# Rothbardian Pro-Wrestler wins election **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [August 3, 2018, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055 "2018-08-03T17:02:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/81 "2018-08-06T22:47:45Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > That same problem happens in our current government environment. A free society is not a utopia either. > > If someone rescued a child, and the parents didn’t like it, let them bring suit against the rescuer and the courts can decide this. , Here’s the difference between our world and your world. In both worlds, kidnapping children is a crime. In our world, if you discover that your neighbors are starving their child to death, you call up the police or child welfare. They have the legal authority to step in and take the child away from the parents so it will be properly fed and cared for. The parents will be arrested for child abuse. If, for some unforeseeable reason (something like a wizard did it), the police or child welfare don’t intervene, you might decide you should kidnap the child to get it away from the parents. You’ll probably end up in court where you’ll argue that you broke the law because the child was in mortal danger. If you can prove the danger was real, you’ll most likely be acquitted and the parents will be arrested. In your world, there would be no option for calling the police or child welfare. The parents aren’t breaking any law by starving their child to death. If you kidnap the child and go to court, you might be able to show that the child was in mortal danger. But the judge is going to say that’s immaterial and give the child back to the parents so they can resume the starvation. So I’m seeing some pretty significant differences between our two worlds. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/82 "2018-08-06T22:52:25Z")
> [@Hellestal](#): > > In standard economic theory, agents have an ordinal ranking of preferences. > > This ranking is described with “utility”, but it’s still ordinal. > > Calling it by the name of utility does not make it any less ordinal. Assigning them a numerical value and doing calculations on them does make them “less ordinal”. > [@](#): > > Rothbardian analysis cannot guarantee a downward sloping demand curve in the market for any particular good. > > There aren’t many “fundamental laws of economics” if he can’t guarantee downward sloping demand or upward sloping supply as deductively inevitable. And he can’t. (To be fair, though, no one else can either.) He can and did in Man, Economy, and State. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/83 "2018-08-06T22:53:14Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > In fact Austrian economics is distinguished from other mainstream schools because it rejects utility measure in “utils” or whatever nonsense. There is no homo Economicus. Humans have an ordinal ranking of preferences which will express the individual’s moral beliefs and ethical considerations. . > [@Hellestal](#): > > In standard economic theory, agents have an ordinal ranking of preferences. > > This ranking is described with “utility”, but it’s still ordinal. > > Calling it by the name of utility does not make it any less ordinal. Yeah, kinda hard to have “an ordinal ranking of preferences…” without something to order. I’m surprised that it’s possible to get through a microeconomics class without a discussion of how Utils exist solely to ordinally rank preferences. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/84 "2018-08-06T22:54:23Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Assigning them a numerical value and doing calculations on them does make them “less ordinal”. . Be specific–other than ordinal ranking, what specific calculations do economists do with utils? ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/85 "2018-08-06T22:54:27Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Here’s the difference between our world and your world. > > In both worlds, kidnapping children is a crime. > > In our world, if you discover that your neighbors are starving their child to death, you call up the police or child welfare. They have the legal authority to step in and take the child away from the parents so it will be properly fed and cared for. The parents will be arrested for child abuse. > > If, for some unforeseeable reason (something like a wizard did it), the police or child welfare don’t intervene, you might decide you should kidnap the child to get it away from the parents. You’ll probably end up in court where you’ll argue that you broke the law because the child was in mortal danger. If you can prove the danger was real, you’ll most likely be acquitted and the parents will be arrested. > > In your world, there would be no option for calling the police or child welfare. The parents aren’t breaking any law by starving their child to death. If you kidnap the child and go to court, you might be able to show that the child was in mortal danger. But the judge is going to say that’s immaterial and give the child back to the parents so they can resume the starvation. > > So I’m seeing some pretty significant differences between our two worlds. Yes me too. Your world involves a vast imprisonment complex and military that enslaves many people and terrorizes communities. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/86 "2018-08-06T22:56:52Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Yes me too. Your world involves a vast imprisonment complex and military that enslaves many people and terrorizes communities. And this is worse than your world, which explicitly allows imprisonment and terrorism within family units (unless a family member is sold outside the family unit)? ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/87 "2018-08-06T22:56:55Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > Be specific–other than ordinal ranking, what specific calculations do economists do with utils? Total utility ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/88 "2018-08-06T22:57:59Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > And this is worse than your world, which explicitly allows imprisonment and terrorism within family units (unless a family member is sold outside the family unit)? You’re not following. Reread. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/89 "2018-08-06T22:58:21Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Total utility I have no idea what you’re trying to say. Be specific-- what calculations do economists do with Utils? Might be good to include a calculation in your answer that had “Utils” as a variable. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/90 "2018-08-06T23:00:20Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > You’re not following. Reread. I think I’m following just fine, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/91 "2018-08-06T23:02:34Z")
> [@WillFarnaby](#): > > Assigning them a numerical value and doing calculations on them does make them “less ordinal”. No. You just don’t know what “ordinal” actually means, and you seem uninterested in learning. This is very basic mathematics. > [@WillFarnaby](#): > > He can and did in Man, Economy, and State. No. He _says_ he did. But he didn’t. If you’d read the book more carefully, you would’ve seen the lapse in his logic. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/92 "2018-08-06T23:14:37Z")
No, **Little Nemo** ’s world is the real world, the one that doesn’t have those things. To be fair, there is a difference between a mathematical domain of objects which just have order properties, and one that also has properties like addition. But you lose most of those differences when, as sane economists do, you refuse to define the function relating utils to anything measurable like dollars, beyond specifying that it’s monotonic. On the other hand, though, there are those dollars… They really are measurable, and it’s perfectly meaningful to add and subtract them, or multiply and divide them by scalars, and so on. Is Rothbardian economics incapable of discussing dollars? That seems like a pretty telling weakness, for an economic system. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/93 "2018-08-06T23:25:48Z")
> [@](#): > > Total utility OK, a conventional economist would say that a person values a house, say, at a certain number of utils, and values a car at some other number of utils. He might then say that the person also therefore places some value on having both, and call that the sum of the two individual utility values. But by the same token, an economist who recognized only order of value would have to say that a person considers having both a house and a car to be greater than either only having a house, or only having a car. Having rules about addition makes that whole process far, far simpler. In a universe with _n_ possible goods that a person could own, the conventional economist, in order to form a model, need only assign values to _n_ different variables, one util value for each available good (actually only _n_-1, since the overall scaling is irrelevant). But an economist using a system with only order must assign values to (2^_n_)\*((2^_n_)-1)/2 different variables, one for each comparison between every two subsets of possible goods. That’s a number that grows _really_ quickly-- For instance, with a mere 10 different potential goods, you’d need to define over a half-million different comparisons. It’s no wonder that Rothbardians dismiss the importance of making models. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/94 "2018-08-06T23:48:31Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > OK, a conventional economist would say that a person values a house, say, at a certain number of utils, and values a car at some other number of utils. He might then say that the person also therefore places some value on having both, and call that the sum of the two individual utility values. No, you never sum utils in this way. You say that a person has x utils from owning a house, and y utils from owning a car, and z utils from owning both. Z will be larger than x or y, if one of your initial assumptions is “free disposal”, but will not be equal to the sum of the two. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/95 "2018-08-06T23:54:45Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > No, you never sum utils in this way. You say that a person has x utils from owning a house, and y utils from owning a car, and z utils from owning both. Z will be larger than x or y, if one of your initial assumptions is “free disposal”, but will not be equal to the sum of the two. I guess a better way to put this would be that every potential market basket has a util value associated with it. Most models assume that more is better than less, so utils are weakly increasing in “stuff” (holding the amount of other stuff constant), and the more stuff you have the less you value getting an additional unit of the same stuff. Throw in a couple of extra assumptions (e.g., all market bundles can be compared to each other, and one will always be either preferred or equally liked), and you have the basis for microeconomics. (I’m not a microeconomist , and this is from years ago, but it’s roughly correct) ---
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2018, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/96 "2018-08-06T23:56:55Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > OK, a conventional economist would say that a person values a house, say, at a certain number of utils, and values a car at some other number of utils. He might then say that the person also therefore places some value on having both, and call that the sum of the two individual utility values. That’s not generally going to be a valid calculation. Utility is additively separable only in special cases. U[car] + U[house] will not necessarily equal U[car and house]. I see **Evil Economist** already pointed this out. > [@Chronos](#): > > In a universe with _n_ possible goods that a person could own, the conventional economist, in order to form a model, need only assign values to _n_ different variables, one util value for each available good (actually only _n_-1, since the overall scaling is irrelevant). But an economist using a system with only order must assign values to (2^_n_)\*((2^_n_)-1)/2 different variables, one for each comparison between every two subsets of possible goods. That’s a number that grows _really_ quickly-- For instance, with a mere 10 different potential goods, you’d need to define over a half-million different comparisons. Yes. Exactly. It’s a problem. Dimensions are kept down by necessity, and additive separability inserted whenever it seems justifiable. But… that’s not always. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2018, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/97 "2018-08-07T00:08:31Z")
> [@Hellestal](#): > > It’s a problem. > > Dimensions are kept down by necessity, and additive separability inserted whenever it seems justifiable. But… that’s not always. It’s not really a problem. These assumptions only exist to get to tractable equations when you describe behavior mathematically. You never actually go around assigning utils to market baskets. (Note: not a microeconomist…maybe there are people out there actually doing this) ---
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2018, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/98 "2018-08-07T00:28:35Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > It’s not really a problem. These assumptions only exist to get to tractable equations when you describe behavior mathematically. You never actually go around assigning utils to market baskets. (Note: not a microeconomist…maybe there are people out there actually doing this) I promise you, it’s a problem. Some of the most famous proofs in economics are about the theoretical existence of an equilibrium point, and their potentially nice properties. The issue is that they’re often computationally intractable problems. So sure, an equilibrium exists… but how do you find it? Or them, if there are several? People in my own department, including the chair, specialize in computation, which means trying to find the equilibrium point efficiently with as many dimensions as possible. “Zeh curse of dimensionality… it’s a KILLER”, as he says. We had one job candidate last year who spent six months crunching out a model, and the only reason why she got it down to six months was she was CS before changing to econ. (That was a macro model, but all academic macro is microfounded these days anyway) Dimensionality is a problem. That doesn’t mean giving up or whatever. It just means trying to be clever. And, of course, all of this doesn’t mean utility is somehow not ordinal. It’s completely ordinal. That’s Chapter 1 stuff. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2018, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/99 "2018-08-07T00:30:45Z")
Let me google that for you …utility function calculation…holy shit look at that ( [Utility Functions | Brilliant Math & Science Wiki](https://brilliant.org/wiki/utility-functions/) ) > [@](#): > > A utility function is a representation to define individual preferences for goods or services beyond the explicit monetary value of those goods or services. In other words, it is a calculation for how much someone desires something, and it is relative. For example, if someone prefers dark chocolate to milk chocolate, they are said to derive more utility from dark chocolate. A utility function of this relationship could look something like where is the utility of eating dark and milk chocolates. **In this example, a consumer derives half as much utility from milk chocolate as they do from dark.** Visit the link if you want to see the math. Sorry buds, but this is not a description of reality. Perhaps if econ chairs were more than math jockeys, modern economists would be more than statisticians. ---
**Author:** ![Hellestal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hellestal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hellestal)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2018, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055/100 "2018-08-07T00:35:41Z")
That might be the single stupidest fucking post I’ve seen in the last week and a half. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/rothbardian-pro-wrestler-wins-election/819055.md?page=6)