Mises’ placement of individuals at the center of his macroeconomic causality 1 resembles traditionalism's understanding of speciation via Intelligent Design: both discover an indeterminant being as generative of material phenomena. Asserting humanity as integral to economic calculation makes the calculations dubious by inviting individual freewill into the discussion: freewill, being indeterminant, rejects the possibility of description via mathematics.
But the observable fact of individual action is, in its most primitive instances, of dubious relevance to the explication of macroeconomics. Termite mounds, ant colonies, and beehives all demonstrate that the activity of purely instinctual beings can be entirely serviceable to the performance of economic calculation. One would not try to infer the hive's behavior from the bee's biology because the hive and the bee have nothing in common with respect to telos and logos. Sociobiologists developed the notion of an ‘insect superorganism’ in order to give place for this distinction.
Is the pure anarcho-capitalism of an insect realm likely to be a useful analog to an economy populated by beings with a capacity for reasoned thought? The economic theorist’s answer to this question might well proceed from considerations upon the extent to which humanity’s reasoning capacity finds application in actual economic behavior. How much rational choice is even possible among all the potentially reasonable decisions to be made in the course of everyday life?The individual usually enters the market out of some biological imperative, which might include a need to relieve boredom, or impulses dictated by advertising, etc.
Once in the market, the atomistic individual has no more than a vanishingly small effect on the prices and quanta he finds there.
If a trip to the supermarket involved a quantitative decision on how much of each available product to buy, together with an overall optimization of each quantity purchased with respect to all the other purchases to be contemplated, then the typical shopping trip would never end.
Businesses also face a plethora of choices concerning the building-up and working-off of their productive assets; and it is impossible to imagine the decisions to be made at any given moment can be much more than a continuation and gradual reshaping of the inertia accumulated from past decisions.Clearly it is the market, rather than the individual, whose actions form the telos and logos of our subject. The sentiments of a specific individual are no more causal to the market than they would be to the overall behavior of a street mob. Mobs, whether or not composed of beings that can think, never think. Freewill is the first thing surrendered upon entry into any behavioral collective wherein one is both literally and figuratively swept along by a mentality not one's own. So markets — mobs that are constantly renewed by the entry and departure of discrete individuals — are perhaps most informatively analyzed as ‘reactive’, rather than as ‘contemplative’.
That said, the economist might come to view of his profession as seeking to understand the peculiar group mentality that is actuated by the pheromone of price signals. The only alternative to the practical inconclusiveness of rational choice is to accept that economic activity is largely a matter of instinct and habit. Rationality only bears upon current economic activity insofar as it has guided the development of whatever instincts and habits are currently being expressed.
The alternative of trying to build-up macroeconomic activity from individual human actions is like trying to derive Newton's Laws from the Schrödinger equation that governs the subatomic world. The problem is that the stuff of Newton — distance, velocity, momentum — does not really operate in the micro realm. And, more generally, no dynamic system's behavior has ever been visible in the parts of which it is constructed. Once again: while the whole is the sum of its parts, the behavior of the whole is never the behavior of the parts.
In contemplating the role that reason does play in the control of uniquely human interactions, we must accept that persons inhabit a metaphysical as well as a physical world. In addition to physical laws, people are governed by mere notions such as justice and compassion which, though highly mutable, effect deliberate and emphatic departures from the state of raw nature that is the market's natural diktat. And this metaphysical life also includes a mutable, culturally-driven scientific worldview whereby humankind's productive technique is augmented randomly and often.
Unthinking creatures cannot reshape the production and utility tradeoffs that an economist might
find implicit in their behaviors; and this creates an admittedly critical distinction between animal
species and people, who can and do change the boundary conditions to which their economic activity
adjusts. But, if a capability for rational thought is best understood as applying at the boundary of
the valuation process, then basic economic causality would be the same among all species: causation
is what happens within a system's boundary; and a properly understood causality would presumably apply
irrespective of whether that boundary is changeable or fixed.