All of devinfinbarr's Comments + Replies

That is a reasonable criticism of mainstream economics. I am skeptical that it has anything to do with Austrian economics. Probably someone sat down with an unshakable belief that the Austrian economics meant something and extracted this claim. I don't see why I should care about the correct attribution of this complaint. The Austrians are so bad at communicating that this interpretation has not helped me extract anything else from them. If other people can extract other useful claims from the Austrians, they should isolate and promote those claims.

I'm not looking for Popperian falsifiability. I'm looking for Bayesian inferential updating. If the argument is that no evidence of any form could ever change the Austrian's probability estimate of a certain theory, I charge the Austrian is either being overconfident or violating the conservation of expected evidence. Even extremely messy evidence can still be evidence. In economics, messy evidence that is messy in a stable way can be very good evidence. For instance, Mises explains that we can never find examples of irrationality, because preferences can never be frozen in time. So the preference reversal involved in the Allais Paradox is perfectly rational. But even if it's a rational preference change, those constant changes are stable over time. If you ask a person which gambles they prefer a second time, they'll give the same answers, and so on. By saying "it's not a controlled experiment so it doesn't count," the Austrian misses out on a key insight about how people can be milked. The Austrian tells us that this person wants to be milked!

I'd point out a couple problems here: Firstly, "controlled experiments" is simply an ideal which is no more achieved in the physical sciences than in the social ones. The various experimental methods employed by scientists differ only in the degree to which they're uncontrolled. Popperian falsifiability has been criticized in all scientific contexts for these reasons. I believe that Quine's discussions of this issue are the best-known... suffice to say, the Austrians need to come up with a better reason for dismissing the scientific method as applied to economics versus the scientific method as applied to other disciplines - but alas, this would probably require them to wade into the kind of messy empirical issues which they seem to abhor. Secondly, even if scientific knowledge of economic phenomena could be rejected for the above reasons, the fact is that Austrian economists still routinely make empirical predictions based on praxeological reasoning which seem incredibly difficult to support based on that reasoning alone. See the OP's part about Mises on price controls - no purely praxeological account can determine that price controls will cause non-price rationing. So the criticism is that Austrians do not actually practice what they preach, largely because if they did so they would have very little to say about the real world.