I can give Cliff's of the earlier book:

As the state has gained strength and taken over the function of violence, violence has fallen dramatically. It isn't a question of theory or guesswork or the way things ought be. There is data.

Will do. Thanks.

A lot of it is irrelevant to this thread, and might also require at least some background knowledge about Austrian and neoclassical economics to make sense of, but I think this critique of Austrian economics by GMU economist Bryan Caplan is interesting. He touches on at least a few topics mentioned here.

This might not be entirely fair but I've always thought there's an entertaining parallel between the off-the-beaten-path enthusiasm of Mises/Rothbard fans and that of Marx fans. My biggest complaint has always just been about the rejection of empiricism. Praxaeology is like some kind of rationalist throwback approach to knowledge.

Saying they reject empiricism isn't quite true.

https://mises.org/wire/do-austrians-...rical-evidence


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OK. I think this is a rather bad way of going about things:

I think Mises' rejection of empirical validation is misguided, and amounts to a rejection of empiricism. Or perhaps you would prefer to say it's a rejection of inductive reasoning and methods. I associate inductive reasoning and methods very closely with "empiricism". The fact that Mises has to allow for a minimum of induction (or perhaps he would have preferred to think of it as abduction) in order to justify his primary axiom doesn't really refute the point, which is about methods. If anything, I would suggest that the fact he must resort to induction illustrates the basic flaw in the methodology.

The exclusive reliance on deductive reasoning is why I compared praxeology to philosophical rationalism, which is also historically taken as being in opposition to empiricism.

I reject EMPIRICISM, but not EMPIRICAL methodo!ogies.

I think I can imagine why Christians with an interest in philosophy would be wary of empiricism, at least insofar as they want to avoid reaching conclusions that contradict matters of faith. I'll leave that aside as probably too far afield for this conversation, though.

But it does let me circle back to something Caplan said about economics which is important to me:

This is basically the abductive argument for empiricism in general -- the progress of human understanding about the world seems far more rapid when knowledge is pursued empirically. That's true for economics but even more so for science in general. Basically my view is that the results matter as far as picking a philosophical paradigm.

I agree that most progress is achieved through empirical means. But EMPIRICISM is a strong claim that ALL knowledge is empirically based. Which, ironically, undercuts the scientific method itself. Negative numbers don't "exist" in the physical world, but they are essential for math, which is essential for the scientific method. I can show you three app!es, but I can't show you NEGATIVE three app!es.

Play time over for now.

Might post something after 21:00 PST.

Gotcha. I was being too sloppy with my terms. I'm not really concerned about whether or not all knowledge is strictly derived from experience; I would allow for some non-empirical knowledge in some domains at least.

I think the problem with praxeology is that it rejects empirical falsification/validation entirely, and tries to turn economics into a branch of logic. Whereas I think it's far more useful to develop economics as an empirical science. I used "empiricism" as a short-hand but hopefully my previous post to jibs clarifies things a bit.

You clearly don't understand. If theory and reality disagree, it is reality that has it wrong!

Heh. I mean I think the Rothbard quote cited in Jibs' article gets at a real difficulty at least:

His statement is wrong: it doesn't "simply" mean that other forces were involved, but it does mean that it's possible there were confounding variables. Obviously that's a real problem. But it's kind of like, upon encountering the fact that empirical science is hard, instead of accepting the difficulty and consequent limitations to the field he instead chooses to pretend that the problem doesn't exist. I think that's clearly the wrong choice, but the difficulty is real.

I know I'm not telling you anything here you don't already agree with, I'm just riffing off your post. It reminded me of a very different reaction to the same problem, from mathematician George Polya and cited in Howard Becker's book Evidence:

I think I can relate to why someone like Rothbard would be frustrated at the prospect of having to make this admission, or why he would prefer to think that economics can yield the "safe, final, and beyond controversy" conclusions of logic.

To me, the problem isn't that his theories describe a simplified world. Physicists do this all the time. We have equations about elastic collisions even though, to date, there have been no actual elastic collisions in the universe. He is correct that you cannot point at a bowl of oobleck and say that the equations covering Newtonian liquids are wrong.

What he did was present a theory of how rational agents with no information gaps, no time preference, (and, and, and) would behave. Nothing wrong with doing such a thing.

However, it is odd to then think that oobleck humans would ever even remotely follow the equations, and/or that they should, or that you can design something useful without taking into account the differences between your idealized almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-humans and humans.



I can't. It is a mindset entirely alien to me.

I do appreciate the work he and Mises did. Much like strict behaviorists in psychology, they did end up moving the field off of some unproductive and silly things.

(Obv just riffing off of what you wrote)

This is such a BS thing to say. Because people that aren't christians are so eager to prove their beliefs wrong? Come on man, this is just lazy. If it were true that most people in general actually wanted to dig into their beliefs even if the evidence disproved them, there would be no one on the political left.

I think you are grossly over stating the position of empirical evidence in the Austrian school.

In any case I shifted my position more towards the Austrian school because of the evidence. Business cycle theory imo is by far the best explanation of the boom bust we see. Human action as a foundation for understanding the free market seems to be the most logical position.

I am not an economist, nor do I care to be. But I do care about the economy and in order to play the "game" one needs to figure out how things work. I've never seen any better explanations or descriptions of how the economy works than the Austrians. Things like keynesian clearly should have been dropped a long time ago. But it won't be because it supports large government.

I will have to think about this some more. As I said, I lean towards the Austrians because they have the best explanations and seem to be the only ones that have real predictive power. Central planning doesn't work. It never has. Big government interventions don't work. They never have. So what are we left with?

I assume that you will be surprised to learn that every school of economic thought includes business cycles.

You might (I am not sure) also be surprised that there was literally nothing that was stopping the free market from creating most of the economic-related things that government currently does.

Even now, if you wish and have sufficient capital, you can create a privately funded education system. You can also build a privately funded road network if you'd like. You can even build a new privately funded internet! Maybe a library system, if you want to start small!* Perhaps a local business interests you; in which case you could start your own local fire department! All easy games to win since government-funded programs are inefficient and never work! You will definitely make tons of profit competing against such an incompetent competitor!!! Better act now before the other capitalists get on board!

*I suggest calling it a "book store."

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that only Christians were subject to motivated reasoning, or even that Christians always are. I was mostly just reflecting on my own experience as a Christian, and my attempts to make sense of what it meant to me to believe. I think there are a lot of Christian beliefs that require very active efforts to rationalize. That's not unique to Christianity, or even to religion. Political beliefs are often not much different, for example. The explanations for why are pretty interesting, I think. In any case, I can see that what I wrote comes across as more insulting than I really intended.

I was willing to consider this possibility, but the link you provided seems to confirm all of my prior beliefs on the subject. So I'm not sure what you mean. I don't think Mises and Rothbard could be any clearer on the subject. And the author of the page seems to agree:

The rest of the argument is just supposed to be a justification for the rejection of empirical evidence, and that justification is that supposedly empirical evidence simply cannot provide an answer (as in the quote I lifted from Rothbard). I don't believe that I'm overstating my disagreement on these points, or misrepresenting Mises and Rothbard's views.

According to the critique from Caplan that I linked, at least some of the Austrian Business Cycle theory is fully mainstream. He criticizes other part of it. I don't have any particular opinion about that theory, but it seems to me that you can probably keep the valuable insights from Austrian economics without having to also hold onto the underlying philosophy or meta-economics.

I think it's a useful oversimplification which has been elevated into a philosophical principle, despite the fact that it's clearly flawed. Oversimplifying human behavior (BTM's homo economicus) in order to build models is fine, and I think it has yielded some real insights. For example I think an Austrian first formulated some basic ideas about marginal utility which are now completely mainstream. The problem occurs when Austrians pretend that the oversimplified model is real, to the exclusion of other, better, models and methods.

I'm not aware of any evidence which could support the claim that Austrian economic theories have better predictive power than their mainstream counterparts.

I agree that "central planning" doesn't work, assuming you're referring to something like Soviet style state capitalism, but it doesn't seem particularly relevant to my complaints with Austrian economics. The blanket assertion that "big government interventions don't work" seems more like an article of faith to me than a conclusion supported by any real depth of analysis, particularly when you're trying to stretch the argument far enough to suggest the elimination of modern states.

Your last question, I think, gets back to part of the discussion about ACism and states from the other thread. We talked through some of the morality, but we dropped the part of the conversation that was about whether a strictly voluntaristic society was even possible. The underlying political philosophy there is also distinct from the criticism of praxeology, but it seems to me that you can't actually offer much in the way of a realistic alternative, re: "what are we left with?" There my problems are less about the underlying economic theory, and more about anthropology. Although the economic philosophy I'm objecting to involves making unwarranted assumptions about human nature, so it all ties together.

Sorry for the multiple posts, but "predictive power" requires empirical testing.

I believe we're on the same page now. Or, as we used to say in the '70s, we are "on the same wavelength."

I have a rule.

Unless you're obviously good, then you're probably bad. If I have to question whether you're good, then you're probably bad. And that's OK too.

P.s. the rule implies, rightfully, that very few are good.
If all were good, then none would be good.
If many were good, then goodness would be cheap.

This is the only way it can be.

Sounds like an old ajmarjarine post!

:Grunch:

Sally is either being dishonest or she's just incredibly stupid. Nothing she's saying about Nazism - from a historical or ideological perspective - makes any sense. However, if genuinely believes what she's saying she could - theoretically at least - still be a good person. She'd be good but also brain dead.

However, I think it's far more likely she's just being dishonest and is obviously a bad person.

Sally is basically in the same camp as holocaust denial.

Same camp as the communists and socialist right?

I'd say Sally is an ignorant and dangerous person. She is not a good person, as she does not have to be ignorant. A person is responsible for their beliefs. If they have no way of verifying their beliefs, they should admit it and adjust them accordingly.

Nazism was not good for "the German people", Nazism was about putting Nazis in power at the expense of everyone else, and in particular the groups it sought to destroy. Nazism seized power in Germany by forcing parliament at gunpoint. They then jailed political dissidents, destroyed an already halted economy with a lot of pointless government spending, led the country into war and a subsequent famine and poverty that killed even more Germans than the war.

It is one of the most disastrous and incompetent political movements in European history.