First of all, the reader is dripping with insipid condescension. He reads the whole thing in this pedantic sing-song voice that makes me want to puke. I’ve transcribed the last half or so below and added comments.
The problem with rationalism is that it makes the search for truth a game without rules. Rationalists are free to theorize anything they want, without such irritating constrictions as facts, statistics, data, history, or experimental confirmation.
Statisticians are free to conclude from data anything they want. Empiricism is effective in the natural sciences only insofar as the scientist is able to control the experiment, the elements of the experiment are simple and few, and the correlations that result are enormous and cannot be easily explained in any other way. Statistical economics fails on all three counts. Statistical treatments of natural science in which these criteria are not met also fail (like climate modelling).
Their only guide is logic. But this is no different from what religions do when they assert the logical existence of God, or Buddha, or Mohammed, or Gaia.
The ontological “proof” of god was refuted by clerical contemporaries of St. Anselm, because it is obviously fallacious. I have yet to hear a single even somewhat convincing refutation of the actual principles of Austrian economics: only methodological moaning like this guy provides.
Theories ungrounded in facts and data are easily spun into any belief a person wants.
So are statistics.
Starting assumptions and trains of logic may contain inaccuracies so small as to be undetectable, yet will yield entirely different conclusions.
So may statistics.
In fact, if we accepted all the tenets of the Austrian School, we would have a second reason why it fails to qualify as science. To be a science, a school must produce theories that are falsifiable: that is, verifiable. If a theories correctness or falseness can’t be verified, then it is not science. Perhaps it’s religion, or metaphysics, or an unsupported claim.
He does not back up his criteria for qualifying as a science here. He merely asserts. And he wants to lecture Austrians about unsupported claims…
Austrian economists make claims about the market such as “markets know better than governments”, but then deny us the tools for verifying those claims, such as statistics.
Again statistics can verify anything the verifier wants to or doesn’t want to.
One might ask, “How do they know?”
One might read Hayek, and find out.
Austrians claim to know these things by logic. But although their literature frequently invokes a priori knowledge, this term appears to be misused. Humans are not born knowing that 2 + 2 = 4. It is something they must learn from their environment, namely school. Forging this learned knowledge from axioms comes later, and then through a process of trial and error. So in this sense, a priori knowledge doesn’t even exist, unless one refers to a very basic level of knowledge capability, such as the physical construction of the human brain, or animal instincts.
He conflates a priori with inborn knowledge.
Austrians may be using the term “a priori” to mean logical proofs or axioms, such as “If A = B and B = C, then A = C.” But if Austrians were creating economic axioms that were true by logical force, then the Austrian School would become world famous overnight, whether mainstream economists liked it or not.
That presumes a respect for logic.
In truth, Austrian journals are not filled with these kinds of axioms. Their arguments are really no more than theories that are guided or tested by logical proofs.
Because the axioms and first deductions have already been discovered. Also he conflates axiom with deduction.
Again, that’s no different from what religions do. The fact that we have thousands of different religions in this world is remarkable evidence of the fallibility of this method.
The vast preponderance of religious growth has had NOTHING to do with rationalist or deductive arguments. In trying to demonstrate the fallibility of the deductive method, he himself demonstrates the fallibility of his own data-worshipping method by lamely inferring from a single statistic a conclusion that simply does not follow.
Earlier, he tried to characterize the Austrian method as a “relic” as opposed to the scientific method of mainstream economics. Like all positivist social scientists, he borrows the prestige of natural science with NO justification. YES, the natural sciences which met the criteria I outlined above achieved more success with inductive methods than with the deductive methods of the past. But the social sciences have shared not ONE whit of that success with inductive methods. In fact, every single one of the economic laws that are considered uncontroversial by even mainstream economists were discovered by the causal-realist approach of pre-positivist economics. There is not a single non-contentious economic law derived from statistics, even among the mainstreamers. Now THAT is a sign of failure.
