J13 - Research Update

After finishing Mises’ Human Action, I took a break from reading and focused on writing for a while, first my Self-Designed Assignment, then my Journals on Economics and Time, all of which took much longer than I wanted. Recently, however, I’ve returned to my reading.

First, I decided to start reading the first half of Menger’s Principles of Economics, primarily because I wanted to borrow some of his terminology for my project. I quickly abandoned this, though, because I had already mostly absorbed his language, and the actual content of the Grundsätze felt repetitive after so many years of reading and writing and studying in the Austrian tradition. 

I then moved on to what I expected to be my seminal source (see my post on How to Research), Rothbard’s famous article “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution.” Now, I suppose that, technically, it is a seminal text, since the field of market environmentalism has developed in its shadow, with almost every later work making some reference to it. I, however, did not find it very useful. I had actually read “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” back in college, so I should have known better, but the article is so hyped by current Austrian scholars that I thought it was worth rereading. Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, the article spends very little time on the air pollution part, the part that drew me. There’s definitely information and ideas here that I could use in my project, and I think that there’s an implicit lesson in its prolonged focus on property rights (to be elaborated upon in a later Journal), but, ultimately, this article will be much less significant to my project than I had expected.

Luckily, I gave Rothbard an opportunity to redeem himself by reading his chapter on “Conservation, Ecology, and Growth” in For a New Liberty, a book I last read in high school (I remember writing about the history of classical liberal thought, learned from this book, in my SAT essay). This text gave me some meat, offering at-length descriptions of market solutions to some environmental problems. There was no real new ground here, but it was a nice refresher. One thing I liked was how similar Rothbard’s explanation of prices acting to conserve resources was to my own explanation of the coordinating function of the price system in my Self-Designed Assignment. It’s always good to get confirmation from the big man. I also liked Rothbard’s discussion of the role of technology in solving environmental problems, which I think relates nicely to my project and its focus on change and controlling change. Still, I don’t think my project will rely too strongly on this source.

Moving forward, I’d like to read Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, Scott’s Natural Resources: The Economics of Conservation, Poole’s “Reason and Ecology,” Block’s Water Capitalism, and Reisman’s “Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises.” I might have to go to a college library for some of these. After reading these I plan to take some time to write out everything I’ll already have so that I’ll have a clearer idea of what I really need to focus on for the rest of my project. I hope to have this all done by the end of September (so throw another SDA in there).