Subjectivism and Economic Analysis: Essays in memory of Ludwig ...

ROGER KOPPLsuch anonymous types, I can ignore the idiosyncrasies of my fellowsocial actors.I can predict the actions of the typical postal worker withconfidence. My usual carrier is a named individual. I cannot guesswhat he does off the job, nor how often he calls in sick or shows uplate. This named individual is more or less a cipher to me. But I canbe reasonably sure that he or someone like him will show up midmorningto drop letters in my box.Social co-operation with strangers is possible because we mayrely on highly anonymous personal types in formulating our pictureof the world and our expectations of the future. When ourexpectations may reasonably rely on personal types of highanonymity only, we have reason for confidence in thoseexpectations. When, instead, we must formulate expectations on thebasis of personal types of relatively low anonymity, we have reasonto doubt the reliability of our expectations.Here is a case where ‘Austrian’ economists may make use of aKeynesian concept. In his Treatise on Probability, Keynesdistinguished between the ‘probability’ of proposition and its‘weight’. The weight of a probability judgement measures howconfident we may be in it. I’m quite sure that the chance of a seven atcraps is one in six. I may judge the chance of civil unrest to be one insix, but I cannot have confidence in that judgement. ‘The weight, tospeak metaphorically, measures the sum of the favorable andunfavorable evidence, the probability measures the difference’(Keynes, Collected Writings [1921] 1972, vol. VIII:77). This notionof weight resurfaces in Chapter 12 of the General Theory (CollectedWritings [1936] 1972, vol. VII: 148; see also Runde 1990.) FrankKnight may have been getting at more or less the same point whenhe distinguished the ‘favorableness’ of an opinion from ‘the amountof confidence in that opinion’ (Knight [1921] 1971:227).We may apply Keynes’s notion of weight to restate Schutz’s pointabout anonymous types. Expectations relying only on personal typesof high anonymity may have high weight. Those relying in part onpersonal types of low anonymity should generally have low weight.Economic actors can better predict the actions of anonymousthan non-anonymous personal types. Something similar may be saidof economic theorists. Social scientists may be able to predictconfidently the results of processes whose descriptions are givenusing only personal ideal types of high anonymity. But when thedescription of a social process requires the use of some personaltype(s) of low anonymity, the predictions of social science are more70