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My day job is
software development. Within the field there is a considerable literature on
modeling, which means more or less, identifying and organizing the concepts
in your problem domain into a form that is suitable for writing programs.
While reading the
book Model-Driven
Design Using Business Patterns by Pavel Hruby, I was struck by some
similarities between the modeling strategies and some Austrian concepts.
For example, p.
19, Economic
Resources:
Economic
resources are things that are scarce, and have utility for economic agents,
and users of business applications want to plan, monitor, and control
Compare this to
Menger, The General Theory
of the Good:
If a thing is to
become a good, or in other words, if it is to acquire goods-character, all
four of the following prerequisites must be simultaneously present:
1. A human need.
2. Such properties as render the thing capable of being brought into a causal
connection with the satisfaction of this need.
3. Human knowledge of this causal connection.
4. Command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the
need.
and p. 30, The value of Exchanged Resources:
Each resource
that is subject to exchange has a different value for the economic agents
participating in the exchange. For rational economic agents, an economic
exchange can occur only if both economic agents perceive the value of the
received economic resources higher than the value of the given resources;
otherwise they will not exchange them.
Compare to
Menger, The Theory of
Exchange:
The enjoyment men
derive from an economic exchange of goods is the general feeling of pleasure
they experience when some event permits them to make a better provision for
the satisfaction of their needs than would otherwise have been possible. But
the benefits of a mutual transfer of goods depend, as we have seen, on three
conditions: (a) one economizing individual must have command of quantities of
goods which have a smaller value to him than other quantities of goods at the
disposal of another economizing individual who evaluates the goods in reverse
fashion, (b) the two economizing individuals must have recognized this
relationship, and (c) they must have the power actually to perform the
exchange of goods.
After noticing
these similarities, I wrote and asked Dr. Hruby
whether his work was inspired by Menger. He wrote back the he is familiar
with the Austrian school, especially Mises, and that Austrian economics had
been helpful to him the development of his methodology. He wrote,
Libertarian
thinking can explain some hard problems in REA we came across, for example,
whether a patient in a hospital should be considered an economic agent or an
economic resource. On one hand, a patient pays for the treatment (either
directly or via his insurance), which is an argument for patient being an
agent. On the other hand, the treatment the patient receives is a conversion
process, which is an argument for the patient being a resource.
The answer to
this problem can be directly derived from the basic libertarian axiom of the
"right to self-ownership" (Rothbard, Libertarian Manifesto):
"The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by
virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to "own" his or her own
body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. So in REA,
a patient is an economic agent but his body is an economic resource.
Robert Blumen
Also
by Robert Blumen
Robert Blumen is
an independent software developer based in San Francisco, California
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