Talk:Human Action

Why "Disputed POV" category?
What is the dispute over non-neutral POV? (i.e.   )

Would the user(s) that submitted the npov categorization please provide an explanation here. I would like to clean up the article so it could be considered neutral.

J_Tom_Moon_79 (talk) 23:19, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

The language of the opening salvo was highly non-neutral POV although I am uncertain after another quick read of how to correct it. I made a tiny change that had bothered me about the balance but other than that I have not made any additions. I may want to read the piece by von Mises again, but I am not even sure if the content of his work is the issue here... It is simply its portrayal in the summary format suggests aspects of his work in general that are not appropriately characterized... I will be back with more at a later time, but I do not have time at the moment to work on this... Stevenmitchell (talk) 03:17, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

"Comments on the book" section started by me
Somehow I was logged off while submitting. I plan to expand this page further. For a book claimed to the intellectual counterpart of Das Kapital, its page is too small. N6n (talk) 12:07, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Rose Wilder Lane's comment is here: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/against-the-stream/ Rothbard's here: http://mises.org/article.aspx?title=Human+Action Are these better references? N6n (talk) 13:40, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Redirect Failure monopoly to here?
At Talk:Natural_monopoly there is a suggestion to redirect/merge Failure monopoly to here. Any thoughts? ie, is "failure monopoly" worth mentioning in this article? (It is mentioned in Human Action.) A "failure monopoly" seems to be a monopoly where there is no hope of positive return. Thanks, ErikHaugen (talk) 19:20, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Given User:Rd232's comment at Talk:Natural_monopoly, I agree that Failure_monopoly would be better to redirect here than there? However, I do not see it worth explaining here if it is not worth explaining elsewhere, as it is reduced to nothing more than a unique phrase used in one section of the book.  At Articles for deletion/Failure monopoly, I was on the verge of conceding "delete" when it was closed.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:45, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Language of a specialised nature
I am not an economist, and so find myself completely lost when I look at the introduction to an article such as this and read:

"Widely considered Mises' magnum opus,[1] it presents the case for laissez-faire capitalism based onpraxeology, or rational investigation of human decision-making. It rejects positivism within economics. It defends an a priori epistemology and underpins praxeology with a foundation of methodological individualism and speculative laws of apodictic certainty."

I realise that there are links to many or most of the key technical terms, but the average reader does not expect to be jumping to half-a-dozen or a dozen different pages simply so they can understand the introduction.

Could someone with expertise in both economics and English please translate this into something the average reader has some hope of understanding? If necessary, mark it as being an incomplete description and include the current more complex description - but please, this text currently discourages 90%+ of the population from reading any further.

Thank you. Ambiguosity (talk) 09:31, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Khalil's comment on this article
Dr. Khalil has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

"At the end of the section "Synopsis," there is a quick mention of "von Mises critique of socialism."

I recommend adding:

Actually, the critique of socialism is the center piece of von Mises contribution to modern economics. He argued vehemently, in his book Socialism [link to Wickipedia entry], published in German 1922, on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, that socialism is impossible. There can be no economic calculation if prices are contrived. How could allocation of resources be possible if prices are not allowed to be the signal of human goals and the limited resources that are sought to satisfy such goals."

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

We believe Dr. Khalil has expertise on the topic of this article, since he has published relevant scholarly research:


 * Reference : Khalil, Elias, 2006. "Entrepreneurship and Economic Theory," MPRA Paper 501, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 18 Oct 2006.

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 16:44, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Added summary, removed issues notice, 2023-02-23
I added a summary of the book, moving most of the previous synopsis to a paragraph in the introduction. I removed the notice that the article needed additional citations, since every claim in it is either clearly summarizing the book (the source is the book), or a factual statement giving a source elsewhere; there was no original research as defined by Wikipedia policy. Thiagovscoelho (talk) 01:47, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Removed vestiges of previous synopsis, 2023-02-23
Nothing of the previous synopsis remains now, because I wanted to keep the article free of unsourced claims, since someone added the lack-of-citations notice back into it. The new intro section has claims about Mises that could be supported by a review of his book that I found. Thiagovscoelho (talk) 04:22, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Sources in summary, 2023-02-24
I thought it was excessive to cite every part of the summary from the primary source, when it is divided by chapter and the source is clearly the book chapter. But people kept adding the lack-of-citations notice, so I have linked every sentence to a web edition of the book, under the impression that people could not bear to see sentences without little blue citation squares, regardless of the clarity of the source of the claim. If you happen to think it's too much, this is why it was done this way. Thiagovscoelho (talk) 19:59, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Summary sourcing issue flag
In case you came here from the "Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page" from the issue flag about this, I think you'll be disappointed, since User:Saxones288 has not said a word in the talk page despite his repeated issue flagging. User:Saxones288 seems baffled that a book summary only cites the book in question, and although he is unreasonable, he is also persistent, and I have left his issue up, adding a custom text to it that he might remove. Thiagovscoelho (talk) 00:29, 25 February 2023 (UTC)