Austrian Capital Theory and the Market Process

The beauty of Austrian economics is of its emphasis on the nitty-gritty of the market process. And capital theory, which has largely ignored by the mainstream, plays a sine qua non role in the market process

Professor Peter Lewin eloquently discusses the Austrian Capital Theory at the Freeman Online (outside titles, all bold emphasis are mine; green brackets my comments)

The Austrian Theory

The best known Austrian capital theorist was Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, though his teacher Carl Menger is the one who got the ball rolling, providing the central idea that Böhm-Bawerk elaborated. Böhm-Bawerk produced three volumes dedicated to the study of capital and interest, making the Austrian theory of capital his best-known theoretical contribution. He provided a detailed account of the fundamentals of capitalistic production. Later contributors include Hayek, Ludwig Lachmann, and Israel Kirzner. They added to and enriched Böhm-Bawerk’s account in crucial ways. The legacy we now have is a rich tapestry that accords amazingly well with the nature of production in the digital information age. Some current contributors along these lines include Peter Klein, Nicolai Foss, Howard Baetjer, and me.

The Austrians emphasize that production takes time: The more indirect it is, the more “time” it takes. Production today is much more “roundabout” (Böhm-Bawerk’s term) than older, more rudimentary production processes. Rather than picking fruit in our backyard and eating it, most of us today get it from fruit farms that use complex picking, sorting, and packing machinery to process carefully engineered fruits. Consider the amount of “time” (for example in “people-hours”) involved in setting up and assembling all the pieces of this complex production process from scratch—from before the manufacture of the machines and so on. This gives us some idea of what is meant by production methods that are “roundabout.”

(The scare quotes around time are used because in fact there is no perfectly rigorous way to define the length of a production process in purely physical terms. But, intuitively, what is being asserted is that doing things in a more complicated, specialized way is more difficult; loosely speaking it takes more “time” because it is more “roundabout,” more indirect.)

More Roundabout Production

Through countless self-interested individual production decisions, we have adopted more roundabout methods of production because they are more productive—they add more value—than less roundabout methods. Were this not the case, they would not be deemed worth the sacrifice and effort of the “time” involved—and would be abandoned in favor of more direct production methods. What are at work here are the benefits of specialization—the division of labor to which Adam Smith referred. Modern economies comprise complex, specialized processes in which the many steps necessary to produce any product are connected in a sequentially specific network—some things have to be done before others. There is a time structure to the capital structure.

[my comment business people or entrepreneurs specialize on the products and services they provide and the markets they sell into]

This intricate time structure is partially organized, partially spontaneous (organic). Every production process is the result of some multiperiod plan. Entrepreneurs envision the possibility of providing (new, improved, cheaper) products to consumers whose expenditure on them will be more than sufficient to cover the cost of producing them. In pursuit of this vision the entrepreneur plans to assemble the necessary capital items in a synergistic combination. These capital combinations are structurally composed modules that are the ingredients of the industry-wide or economy-wide capital structure. The latter is the result then of the dynamic interaction of multiple entrepreneurial plans in the marketplace; it is what constitutes the market process. Some plans will prove more successful than others, some will have to be modified to some degree, some will fail. What emerges is a structure that is not planned by anyone in its totality but is the result of many individual actions in the pursuit of profit. It is an unplanned structure that has a logic, a coherence, to it. It was not designed, and could not have been designed, by any human mind or committee of minds. Thinking that it is possible to design such a structure or even to micromanage it with macroeconomic policy is a fatal conceit.

[my comment:

The term “economy” has truly been a misrepresentation.

In the real world, there are millions of heterogeneous interactions, distinctive moving parts, and complex and variegated supply chains, which means commercial activities represent mass spontaneity of people’s actions. They are not centrally organized actions as the word “economy” projects.

Think of it, does the government tell you whom to sell? Does the government dictate upon you on what (and how many) to produce or what services to provide? Does the government tell you which stock to buy or which investment to take?

If none of this applies, then why the heck, the popular impression that government “runs the economy”? Well the answer is that these have long been impressed upon to us by current political institutions meant to ensure our docility to our political masters]

The division of labor reflected by the capital structure is based on a division of knowledge. Within and across firms specialized tasks are accomplished by those who know best how to accomplish them. Such localized, often unconscious, knowledge could not be communicated to or collected by centralized decision-makers. The market process is responsible not only for discovering who should do what and how, but also how to organize it so that those best able to make decisions are motivated to do so. In other words, incentives and knowledge considerations tend to get balanced spontaneously in a way that could not be planned on a grand scale. The boundaries of firms expand and contract, and new forms of organization evolve. This too is part of the capital structure broadly understood.

[my comments:

Statistics signify as information based on aggregates. They do not account for the “knowledge of circumstances” that are “dispersed” “incomplete” or often “contradictory knowledge” or knowledge why people people have chosen through “incentives” to take such actions. Knowledge acquired from interpreting statistics constitute as presumptions and are manipulable to suit veiled agendas.

Statistics and econometrics are instruments mainly used to bamboozle or to overwhelm on the ignorant and the gullible public of the supposed omniscience of central planners. The only thing political actors know is to gorge and lavishly spend on other people’s money, as well as to exercise control over the population under the cover of the farcical “social justice”].

Division of Knowledge

In addition, the heterogeneous capital goods that make up the cellular capital combinations also reflect the division of knowledge. Capital goods (like specialized machines) are employed because they “know” how to do certain important things; they embody the knowledge of their designers about how to perform the tasks for which they were designed. The entire production structure is thus based on an incredibly intricate extended division of knowledge, such knowledge being spread across its multiple physical and human capital components. Modern production management is more than ever knowledge management, whether involving human beings or machines—the key difference being that the latter can be owned and require no incentives to motivate their production, while the former depend on “relationships” but possess initiative and judgment in a way that machines do not.

The foregoing provides the barest account of the rich legacy of Austrian capital theory, but it should be sufficient to communicate the essential differences between the Austrian view of the economy and that of other schools of thought. For Austrians the whole macroeconomic approach is problematic, involving, as it does, the use of gross aggregrates as targets for policy manipulation—aggregates like the economy’s “capital stock.” For Austrians there is no “capital stock.” Any attempt to aggregate the multitude of diverse capital items involved in production into a single number is bound to result in a meaningless outcome: a number devoid of significance. Similarly the total of investment spending does not reflect in any accurate way the addition to value that can be produced by this “capital stock.” The values of capital goods and of capital combinations, or of the businesses in which they are employed, are determined only as the market process unfolds over time. They are based on the expectations of the entrepreneurs who hire them, and these expectations are diverse and often inconsistent. Not all of them will prove correct—indeed most will be, at least to some degree, proven false. Basing macroeconomic policy on an aggregate of values for assembled capital items as recorded or estimated at one point in time would seem to be a fool’s errand. What do the policymakers know that the entrepreneurs involved in the micro aspects of production do not?

[my comment:

Macro economics has truly been about heuristics and or of our innate biases that have been embellished by mathematical formalism than about law of scarcity and opportunity costs or about economic reality.

Macro economics understates the ‘economic’ value provided by the market process.

On the other hand, macro economics overstates the illusion of hydraulically driven “economy”.]

Capital and Employment

The folly is compounded by connecting capital and investment aggregates to total employment under the assumption that stimulating the former will stimulate the latter. Such an assumption ignores the heterogeneity and structural nature of both capital and labor (human capital). Simply boosting expenditure on any kind of production will not guarantee the employment of people without jobs. How else to explain that our current economy is characterized by both sizeable unemployment numbers and job vacancies? Their coexistence is a result of a structural mismatch: The structure (that is, the pattern of skills) of the unemployed does not match those required to be able to work with the specific capital items that are currently unemployed.

In fact the current enduring recession is basically structural in nature. It is the bust of a credit-induced boom-bust cycle, augmented by far-reaching production-distorting regulation. The Austrian theory of the business cycle was developed first by Ludwig von Mises, combining insights from the Austrian theory of capital with the nature of modern central-bank-led monetary policy. The theory was later used, with some differences, by Hayek in his debates with Keynes. Over the years its popularity and acceptance have waxed and waned, but it appears to be highly relevant to our current situation.

[my comment:

The market process represents the immensely intertwined and deeply interdependent relationships of methodological individualism, profit-loss tradeoffs, capital theory, consumer sovereignty, property rights, coordination-discoordination of resource allocation, division of labor, specialization and roundabout production, division of knowledge, entrepreneurship, speculation, voluntary exchange, pricing system, spontaneous order, rule of law, market institutions and everything else under the capitalistic or classical liberalism order.

Whereas boom bust cycles signify as symptoms of imbalances brought upon by government inflationism, as well as, distortions emergent or as consequence from various production regulations and mandated proscriptions]

Glancing at the political prescriptions for today’s crisis management, one would notice that “capital” for the mainstream represents a homogenous lump called currency. Print money and everything is supposedly solved. Unfortunately after trillions of printed money, the global crisis has been worsening instead of abating.

Yet little is understood that money is NOT wealth, but a medium of exchange.

And wealth is about purchasing power of money. From this we understand that popular prescriptions of money printing have been economically unrealistic or unfeasible, and therefore, are bound for failure.Worst they are redistributive which favors political actors and their clients (the cronies).

It is not what gullible masses think that matters, rather it is the limitations of economic reality. That’s what Austrian Capital Theory talks about.