In the spirit of the congratulatory postings proliferating of late, I figured that at least one more was in order for David Veksler, the webmaster who has played a major role behind the recent changes to the Ludwig von Mises Institutes website.

One of his latest additions to the main website is a sidebar widget labeled “Related” which as you might suspect contains links to other Mises daily articles, literature, media files, and store products which share topical relation; or at least that is what is aimed to be accomplished.

This is the part where we turn to all our site visitors and ask them to pitch in a hand to improve the accuracy of those resulting links, by utilizing the websites tagging function, located conveniently at the bottom of every daily article where the reader is provocatively invited to “Tag this document!” (as Walter Block might have them do to unowned ‘public’ property.)

All you need to do is think of one or a few words which best describe the content of the daily article, type them in, submit, and voila! What you have just accomplished is to create a relationship to other articles, books, or media which discuss those related topics. The more attributes those articles share, the more likely it is will be linked to, thus laying the groundwork to help new readers further explore and expand their education on any specific topic that what might have occurred otherwise.

For example, a visitor who enjoyed the recent articles discussing the Methodenstreit debates might be keen to discover that Ludwig von Mises wrote a number of books dealing with those very same topics.

Following the biblical narration, the Tower of Babel was said to have been the culmination of a widespread mortal desire to revolt against the creator. Instead what was to result was a crumbling of the foundation of Babylonian civilization, causing exchange to come to a screeching halt and mass unrest which left behind an uncompleted tower to serve as a monumental testament to the perils of reckless capital consumption. And like that the wonderful boom times came to bust, and the first Skyscraper was added to the Skyscraper Index, Amen.Looking at these gorgeous renderings of some skyscrapers in the works, I can’t help but think of Mark Thornton’s QJAE article “SKYSCRAPERS AND BUSINESS CYCLES” (PDF linked).

In our modern narrative, there exists a tendency to revolt against knowledge acquired through the painstaking method of deductive reasoning, which I imagine is motivated in part by self-deluding escapism, the unshakable faith that the universe will change the realities of scarcity to suit your wishes. I like to think that the Skyscraper Index is just one of the visible symptoms to this malady.

While the headline of a recent New York Times article employs a subjectivist notion of value, “Maybe Only God Can Make a Tree, but Only People Can Put a Price on It”, the article makes it clear that the concept of price formation is something less well understood in the so-called paper of record.

Witness how the tree prices were derived:

Step 1 was a tree census, a two-year process that sent more than 1,000 volunteers to count every tree on every street in the city. The census results were then fed into a computer program that spit out a dollar value for each of the 592,130 trees counted, a figure that does not include the roughly 4.5 million trees in parks and on private land…

It takes into account several factors, including a tree’s impact on local property values, its contribution to cleaning the air by absorbing carbon dioxide, and how much its shade helps reduce energy consumption.

Factoring in the costs associated with planting and upkeep, New York City’s street trees provide an annual benefit of about $122 million, according to the Parks Department. The study concludes that New York receives $5.60 in benefits for every dollar spent on trees.

But wait just a second– how does a computer program determine the price for the trees? I’m reminded of Gary Galles’s article “And Then a Miracle Occurs.” Much like the cartoon professor who uses that phrase as a stage in a mathematical proof, the “price-calculating” black-box could only invoke some arbitrary determination based on of what the historical market demand has been for street-side trees.Now although the city government presumingly pays market prices to private contractors for the planting and maintenance of these trees, the notion of these trees now having a determinable market value or price is quite meaningless without a market to set them. To further ascribe the role these trees play in property valuations is an empty consideration without the knowledge of what opportunities were forgone with their planting. Thus is the nature of the socialist beast.

The root of this problem was brought up by Mises over 80 years ago in a series of articles beginning in 1920, shortly thereafter culminated into his Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis in 1922, and later in his treatise Human Action.

Lacking both omniscience and a market to determine the value individuals place on trees, planners cannot determine the opportunity cost that the trees represent, making any monetary calculation of the benefits provided a worthless spectacle of ignorance on stilts.

The Grey Lady reports that H. Lee Scott Jr., the Chief Executive of Wal-mart has decided against opening a location in New York City due to the intense opposition from unions, lobbyists, lawmakers, and other assorted community groups who have fought to stymie their efforts every step of the way.

But as Mr. Scott sees it, there is another reason Wal-Mart has such a hard time making inroads into some of the nation’s biggest enclaves. Speaking about what he sees as snobbish elites in New York and across the country, Mr. Scott added, “You have people who are just better than us and don’t want a Wal-Mart in their community.”

Daniel B. Klein proposes that economists of the “Smith-Hayek” variety ought to distinguish themselves from the mainstream economists who have usurped the title to prop their econometric orthodoxy.

Perhaps ten percent of economists in the United States share the broad character represented by Smith, Say, and Bastiat. Would it make sense for them to distinguish their character in some way? Would it make sense for them to cultivate a suitable identity? In this essay, I explore the heterogeneity of character types in economics, delineate the “Smith-Hayek” character, and explain why it might be beneficial for that character to establish an identity that functions in both the professional and public cultures.

As one commenter noted on Cafe Hayek‘s blog, the characteristic which best captures the divide between the two–

… is a heavy reliance on deductive reasoning, while the mainstream form of model building and GDP forecasting relies to a much greater extent on inductive reasoning. Would the brand “Deductive Economics” be out of place?