In the vocabulary of The Bob Zadek Show, “human action” names the subject matter of economics itself. Jeff Deist, President of the Mises Institute, told Bob Zadek that economics is a social science concerned with “the stuff of life,” about human beings and the choices and tradeoffs they make, and therefore strongly interrelated with psychology, sociology and anthropology Austrian Economics Triumphs (2021). In a later episode, Deist returned to the phrase while explaining that the study of economics has nothing necessarily to do with politics: it is all about human action and human incentives, and can illuminate life in general rather than only money and finance Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). Art Carden, a professor of economics at Samford University, likewise described prices as the most accurate form of information for coordinating human action Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022).
Volitional creatures and deductive method
Deist’s account of the concept begins with a contrast between the social and physical sciences. Human beings, he said, are not the same as an apple in physics, nor atoms or molecules; they are volitional creatures with minds, emotions, desires and sometimes irrational beliefs and attitudes. Because they cannot be studied the way the physical world is studied, economics must start from certain axioms about human action that are known to be true axiomatically and work backwards deductively Austrian Economics Triumphs (2021). One such axiom, in his example, is that human beings act, since if they merely stood on a plot of earth they would starve, overheat, freeze or die of thirst. From it he derived the observation that humans prefer things sooner rather than later, illustrated by asking whether Zadek would rather have his dream home in Coronado at age 40 or at age 90, and by the borrower who takes a loan and pays interest to have a new car today rather than paying $45,000 outright.
Against this method Deist set the mathematical turn in economics, which he dated to Keynes in the 1930s and which he said treated economics like physics and math, building models from spreadsheets and historical data in order to predict the future. He cited two failures: Paul Samuelson’s prediction that the Soviet Union would be a more productive economy than the United States, and the failure of Alan Greenspan and others to foresee the housing crisis of 2008. Deist also noted that the Samuelson textbook went through about 12 editions and made its author wealthy. Zadek, for his part, described his own undergraduate encounter with that textbook as boring and said he was turned off economics until he discovered Austrian economics later in life. In the inflation episode, Deist placed the same shift in a political context, saying that economists beginning around the 1930s started seeing themselves as advisors to politicians and central planners, a development he traced to the Keynesian revolution and the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which created the field of macroeconomics Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
Prices as the product of human action
Carden’s contribution to the concept is the claim that prices are the products of human action but not of human design, a phrase he attributed to Adam Ferguson, a contemporary of Adam Smith. Prices, on this account, are unintended consequences of people pursuing their own interests, not decisions made by gas station owners according to how greedy they felt when they woke up Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022). Carden called prices indispensable guides that tell us whether we are stewarding our resources well or wastefully, and told his students that price is informative rather than decisive; he allowed that there are things people would pay him a great deal to do that he would not do, such as commit murder.
Zadek supplied the show’s most expansive statement of the same idea, arguing that price is the purest and most ultimate truth when it results from a free market, and the most small-d democratic way for every participant in a market society, from the spender on the tightest budget to the billionaire, to take part. He described the vote exercised hundreds of times a day in buying and selling as the most important and most personal vote. On greed, Zadek argued that no one gets to set a price unilaterally: price is what a producer hopes for, and the price is zero unless somebody is willing to pay it. When buyer and seller meet, each having refused to move a penny, both get what they want and both are better off; Zadek called it an absolute tie and asked which party was more greedy. Carden’s example of the choice between two people who want to buy an hour of his time made the same point concretely: the answer is the one who will pay the most, modified by non-economic considerations such as hazard.
Coordination and its distortions
The concept does work in the show’s arguments against intervention. The price theory episode announces that government interventions such as rent control, minimum wage laws and price gouging laws distort the signals prices carry, producing waste, shortages and unintended social consequences Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022). Zadek described price gouging regulation as a profound misunderstanding that enjoys public support but is destructive to the very public the statutes try to protect. The Austrian economics episode announces that the principles at issue are applied there to the 2008 housing crisis, COVID-19 stimulus packages, wealth creation and non-interventionist foreign policy Austrian Economics Triumphs (2021). The inflation episode ties the same intellectual history to institutions, with Deist noting that the Constitution gives the federal government the ability to coin money but not to print it, that politicians began ignoring the Constitution almost immediately, that it took until 1913 to get the Fed after many battles over a national bank, and that Andrew Jackson vetoed one such bank out of existence in the early 1840s Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
Across episodes: no development
Three episodes touch the topic — Austrian Economics Triumphs (2021) in 2021, Art Carden on Price Theory & Its Discontents (2022) in 2022, and Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022) later in 2022 — and the excerpts show no development in the treatment: Deist supplies the methodological definition of human action as the deductive starting point of a social science, Carden supplies the account of prices as its unintended product, and Deist’s later remarks restate the 1930s perversion of economics as a shift toward advising central planners without revising the earlier account.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when or where the term “human action” was coined, nor do they name the treatise with which it is conventionally associated. They do not record any disagreement among the guests about the concept’s meaning or scope, and they do not present a definition offered by Zadek himself beyond his framing of price as truth. Where an excerpt ends mid-sentence or mid-exchange, the source stops there.