…And with very many DoL readers, too. Well, not picking a fight, but you know what I mean.

Art recently posted about his re-discovery of the excellence of Human Action. I’ve never had that reaction. I’ve always found Mises’ writings to be a chore rather than a revelation.

Caveats are in order: I am not particularly well read in the Austrian canon. I’ve never read Human Action once, much less twice. I’ve only read those bits assigned in a grad class, and I struggled with those. I’ve not read many of the other Austrian classics (though I somehow own Menger’s book), much less the moderns.

Art describes how Mises constructs a systemization of human decision making, contingent upon calculation, of which economic decisions form a subset. Agreed, but I always conceived of Mises’ efforts as attempting to build a logically correct and (therefore) irrefutable description of human behavior. As such, I always viewed Human Action as a work of philosophy, not science, nor economics—a subset of science. As such, I found the book largely uninteresting and, dare I say it, chimerical.

I admit that I am in awe of the scientific method and experimental thinking, the entire point of which is to NOT build logically irrefutable descriptions of the world. Austrian friends have told me many times of the devastating arguments which philosophy has brought to bear against scientific thinking (refutation of hypotheses, etc.) Perhaps this is true. I am not smart enough to follow the arguments whenever I’ve tried to read these philosophers. However, I can see the overwhelming increases in human well-being which have been caused by the scientific revolution. Personally, this inclines me to hold the jury on science until its critics can likewise effect similar increases in human well-being using their methods.

None of this means I’m slighting Mises’ genius. Nor am I unfriendly to what I think of as the “Austrian project.” Indeed Hayek has shaped how I think and has been the backbone of how I teach since I read “Use of knowledge in society” in the first month of grad school, and Schumpeter and Kirzner began for me a continuing—and professionally very rewarding—interest in entrepreneurship.

Still, as far as Human Action is concerned, I guess I don’t get it. OK, after writing such potentially inflammatory remarks, it’s only fair to remind readers that I can be reached at noelecon@gmail.com