Study Guide to Human Action

Study Guide to Human Action, by Robert P. Murphy and Amadeus Gabriel, is the Mises Institute's 2008 companion to the Scholar's Edition of Ludwig von Mises's treatise. It follows Human Action through seven parts and thirty-nine chapters. Each chapter gets a summary arranged under Mises's section headings and subheadings, then historical context and the chapter's role in the book, then Technical Notes on difficult and subtle points, and finally Study Questions. An index closes the volume. Murphy's December 2008 preface credits Gabriel with independently preparing the bulk of the questions. The guide's interpretations and criticisms are its authors' own.

The guide earns its shelf space beside Human Action through the notes and questions. They turn compressed arguments into claims a reader can test, and they mark the places where an interpreter must choose between readings. Again and again the notes separate what Mises's premises establish from a stronger conclusion his wording seems to license. They broadly defend his framework and qualify sentences the authors judge to overreach.

In chapter 1, Mises writes that an actor must believe purposeful behavior can remove or at least alleviate felt uneasiness. The first Technical Note argues for a weaker requirement. To act, a person needs the belief that a chosen means offers some chance of alleviating the uneasiness, and he may strongly doubt that it will. A reflex involves no such belief, while a desperate attempt against poor odds still counts as purposeful action. The note grants that Mises's wording fits these cases and corrects other Austrian expositions that require the actor to believe his action will remove the uneasiness. Every actor chooses a means for the benefit he anticipates from it, and that anticipation can coexist with strong doubt. A reader who equates it with confidence that the means will work would make every entrepreneur confident by definition and drain the uncertainty from Mises's later account of profit and loss.

Chapters 11 through 13 make economic calculation concrete. A barter of five oranges for eight apples reveals that each trader ranked one bundle above the other, and the guide declines to read the trade as a utility ratio of eight to five. Engineering recipes state how much of each input yields an output. When several recipes work, money prices, which record past exchange ratios, give the producer a guide for comparing their costs, and the chapter 12 summary warns that most balance-sheet entries reflect owners' speculative anticipation of future market conditions. In a hypothetical from chapter 12, a financial specialist choosing between $350,000 at a hedge fund and $150,000 in academia can ask whether the calmer life is worth $200,000 a year. The subtraction concerns money, and the weighing of peace against income stays with the chooser. A chapter 13 note adds that action alone yields no calculation. Barter still produces exchange ratios and a socialist economy can still price consumer goods, while monetary calculation across production methods requires private property in the means of production and a generally accepted money, the setting both systems lack. The last question on chapter 26 observes that newer neoclassical models characterize the equilibrium transition path to a steady state. It asks whether that development vitiates Mises's critique of mathematical economics and leaves the reader to argue the case.

Chapter 19 carries the ordinal discipline into time. Mises opens his section on originary interest by calling it the ratio of the values assigned to want-satisfaction in the immediate and the remoter future. The guide's first Technical Note calls that sentence, read strictly, nonsensical, because subjective valuations admit no arithmetic, and supplies a case. Suppose a television costs $110 today and an ironclad claim to an identical set delivered in one year costs $100. The implicit rate is 10 percent, the premium of 110 over 100. A buyer of the claim who resells the delivered set for $110 earns that 10 percent if prices and conditions stay unchanged. The spread exists because people pay more for a television now than for a claim on one next year. Two sentences later on the same page 523, Mises calls originary interest a ratio of commodity prices, so the note supplies worked arithmetic for a distinction the treatise already draws.

Other notes argue with Mises and separate a method's scope from a verdict on goals. Mises writes that an economist who calls minimum wage rates a bad policy means their effects run contrary to the purpose of those who recommend them. The chapter 39 note reports that Murray Rothbard would amend this, since many politicians and bureaucrats implementing interventionist policies achieve the goals they hold, such as winning elections or larger budgets. Before declaring that a means failed, a reader has to ask whose ends it served. The next note records a deeper split. Mises held value judgments to be ultimately beyond rational analysis, while Rothbard rejected the is-ought distinction and still agreed that praxeology is value-free. A note on chapter 1 prepared the ground with the point that praxeology takes preferences as given and that reasoning outside it remains free to criticize them.

The guide fits a reader working through the Scholar's Edition, whose page numbers the notes cite. A workable order is to read a chapter of Mises against the summary's outline, then answer the questions with the treatise open. The chapter 30 questions on rent control, for example, send the reader back to Mises to separate existing apartments from new construction. Some notes relate Mises to mainstream economics for graduate students and professors. The Mises Institute offers the study guide as a free PDF, and the Towards Liberty recommendation of Human Action introduces the treatise itself.