75 sats \ 7 replies \ @SimpleStacker 13 Nov \ parent \ on: Wanted: Critics of Austrian Economics econ
See my post above. I always got the sense that it's not that mainstream economists disagree with Austrian ideas, it's that Austrians refuse to engage using the tools of modern, mainstream economists.
To put it another way, it seems more like a methodological gap than an ideological one.
I could be wrong
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The criticism is fair. Some economists give too much credence to our models and our data. But I'd say that most mainstream economists would agree that we're not a hard science, and even our best models and best data analyses are suggestive at best. But they're still useful tools, and better to have them than to not have them. You just have to interpret them holistically along with other methods, which would include experience, intuition, and dialectic and historical reasoning.
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You're touching on a big important difference between Austrians and the mainstream that is also a point of commonality.
Mainstream economists give the impression of extreme confidence in their tools, while Austrians are openly critical of those tools.
The truth, as you say, is that most economists are at least intellectually aware of the deficiencies in our tool kit.
I think this helps Austrians to not get seduced by the fancy methodologies, but it also makes it very difficult to communicate across the divide.
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Austrians object to using mathematical tools on several points. One being that mathematics aggregates things that should not really be aggregated. Another being that mathematics and charts do not represent what actual humans use for making decisions. A third is that mathematical results do not always reflect reality very closely. What the Austrians call praxeology and callitics differ on many of those points from the mainstream, which, by-and-large is still based somewhat on Kenysianism.
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Mathematics does not aggregate. Some mathematical methods aggregate.
The other points are all about omitting key elements from their analysis, which can just as easily be done with verbal logic.
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That was the point, the methods aggregate where aggregation erases the differences that are important.
Yes, verbal logic makes some of the same mistakes but are more readily found.
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The important point, though, is that there are appropriate mathematical approaches that don't make any more errors than verbal logic. Sometimes it's easier to catch a mathematical error, because there are such well-defined rules about what can be done with the notation.
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