Salerno on Mises’s View of Coordination in Market Economies

This is presented in Salerno (1993) and is of some interest.

First, the role of flexible prices:

“prices that are generated by the market process and serve as the data for economic calculation. These are realized prices; or, in other words, they are the actual outcome of the historical market process at each moment in time and are determined by the value scales of the marginal pairs in each market. They are, therefore, also market-clearing prices the establishment of which coincides with a momentary situation, what Mises calls the ‘plain state of rest’ (PSR), in which no market participant, given his existing marginal-utility rankings of goods and money and knowledge of prevailing prices, can enhance his welfare by participating in further exchange. However, despite their character as market-clearing prices, these are also disequilibrium prices. Thus as a consequence of the unavoidable errors of entrepreneurial forecasting and price appraisement under uncertainty, most goods are sold at prices that do not conform to their monetary costs of production, thereby generating realized profits and losses for producers.” (Salerno 1990: 121).

So prices are “disequilibrium prices” in the sense that they are not equal to costs of production, but allow profit and loss. Nevertheless, supply and demand are equated by a tendency to market-clearing prices:

“Mises conceives the market process as coordinative, ‘the essence of coordination of all elements of supply and demand.’ This means that the structure of realized (disequilibrium) prices, which continually emerges in the course of the market process and whose elements are employed for monetary calculation, performs the indispensable function of clearing all markets and, in the process, coordinating the productive employments and combinations of all resources with one another and with the anticipated preferences of consumers.” (Salerno 1993: 124).

Present prices or prices of the immediate past (or “realised prices” in Mises’s terminology) are the basis for monetary calculation when entrepreneurs guess or forecast prices in an uncertain future (Salerno 1993: 123).

But the market process is open-ended, because continuous change always shifts the end point equilibrium state which Mises calls “final state of rest” and into a new state, then a new state and so on.

Therefore economies do not have a long-term tendency to equilibrium (Salerno 1993: 122), but rather at most shifting, very short term tendencies, which are always thwarted.

But the Misesian theory is not the same as that of Hayek.

For example,

“The Hayekian paradigm stresses the fragmentation of knowledge and its dispersion among the multitude of individual consumers and producers as the primary problem of social and economic cooperation and views the market’s price system as the means by which such dispersed knowledge is ferreted out and communicated to the relevant decision-makers in the production process.” (Salerno 1993: 115).

In contrast to this,

“Salerno points out that for Mises, knowledge and appraisal on the market are complementary, and have very different natures and functions. Knowledge is an individual process, by which each individual entrepreneur learns as much as he can about the largely qualitative nature of the market he faces, the values, products, techniques, demands, configurations of the market, and so on. This process necessarily goes on only in the minds of each individual. On the other hand, the prices provided by the market, especially the prices of means of production, are a social process, available to all participants, by which the entrepreneur is able to appraise and estimate future costs and prices. In the market economy, qualitative knowledge can be transmuted, by the free price system, into rational economic calculation of quantitative prices and costs, thus enabling entrepreneurial action on the market.

As Salerno notes: ‘competition therefore acquires the characteristic of a quintessentially social process, not because its operation presupposes knowledge discovery [as with Hayek-Kirzner], which is inescapably an individual function, but because, in the absence of competitively determined money prices for the factors of production, possession of literally all the knowledge in the world would not enable an individual to allocate productive resources, economically within the social division of labor.’

In short, the entire Hayekian emphasis on ignorance and ‘knowledge’ is misplaced and misconceived.” (Rothbard 1992: 19–21).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rothbard, Murray N. 1992. “The Present State of Austrian Economics,” Working Paper from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, November.

Salerno, Joseph T. 1990. “Ludwig von Mises as Social Rationalist,” Review of Austrian Economics 4: 26–54.

Salerno, Joseph T. 1993. “Mises and Hayek Dehomogenized,” Review of Austrian Economics 6.2: 113–146.