Here are some more quotations that Bettina Bien Greaves recorded in Mises's NYU seminar:
Mises's extemporaneous remarks were often vivid, colorful and succinct. Here are a few gems selected from my years of seminar notes:
- You say the secret is in selling something above cost. But the situation is really very different. The problem is to produce something for which consumers are willing to pay above cost.
- Education can only hand down what was present in the old generation. The innovator cannot be educated. There is no school for the inventor.
- Prices are like the snows of last winter. They come, but at the moment we catch them, they are already something of the past.
- Concerning statistical averages which conceal the truly significant factors: If a man has one leg on an iceberg and the other in a fire, the average is then all right.
- Ideas are called "imported and alien" when one doesn't like them. It is exactly the opposite with wine.
- Beginning with Omar Khayyam, wine has been advertised by the poets. Were the poets in the pay of the "Whiskey Trust"? Why not say that the desire for cleanliness is the result of the "Soap Trust" and its advertising?
- Concerning the idea of nationality: St. Francis of Assisi and Casanova were both Italians. But what did they have in common? Only the fact that they both used the same language, though for very different purposes!
- Why should the members of Congress be so nasty as to fix a minimum wage lower than their own?
Taken from "Mises's New York University Seminar (1948-1969)," by Bettina Bien Greaves,
The Libertarian Review, September 1981.
1 Comments:
"Education can only hand down what was present in the old generation. The innovator cannot be educated. There is no school for the inventor."
I recently discussed this matter with a colleague via email:
You've mentioned entrepreneurship and of late, businesses management. I was reading an old review of Human Action from Ludwig Lachmann and thought you would find the following passage on Mises intriguing:
Nor is much comfort offered to those who would create "equality of opportunity" through education, by "making educational opportunities more equal." The abilities by which men outdo each other in a complex society have little to do with education. Entrepreneurial ability is not to be acquired in lecture-rooms. Here Professor Mises makes an important point. "It is not generally realised that education can never be more than indoctrination with theories and ideas already developed. Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative genuises cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them." http://us.share.geocities.com/dbskarbek/Lachmann.pdf
The tie in to contemporary schooling comes from a controversial paper regarding the value of obtaining an MBA:
Some schools lecture, others teach by the case method, some use a combination. But in relatively few instances in established business schools is there much clinical training or learning by doing?experiential learning where "concrete experience is the basis for observation and reflection" (Kolb, 1976: 21). Students learn to talk about business, but it is not clear they learn business. "Unfortunately you cannot replicate true managing in the classroom. The case study is a case in point: Students with little or no management experience are presented with 20 pages on a company they do not know and told to pronounce on its strategy the next day" (Mintzberg & Lampel, 2001: 244). As Bailey and Ford argued, although a scientific approach may be useful for the study of management, it is not at all clear that it helps in teaching management: "The practice of management is best taught as a craft, rich in lessons derived from experience and oriented toward taking and responding to action" (1996: 9). But as Leavitt noted, "business schools have been designed without practice fields" (1989: 40). http://www.aomonline.org/Publications/Articles/BSchools.asp
With these quotes in hand, the Lachmann review had a prescient quote (especially for its time) from Peter Drucker (in 1950):
"On the whole it looks very much as if the 'integrated' business education tends to make a man unfit to be an entrepreneur by paralysing his intellectual muscles, just as the training in mere technical skills of the business school of yesterday tended to unfit a man by destroying his vision. The more emphasis there is on 'administration', 'organisation', 'policy', 'analysis', etc., the more there is emphasis on the known 'right' way of doing things and on routines rather than on the new -- in short on the accepted, the safe, the bureaucratic way rather than on the way of the risk taker and the innovator."
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