Bettina-Bien Greaves took careful notes during Ludwig von Mises’s New York seminars. Whenever he made a comment about a possible paper, book, or research topic, she jotted it down on a note card. She kept all these note cards and has generously agreed to share them with the public by sending them to us. The Mises Institute is pleased to make them public for the first time. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/5250/ludwig-von-misess-suggested-research-topics-1950-1968/
Ludwig von Mises’s Suggested Research Topics, 1950-1968
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It is fascinating to read this document. Off an on, I keep up files labeled “Thoughts” and “Ideas”, new essay ideas, research ideas, etc. I always counsel students to do this, because big ideas grow from small seeds and flickers of thoughts. Ideas develop. I learned to keep a journal record of ideas when I was at Rochester. A fellow student, Bob Hagerman, did this. We all knew we had to publish or perish, so this was a logical thing to do. Fischer Black used to carry a yellow notepad to every presentation he attended and he was always busy scrawling. I heard that he had a bad short-term memory, so that during lectures he’d stop and write down an idea that he might have. Now I see that we know far less than what there is to know. The amount of research that can be done is staggering. As I read references, I see that a vast amount of translation needs to be done. In my field, the general subject of financial history is woefully under-researched. Where does one turn to find detailed histories of business companies or corporate matters or financial istitutions? I am stymied constantly by my lack of knowledge of historical matters. So reading von Mises’s thoughts and ideas is fresh inspiration and confirmation of the importance of creating knowledge and new ideas. I don’t think this is work cut out for just a small fraction of mankind called intellectuals. I think the capacity for good research is present in most everyone. It needs development and training, that is all, or perhaps only encouragement and some feedback. In my later years, I’ve had MBA students do more research projects, and the results are astonishing! I am sure that the same will be true even of students at very young ages. The waste of good minds through discouragement and deadening of natural impulses is a tragedy of the very highest order. Research is enhanced by a culture of feedback from one’s peers, criticisms that can be taken without feeling personal insult or sensitivity. One learns to be objective about all ideas, even and especially one’s own. The beginning of knowledge is simple: asking questions.
Maybe I made it too simple about “asking questions.” The actual process includes doubting what you are hearing and being told by the wise men, doubting the conventional wisdom. Your doubts may disappear as you come to understand it, but they may not. You may find that you can’t understand something, and the reason may be that the so-called wisdom is flawed, or limited, or makes hidden assumptions, or maybe it misses the central issue. Asking questions includes asking why something occurs. Feynman stressed this. Keep asking why, he said, and eventually you get to something interesting. Lew Rockwell wrote a good piece on DDT and how Rachel Carson’s book was accepted and reflected in perverse policy. Ask “why” this happened, and keep asking why. My first thought was that people acting as Bayesians updated their probabilities that DDT was harmful and rated it as highly probable. Why would that happen? What sort of weak priors did they have and why? Someone who has very little other information will place a high weight on the one piece that they do have. If they are suspicious of chemicals in the first place, the new information will tip the balance. Why did the public have so little information and why be so suspicious of chemicals? But of course this approach is only one of many possibilities. Question authorities. We should question Rothbard, von Mises, etc. They did not know everything. They made plenty of errors. They may have pursued directions that are not critical to the Austrian project or even could be harmful to it. The beginning of knowledge is to question.
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