Archive for 31 October 2008
Mises Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
Here is Mises on entrepreneurial “understanding,” a concept distinct from quantitative prediction according to a known model. You could even call it judgment. It’s particularly germane to current economic conditions and the phalanx of economic forecasters attempting to predict how the economy will do in the coming months and years. The source is a 1956 essay, “The Plight of Business Forecasting,” reprinted in Economic Freedom and Interventionism:
Economics can only tell us that a boom engendered by credit expansion will not last. It cannot tell us after what amount of credit expansion the slump will start or when this event will occur. All that economists and other people say about these quantitative and calendar problems partakes of neither economics nor any other science. What they say in the attempt to anticipate future events makes use of specific “understanding,” the same method which is practiced by everybody in all dealings with his fellow man. Specific “understanding” has the same logical character as that which characterizes all anticipations of future events in human affairs — anticipations concerning the course of Russia’s foreign policy, religious and racial conditions in India or Algeria, ladies’ fashions in 1960, the political divisions in the U.S. Senate in 1970; and even such anticipations as the future marital relations between Mr. X and his wife, or the success in life of a boy who has just celebrated his tenth birthday. There are people who assert that psychology may provide some help in such prognostications. However that may be, it is not our task to examine this problem. We have merely to establish the fact that forecasts about the course of economic affairs cannot be considered scientific.
Controynms Redux
| Peter Klein |
Last year’s post on contronymns — words that are their own antonyms — was one of our most popular. Anu Garg of Wordsmith.org ran a contronymns series this week, featuring cleave, continuance, asperse, copemate, and quiddity.
The series intro contained a few more:
When you sanction a project, do you approve of it or disapprove? Should one be commended for oversight (watchful care) or reprimanded for oversight (error or omission)? When you resign from a job, do you leave it or re-join (re-sign) it?
When a proposal gets tabled, is it being brought forward for discussion or being laid aside? Depends on which side of the pond you’re at. If the former, you’re in the UK; if the latter, you’re in the US.
I call them fence-sitters. They sit on fences, ready to say one thing or its opposite depending on which side they appear at. I’m not talking about politicians. These are words, known by many names: autoantonym, contranym, self-antonym, enantiodromic, amphibolous, janus word, and so on.
Sometimes it’s a result of two distinct words evolving into the same form (cleave from Old English cleofian and cleofan) but often a single word develops a split personality and takes on two contradictory senses. All of us have a bit of yin and yang and these words are no exception. The context usually provides a clue to help us understand the right sense in a given place.
Organizations and Markets 
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