jsalvatier comments on Awful Austrians - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Swimmy 12 April 2009 06:06AM

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Comment author: jsalvatier 14 December 2010 09:55:11PM *  7 points [-]

This looks like a good place to post what I think is the best critique of the Austrians out there: Bryan Caplan (who is sympathetic to the Austrians) does a good job of arguing that the Austrian foundations fall into two categories 1) not different than mainstream economists 2) wrong.

It starts here Why I am not an Austrian economist, continues some back and forth between Walter Block and Hülsmann (an Austrian) and Caplan:

There's more here (links from the appendix 1). Some of these are in .doc form.

I should also point out that I do think the Austrians are more correct than mainstream economists on several issues, but I don't think these follow from their epistemology.

I will also add that this discussion highlights that LWers should be particularly good at seeing the epistemic flaws of the Austrians since they are 1) a rejection of the use of probability theory as a fundamental part of decision theory 2) a rejection of utility functions 3) abuses of language (they frequently attempt to argue "by definition").

Comment author: tkadlubo 13 May 2012 02:33:54PM 3 points [-]

Here are the links to the official and well typeset PDF versions of two of the above Caplan's articles: