Austrian economists often employ the pedagogy called “Crusoe economics” to illustrate the foundational principles of economic theory. Robinson Crusoe is alone on an island. He has nothing but his own body at his disposal, and he needs to find food and construct a shelter to survive. So what does he do?
He starts punching trees, of course!
Okay, Robinson Crusoe doesn’t punch trees — that would be a recipe for bloody knuckles and wasted time. But in the game Minecraft, in which players are plopped into a world in a very Crusoean situation, punching trees is how they obtain the initial materials they need to start constructing a shelter and tools.
But while Minecraft may not accurately illustrate real-world physics and biology, it does illustrate many (not all) of the foundational principles of economics. Before we can consume, we have to mix our labor with nature. In the world of Minecraft, this is done by punching trees to obtain wood. Wood, then, serves as a factor of production; throw a few blocks of wood together, and you get a crafting table — a higher-order production good — which allows you to craft lower-order goods like shovels, swords, and pickaxes.
Murray Rothbard wasn’t writing about crafting tables and pickaxes in Man, Economy, and State. He was writing about berry picking and fishing poles. But the principles are apparent in both worlds. “To acquire fish,” Rothbard writes, Robinson Crusoe “must have a pole or net, to acquire shelter he must have logs of wood … and an axe to cut the wood.”
Fish and shelter are among the basic consumer goods one might seek in Minecraft, and the player has to spend labor (well, virtual labor) to craft production goods like the fishing pole or the wood blocks and doors for the shelter — and an axe is certainly handy for cutting down future production time for players who make the initial investment in crafting one.
