Christopher Ferrara has written a sweeping, three-part (here is part 3 but I can’t seem to find parts 1 and 2) polemic in The Remnant against the Austrian School, the style and scope of which recalls a denunciation published in official periodicals of the Soviet government in the 30s and 40s. I can’t say that I’ve read the whole Ferrara undertaking, but a footnote in part 3 stands out as illustrative of the overall quality of the work. It revives an old canard that Mises favored economic efficiency over human happiness, based on a story about Geneva garden plots. The setting is Geneva during the second world war, where Mises lived from 1934 to 1940. To alleviate food shortages, the city permitted people to grow vegetables along the line of the old city walls. Mises and Wilhelm Ropke (who worked with him there) were supposedly on a walk observing these garden plots, when Mises denounced them: “A very inefficient way to producing foodstuffs.” Ropke then replied: “But perhaps a very efficient way of producing human happiness.”
What a picture! The wise humanitarian vs. the cold-hearted economist!
Now, anyone with knowledge of Austrian economics and Mises can immediately smell a rat. The idea that Mises would be against private gardens makes no sense. His comment about efficiency might make sense as a critique of government measures (price controls, wartime planning, rationing) that forced people to raise their own food, but he would not have objected to people making themselves happy. He might have even doubted the merit of goverment-created garden plots, which were something of a policy fashion in those days. In any case, it is Chicago School, not the Austrians, who might have imagined a separation between happiness and efficiency.
Well, a quick look at the literature shows that the story is fishy in many more respects. The version quoted by Ferrara has long been a staple in the anti-Misesian repertoire of Russell Kirk. He tells it in his autobiography (Sword of Imagination, 1995, p. 205), but it seems that the first time Kirk relays the incident is in the introduction to Ropke’s Social Crisis of Our Time, originally published in 1942 in German, 1950 in English, and 1992 by Transaction Publishers with an foreword by Kirk. It is in this 1995 edition that we find the anecdote as first reported by Kirk, on page viii.
The heck of it is that a completely different version is told by Ropke himself in that very same book, and apparently Kirk himself failed to notice it, even though Kirk wrote the introduction. It appears on page 224. Here Ropke says that it is not he who had the exchange with a “dogmatic old-time liberal” (he does not say it was Mises) but rather “a friend of mine in Rotterdam.” So it turns out that the setting is not Geneva but Rotterdam. There is no mention of war. Indeed, the whole tenor of the discussion is different.
Kirk’s autobiography–appearing several years after Kirk was called on the discrepancy–includes a footnote that acknowledges the difference between what Ropke wrote and what Kirk says that Ropke told him. He further speculates that Ropke changed the name, place, and date in order to “spare Mises’ sensibilities.”
Maybe. Mises lectured in Rotterdam in 1926. But he was hardly the only “old liberal” in Europe. In any case, there are enough uncertainties about the quip version of this little story to make it invalid as a point against Mises. The story is either false and irrelevant or just irrelevant. Anyone who thinks that it somehow delivers a decisive blow, proving that the Austrians are cold economizers who think only about dollars and cents, rather than compassionate and godly humanitarians, knows very little about Mises or the Austrians.
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Someone definitely has the Austrian School’s methodological individualism confused with Chicago School “Social Cost” theory — a conflation of thesis and antithesis.
If Austrians can be accused of anything, it would be putting too much emphasis (if you believe in such a thing*) on the personal satisfaction of individuals and refusing to equate use-value with exchange-value. We’re not the ones claiming, as David Friedman puts it, that everything can be measured in anything else.
(Listen to the second joke Peter Klein tells here for more on this point.)
There ought to be a term for this subcategory of strawman fallacy, where you not only misrepresent your opponent’s view but actually get it exactly backwards.
Perhaps the Wartsman Fallacy? (“warts” being “straw” spelled backwards)
[* "There cannot be too much of a correct theory." -- Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics.]
From my understanding of Austrian and especially Misesian economics, economics has virtually nothing to say regarding the ends chosen by individuals. Economics only analyzes the means utilized by individuals to obtain their chosen ends and whether or not the means utilized are suitable to obtain the chosen ends. On its surface, Mises’s comment is simply a realistic observation that food can be produced more efficiently by different methods. Not an unreasonable comment given the conditions of war ravaged Europe and the food shortages.
I would argue that Ropke’s comment is ridiculous since it attempts to divine what constitutes “human happiness”, either in a generic sense or for the Geneva residents in question. It is plain wrong to assert that one individual knows what constitutes “human happiness” for others. Only each individual resident of Geneva could have known what constituted happiness for himself/herself. Interestingly, people of Ferrara’s bent, while critical of efficiency and its “de-humanizing” effects, typically have no problem with taking the output of the more efficient producers and transfering it to others. Apparently, their disdain for efficiency is somewhat inconsistent and limited.
And the alternative to Mises’ liberalism, and the Austrian’s proposed propertarianism is socialism.
Socialism, because people were so happy in the U.S.S.R.; that is, those of them who weren’t in the gulags, or executed, or killed in war, or starving, or…
For a Christian, Mr. Ferrara has a remarkable lack of faith in the persuasiveness of his own religion to keep citizens from vice. And he is entirely too impatient to let God sort out the sinners from the saints, instead nominating God’s self-appointed agents on earth for that job (including himself). Oddest of all, he has written a religious tract that is devoid of any quotations from or even allusions to the divine scriptures. Not even Austrian straw men have much to fear from that kind of scholarship.
Maybe Ferrara hopes to actually be a god some day…
Not knowing the whole anecdote, I think Mises may have been off-target by complaining about the Geneva/Rotterdam gardens (perhaps the unusual sight bothered him). If Vancouver is anything by which to gauge, modern urban farms can be more efficient & yield more crops-per-acre than the huge corpo-growers in rural areas. Even tops of skyscrapers are going green as agri-entrepreneurs take on the centralized food-marketing boards.
Was Mises’ point that urban real estate should be a priority for housing/industry/retail and farms should be out in the countryside?
The story is not only apocryphal in its entirety but, as well, in its details. That is to say that, even had the occurrence taken place exactly as described, we cannot know from what has been provided the nature of the (posited) criticism.
It has been assumed rather forcibly that the criticism was being leveled at the very idea of individual gardens–on the grounds of their alleged inefficiency. Like others here, I find it unlikely that someone of Mises’ turn of mind would criticize such behavior; at the most, he might comment that (some) people can be mistaken as to whether they are actually “saving money” by growing vegetables–further, he would have been keenly aware that “inefficiency” is a magnitude indeterminable
without regard to (and knowledge of) the precise bill of inputs involved (as well as those of the “normal” method of commercial production). Since, as I understand the example, he (they) saw nothing but the devotion of specific pieces of otherwise unused soil, there would have been no way to draw the costs comparison. Such considerations suggest that the story might be “whole cloth.”
But there are other possibilities. Perhaps the “inefficiency” remark was directed to some other aspect of the gardens themselves–the choice of an unfavorable, poor-yield type of plant; a less-than-optimal spacing of rows; a failure to have protected a plot of plants attractive to pests, etc., etc. We’ll never know.
During WW II, Americans were encouraged to have “Victory” gardens. These sprung up in backyards and on lawns, in the courtyards and parks (and roofs and window-boxes) of highly-urbanized areas. Government buildings were generally obliged to make their grounds available for such efforts on a first-come, first-served basis. And, to a great extent, other than in establishing these, their normal inefficiency was largely offset by the fact that their tending–watering, weeding, etc,. was accomplished by utilizing the much under-utilized resource: unreimbursed child labor, especially encouraged by patriotic appeal. There’s no doubt that however inefficient compared to normal productive patterns, the ad hoc appearance and profusion of such gardens did contribute to the war effort simply by lessening, to whatever extent provided by the otherwise non-vauable
child labor, the pressure on the adult population diverted to war and war industry.
Essentially (though we have an attribution for this one), these stories are similar to “urban legends.”
I like Kirk, guess that puts me in the minority here, but I agree that this story looks odd. It’s interesting that Heritage now has a transcript up from a lecture Kirk gave in 1989:
http://www.heritage.org/research/politicalphilosophy/hl198.cfm
In this version Kirk places the exchange after the war, “about 1947″. That again make me think either Kirk’s memory was off, or Roepke’s, because the story first appears in The Social Crisis of Our Time, which was written in 1941. But maybe the anecdote was added to a later printing, I don’t know [though Roepke's preface to the English edition mentions the text underwent only small changes across the different editions].
Gary North writes of hearing the story in 1975 from Patrick Boarman, Roepke’s translator. He does not remember hearing that the old-time liberal was Mises:
http://www.entrewave.com/freebooks/docs/html/gnbd/Chapter11.htm
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