ȃȃ Partʺ: EconomicsMoney costs of production, as well as the input prices that enter into
estimating them, play a vital role in conveying information to particular
business decisionmakers about conditions in other sectors of the economy.
Money costs and prices reflect—do not measure precisely, but reflect—the
values and even the utilities attributed by consumers to the goods and
services whose production is forgone to make the required inputs available
to the particular line of production whose costs are in question. (Money
costs and factor prices also reflect, as noted above, the preferences and
attitudes of workers and investors.)
It is therefore subversive to the understanding of the logic of a price
system to maintain that cost is entirely subjective, falls entirely on the
decisionmaker, and cannot be felt by anyone else.
Perhaps this risk of subversion is being run in a good cause. A healthy
skepticism is in order about socialism, nationalization, and the imposition
of cost rules on nationalized and private enterprises. However, we should
beware of trying to obtain substantive conclusions from preconceptions
about method or about policy. Sound conclusions and policy judgments
incur discredit from association with questionable verbal maneuvers.
Valid subjectivist insights join with the fact that general equilibrium
never actually prevails in recommending skepticism about policies that
would unnecessarily impose imitation markets or the mere feigning of
market processes. Ļe fact of disequilibrium prices does not, of course,
recommend junking the market system in favor of something else. Market
prices, although not precise indicators of the trade-offs posed by reality,
are at least under the pressures of supply and demand and entrepreneurial
alertness to become more nearly accurate measures.
Ļe recommended skepticism does have some application, however,
with regard to compensation for seizures under eminent domain, dam-
age awards in tort cases, and the development of case law. It also has
some application in cost-benefit studies. Personal rights, not such exer-
cises, should of course dominate many policy decisions.
Again, though, I want to warn against overstatement. Admittedly,
costs and benefits are largely subjective, market prices are at disequilib-
rium levels, and other bases of making estimates are inaccurate also. But
what is to be done when some decision or other has to be made—about
a new airport, a subway system, a dam, or a proposed environmental
regulation? Does one simply ramble on about how imponderable every-
thing is, or does one try in good faith to quantify benefits and costs?
Of course the estimates will be crude, even very crude, but perhaps the