jsalvatier comments on Awful Austrians - Less Wrong
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I don't have the time to post a defense of the Austrians, but I encourage anyone who is really interested in the subject to read this comment thread: http://commentlog.org/bid/4408/Feynman-Rothbard-and-the-Science-of-Economics
This thread contains the best explanation I've seen of the Austrian position, and it actually makes a lot of sense. In economics, there is simply not enough variables to do a controlled experiment. So you have to use deduction and reason in order to understand events. Insisting on using Popperian falsifiability where such a procedure is not possible, creates the well known keys and lamp post fallacy.
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").
Here are the links to the official and well typeset PDF versions of two of the above Caplan's articles: