05-31-2016, 08:59 AM
(05-30-2016, 08:31 PM)Galen Wrote:(05-30-2016, 08:08 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(05-30-2016, 06:07 AM)Galen Wrote:(05-30-2016, 05:09 AM)taramarie Wrote: Thank you. I will check him out tomorrow after work. Off to bed after a double shift. I agree with him already. I will seek many sources. Not just what science only currently knows.
Just remember that psychology, in particular, has trouble with replicating results. The field of economics has the same problems which is why the Austrian economists choose the methods of Mises and Rothbard. They get better results that everyone else but they still are doing research, which is the main reason why the Mises Institute exists.
The Austrian school leaves its "self-evident truths" about economics beyond analysis or criticism. In that they are as flawed as Marxists.
No they don't. It is a matter of deduction from what is known of human nature and a study of history. You just don't like the answers that they come up with. If you actually read Economic Calculation in a Socialist Commonwealth and perhaps some computer science texts then you might know that Mises was on to something. Given how poorly economic intervention has worked historically then it seems clear that the Austrian economists know more about what is going on then mainstream economists.
When one gets wrong results with a theoretical model, then most likely something is wrong with the theoretical model. Maybe the self-evident truths aren't so true. Maybe there is a logical gap in the thought.
Hayek is right about the boom-and-bust cycle to some extent: that the speculative boom usually gets the aid of low interest rates, and that as the speculative boom gets an advantage over all other parts of the economy it quickly goes to diminishing returns on investment and finally oversaturation of investment that wastes the investment. The panic at the end of the boom is not the disaster; it is simply the realization that investment in the speculative boom had become waste. I can use it to explain the real estate bubbles of the 1920s and the Double-Zero decade.
As with most pragmatists I pick and choose between Keynesian economics and the Chicago school. Keynes works as well as anything not a planned economy (the horror! Soviet economics may have been good for getting rapid growth in basic industry but inept at anything else) in a depression, and Friedman gives some idea of how to constrain the money supply without a gold standard. Prosperity is not gold reserves; it is the result of making or doing stuff that the rest of the world wants. The gold supply is not overshooting population growth or technological innovation. Steel, aluminum, copper, and zinc matter far more than do gold.
Say what you want about the consumer society; people remain gullible and often debased, which explains "collectibles" and strip clubs. But can anyone think of a viable alternative? A command society? A plantation order? Kleptocracy? Fascism or National Socialism? A nation as one giant monastery/convent?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.