This is coming from a guy who believed Keynes to the day he died.
This has the potential for being an interesting discussion if you can dig up what Milton thought was the proper evidence for his case against?
Huh? He was an early advocate of Keynesian countercyclical policy, but it was by no means a lifelong belief. The quantity theory of money was challenged by Keynes, for cryin’ out loud!
In the Free to Choose documentary, Milton Friedman says that Keynes was one of the greatest economists.
So?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
You have to admit such ideas are fun, creative, and hit upon ideas worth considering. Frankly, I’d like to know what he meant by “greatest” and the fuller context.
here is the clip (the whole thing is worth watching, but he talks about Keynes in the last 2 minutes):
Thanks!
Friedman = Keynes on money
“The Hayek-Mises explanation of the business cycle is contradicted by the evidence. It is, I believe, false.” – Milton Friedman
Do you think you’re going to prove the ABCT is not scientific by quoting Friedman, here of all places? Please, get a grip.
Why would Friedman have opposed the view if the evidence was available?
He had just as much incentive to believe the ABCT, given his laissez-faire ideology. Frankly, when it comes to confirmation bias, the Austrians are guiltier than most.
This has the potential for being an interesting discussion if you can dig up what Milton thought was the proper evidence for his case against?
Why would Friedman have opposed the view if the evidence was available?
He had just as much incentive to believe the ABCT, given his laissez-faire ideology. Frankly, when it comes to confirmation bias, the Austrians are guiltier than most.
Your first contention is an appeal to authority. Friedman would first have to dislodge Mises’s epistemological arguments to show “evidence” could contradict an economic theorem; he never did. He utterly misunderstood the Austrian methodology and his own has been hacked to pieces by Austrian and non-Austrian anti-positivists alike (Hollis and Nell’s Rational Economic Man, Hoppe’s Economic Science and the Austrian method etc.) Secondly, supposing he did, please refer to this evidence provided it has not already been contradicted by Austrians.
To the latter, he was married to positivism and its use in economics, so he would strenuously dislike a theory built on rationalist premises. Conversely, Austrians believe in laissez-faire too. Why would they be so eager to defend the ABCT against him, then, hm? Perhaps it’s because they genuinely think he is wrong. It’s not an ideological question but an economic one.
Much of Friedman’s philosophy is based on the one hand solving problems with more liberalism. But on the other hand, still needing something for him to advise people about. It doesn’t take long to explain a political belief or reasoning behind it, whether it is liberal, conservative, libertarian, etc., but you can get a lot of mileage out of something like monetarism and positivist economics. With charts that most don’t understand, the necessity to collect new and more data, and the need to form new mathematical formula.
Both Friedman and Keynes seem to believed that bank runs happen for no reason; probably irrationality. And that deflation fighting is the proper role of government. They both believed that the Fed ‘let the Great Depression happen’. On the flip side, they both think that controlling the money supply and getting people take money out of the banks, too, in the aftermath of fighting a great Depression is necessary. But differ only in how this is done. But in effect both separate macro and micro spheres.
Austrian methodology overly relies upon folk psychology, as far as I’m concerned. I would like to see an Austrian economist seriously grapple with Paul and Patricia Churchland’s eliminative materialism.
Their reluctance to accept empirical, econometric studies is anti-scientific and backwards.
Ultimately, though, if Austrians are right, then empiricists should arrive at the same conclusions, only using a more roundabout, data-gathering process.
Hehe. That looks like troll bait.
It doesn’t have to grapple with any theory of psychology. Economics is a branch of praxeology.
Ultimately, though, if Austrians are right, then empiricists should arrive at the same conclusions, only using a more roundabout, data-gathering process.
I guess David Friedman and Bryan Caplan are examples of such.
Praxeology, as “the study of human action,” has serious presuppositions–namely, folk psychology! Just consider Mises’s “methodological dualism,” for instance.
Yes. All of us found satisfactory reasons to adopt anarcho-capitalism. However, Friedman and Caplan definitely don’t agree with all of the conclusions (e.g., they actually discuss market failture, aggregate demand, etc.)
Their process for arriving at the truth is so roundabout it will take them both a while longer to fully arrive :-p
I can’t think of a good response to this.
not because I find it packed with truth and convincing. but because it reads like unconnected half thoughts. What are you trying to say? can you find different words to say it?