Human Action en vertrouwen

Welke wetenschap is eigenaar van het fenomeen vertrouwen? Als je zegt fenomeen, dan moet het wel de filosofie zijn. Maar zelfvertrouwen is typisch iets van de psychologische wetenschap. "Een inschatting van eigen kwaliteiten," lees ik ergens over zelfvertrouwen.

De Praxeologische wetenschap dan, de wetenschap van het menselijk handelen. Het meest bekende werk hiervan is van Ludwig von Mises, Human Action. [Ik moet bekennen dat ik het nooit helemaal uit heb gelezen, maar de intentie om dat te doen is er nog wel.]

1. Trust

In Human Action komt trust (een van de twee vormen, naast eerder genoemde confidence) voor in het hoofdstuk "Uncertainty:"

• Gambling, engineering, and speculating are three different modes of dealing with the future.  The gambler knows nothing ahout the event on which the outcome of his gambling depends. All that he knows is the frequency of a favorable outcome of a series of such events, knowledge which is useless for his undertaking. He trusts to good luck, that is his only  plan. 

In het hoofdstuk, the market (XV), gaat het niet om vertrouwen, maar om betrouwbaarheid:

The buyer must always rely upon the trustworthiness of the seller

In Prices (), gaat het (ook) over de term reliable:

The regular customer does not always select the article or the service, but the purveyor whom he trusts. He pays a premium to those whom he  considers reliable.

In Interest, Credit Expansion, the Trade Cycle ():

It is customary to distinguish the market for short-term loans  (money market) from the market for long-term loans (capital market). A more penetrating analysis must even go further in classifying  loans according to their duration. Besides, there are differences with  regard to the legal characteristics which the terms of the contract assign to the lender's claim. in short, the loan market is not homogeneous. But the most conspicuous differences arise from the entrepreneurial component included in the gross rates of interest. It is this that people refer to when asserting that credit is based on trust or confidence. 

2. Confidence

Economics and the revolt against reason (). The rationalist philosophers themselves were always intent upon showing the boundaries both of aprioristic theory and of empirical research. The first representative of British political economy, David Hume, the Utilitarians, and the American Pragmatists are certainly not guilty of having exaggerated the power of man to attain truth. It  would be more justifiable to blame the philosophy of the last two hundred years for too much agnosticism and skeptickm than for over-confidence in what could be achieved by the human mind. 

Human Society (). Liberalism is rationalistic. It maintains that it is possible to convince the immense majority that peaceful cooperation within the framework of society better serves their rightly understood interests than mutual battling and social disintegration. It has full confidence in man's reason. It may be that this optimism is unfounded and that the liberals have erred.  But then there is no hope left for mankind's future.

The Fable of the Mystic Communion (). The voice of the blood which brings the father close to his child was not heard by those savages who did not know the causal relation between cohabitation and pregnancy. Today, as this relation is known to everybody, a man who has full confidence in his wife's fidelity may perceive it. 

But if there are doubts concerning the wife's fidelity, the voice of the blood is of no use. Nobody ever ventured to assert that doubts concerning paternity could be resolved by the voice of the blood. A mother who has kept watch over her child since its birth can hear the voice of the blood. If she loses touch with the infant at an early date, she may later identify it by some bodily marks, for instance those moles and scars which once were popular with novel writers. But the blood is mute if such observations and the conclusions derived from them do not make it speak. The voice of the blood, contend the German racists, mysteriously unifies all members of the German people. But anthropology reveals the fact that the German nation is a mixture of the descendants of various races, subraces, and strains and not a homogeneous stock descended from a common ancestry. The recently germanized Slav who has only a short time since changed his paternal family name for a German-sounding name believes that he is substantially attached to all Germans. But he does not experience any such inner urge impelling him to join the ranks of his brothers or cousins who remained Czechs or Poles. 

Indirect Exchange () First: It must avoid any action which could make the clients - i.e.

the public - suspicious. As soon as the clients begin to lose confidence, they will ask for the redemption of the banknotes and withdraw their 16. It is furthermore immaterial whether or not the laws assign to the noney substitutes legal tender quality. If these things are really dealt with by people as money-substitutes and are therefore money-substitutes and equal in purchasing power to the respective amount of money, the only effect of the legal tender  quality is to prevent malicious people from resorting to chicanery for the mere  sake of annoying their fellow men. If, however, the things concerned are not 

money-substitutes and are traded at a discount below their face value, the assignment of legal tender quality is tantamount to an authoritarian price ceiling, the fixing of a maximum price for gold and foreign exchange and of a minimum price for the things which are no longer money-substitutes but either credit money or fiat money. Then the effects appear which Gresham's Law describes. How far the bank can go on increasing its issues of fiduciary media without arousing distrust, depends on psychological conditions.

The economics of war ().  It is futile to place confidence in treaties, conferences, and such 

bureaucratic outfits as the League of Xations and the United Nations. 

Plenipotentiaries, office clerks and experts make a poor show in fighting ideologjes. The spirit of conquest cannot be smothered by red tape. What is needed is a radical change in ideologies and economic policies. 

... dit is een zeer beperkte bloemlezing. Waar Human Action vol van staat is van het begrip, entrust, als werkwoord...

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2020/11/een-vertrouwenskwestie