good on you, mate' -- they were the seeds of our current garden.

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The origin of action -- its efficient, not its final cause -- is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This is why choice cannot exist either without thought and intellect or without a moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a combination of intellect and character. Intellect itself, however, moves nothing, but only intellect which aims at an end and is practical. --Nichomachean Ethics, 1139a
==============

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Now it is evident that that form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily. --Politics, 1324a
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Ed

p.s. Sorry to hear about the Libertarianz loss -- my distant, quasi-friendly acquaintence.

Post 8

Thursday, September 22 - 6:04pm

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Yeah, gidday digger. I see that Younkins and Machan have dropped a bit of wombat in your tucker bag! But you're a good sport so I'll tie the kangaroo down for ya.

Listen mate- the Murry River trickles a ditch in upper New South Wales, splits that state and Victoria a'twain as it heads thousands of miles westward before turning south through South Australia and completes its walkabout by topping up the Indian Ocean. Either side of these extremities there is water known by another name than 'The Murry'- be it a small ditch or subterranean trickle, or be it the collapsing tidal estuary or the vast Indian ocean where that trickle ends up. Oh, not to mention the oceans of air yet to fall to ground.

Call a billabong in Kansas or a hat-full'a of snow on Everest part of The Murry and you're a prize galah, in my book!

One never steps into the same river twice, so noted Heraclitus. All the things of the world we think we know and seek to name are in a state of change. Different water comes to our river, takes the name of that river, relinquishes that name and moves on again. Likewise economics, it comes from philosophy and passes away into an ocean of other things. Economics is a component of a business degree, or a component of corporate, academic or governmental management or one's personal life. Just as we stop calling water The Murry when it reaches the ocean, so too we must stop calling what Microsoft or the Federal Government does economics because they're much more, much other than, only that.

Likewise, before The Murry 'graduates' from being a wee trickle or puddle or dew drop or sheep spit it ain't Murry. Before Adam Smith did his number, "economics" wasn't economics. Screw Rothbard and Gordon! They're trumped by von Mises and Heilbroner, they're on my side.

And this is what really nails the goanna- nobody in their right mind would call the first man to tell 1 thing apart from 2 things a mathematician. Man was using numbers a long time before he started theorising about numbers. And nobody with half the brains of a dingo would call the first homo erectus man to discover fire a pyrotechnologist!

Plan to come out ahead in this one Ed? Then you'd better take it up with an octogenarian!

Post 9

Friday, September 23 - 10:05am

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Rick, can I have my @$$ back now (you seem to be done with it)?

Ed
[moping around like a despondent tree sloth -- who just found himself smack dab in the middle of the Serengeti plains]

Post 10

Friday, September 23 - 5:20pm

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Isaiah 65:22.....who were you kidding Thompson?

Post 11

Friday, September 23 - 9:21pm

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Whoa, Nellie. No need to kick a man when he's down.

Ya' Sore Winner.

Ed

Post 12

Friday, September 23 - 10:46pm

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Who is?
That was post-match commentary.

Post 13

Friday, September 23 - 11:40pm

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Hahah, Ed Thompson ... magnanimous in victory, graceful in defeat, as always.

Post 14

Saturday, September 24 - 1:05am

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Much thanks to Andrew! Thou hast earnest an article -- extraordinaire -- fromst mine own self. Watcheth thee, for in thine own next 72 hours -- thou shalt be christened with mine own grace -- in black, and in white, no doubt.

T' tha' Rick-ster, the extraordinairest of them all -- to thine own self ye' are true:

For 'tis surely, by now, a bandied jest
that ye be so wily, in defeat or conquest

Sir Ed
Der Ubermeister uber das Ubermachen (whatever the hell that means, in German)