Meta Econ Takeover Day18

Undisciplined

I'd say you pretty well stated it.

There are still open questions in the Austrian tradition and scholars making headway on them, but a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Also, as you said, the very nature of Austrian Economics excludes precise predictions. That's actually where empirical work enters the picture

We can look at history and draw quantitative conclusions (this is what I do, btw) to questions where theory only gives directional answers. We can then make predictions based on those conclusions, but the caveat is always "If the prior relationship holds..."

My view is that there's a hierarchy of methodological approaches: 
1) Preferably, you can answer the question with the Austrian deductive approach that makes very minimal assumptions about people's preferences.
2) If not, see if it can be answered using modern methods from abstract algebra and set theory, which might require some more assumptions about preferences, but aren't very restrictive.
3) Create an experiment that closely resembles the question and see what people do.
4) Finally, if all else fails, look at real world data and use econometrics to create natural experiments and see what people do.