Wikipedia puts him as a Chicago-style economist, for whatever that’s worth:
He himself calls himself a Chicagoite.
Chicago School.
It’s a mistake to confuse economic schools of thought with political positions.
What is quoted above is an odd way of putting it, given that the Chicago school isn’t Austrian. Also a bit odd given that neither Mises nor Hayek was an anarchist.
I thought so called “economic thought” had quite close ties to political theory…as in “political economy”
I must have been dreaming…
More people need to be aware of this point.
Neither Newton nor Einstein believed in quantum physics.
So? Would you use either to promote quantum physics? Would that be honest?
neither was your father; glad you are though [:P]
What do you mean Einstein did not believe in it?
Actually I would, but I agree that to say, “Mises was an anarchist so you should be too” would be dishonest. However, saying, “Mises argued that the right of self-determination should be extended down to the individual if ever feasible, which implies something no different than advocating voluntarism ‘if ever feasible’,” is not dishonest. It all depends on how specific on is. I’m sure some people do it wrong, but I don’t see this as widespread. If you mean why is it called Ludwig von Mises Institute if it really promotes the Rothbardian tradition as far as social thought, then I agree with you - that I would like an explanation for.
To be precise, he rejected some of the claims of quantum mechanics, although he did contribute to its discovery.
roll the clock back a little through to a recent period in world history and consider whether you would have been perplexed to find a a Bohm-Bawerk institute staffed by Mises and fellow Misesians? or not ? [;)]
To be more precise, Einstein’s main quip was with the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which he rejected. Strangely enough this interpretation is philosophically a realist position, one I think many Misesians would sympathise with, given Austrian and especially Mises’ thoughts on epistemology.
As far as physics goes though, it makes no difference exactly which intepretation you pick that hasn’t been ruled out by Bell’s inequality experiments, like many of the hidden variable theories. I think the Copenhagen interpretation is mainstream because it makes the least assumptions, following Bohr’s dictum:
“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.”
I guess it kind of satisfies Occam’s razor too.
It goes without saying that Erwin Schrodinger and Louis de Broglie had certain reservations about Quantum Mechanics and especially about the Copenhagen interpretation, though they too contributed greatly to the development of QM and arguably far more than Einstein, who mainly provided the initial spark with his excellent paper on the photoelectric effect.
Strictly Max Planck was the father of Quantum Theory, with his paper on blackbody radiation in 1900, though could never really even accept the primitive Bohr-Einstein stuff, never mind the Matrix Mechanics and Wave Mechanics developed independently by Heisenberg and Schrodinger respectively. Interestingly the Schrodinger wave version of single particle non-relativistic QM with Max Born’s probabillity interpretation, is what is the basic material taught to undergraduates everywhere today; though my thesis advisor likes to call it Mickey mouse Quantum Mechanics[:D]
It certainly is compared to 2nd quantization…
Thus he did not reject any actual theory. He disagreed with an interpretation, expecting some hidden variables to eventually restore determinism. That issue was unsettled at the time. So it was nothing unreasonable.
The so called Copenhagen interpretation of QM is not physics, it’s pseudo-philosophy. And Schroedinger for instance didn’t buy it.
Right… by the same token none of the interpretations of QM are physics but pseudo-philosophy as you assert. Indeed Schrodinger himself had to backtrack from his own early interpreatations and misgivings about the wavefunction in his formulation, since he originally interpreted it as a “physical” wave, though he was mathematically astute to derive its equivalence to Heisenberg’s formulation a year later, and abandoned a lot of these erroneous views after Hendrik Lorentz talked some sense into him.
Max Born, is the one that really helped to realise the proper meaning of the results of QM, whereby the relation to observables with the wavefunction is that the wavefunction’s modulus squared, therefore its intensity; is the expected probabillity distribution of the particles with that wavefunction. As I’m sure you’ll know this has been well tested empirically and is impressively accurate in its predictions of the actual distribution(unlike almost all of mainstream economics).
Moreover, I’d say the Copenhagen interpretation is really just an outgrowth of Born’s work stating simply that we cannot know any more than the wavefunction until we actually detect particles, after which coherence is lost. I’m not sure why it distresses you, I deem it sensible myself since it makes the least(zero) unobservable extra assumptions about reality compared with all other interpretations. Philosophically it is realist too, which is refreshing given a lot of the nonsense in contemporary philosophy.
Then again, it makes no difference which one you “believe”, since all interpretations that have not been refuted since they do not match Bell’s inequality don’t change the fundamental physical results.