Yes I know of his name-change. Maybe he’ll wander into this thread? 
He might do.
He’s a troll.
Oh OK; well that settles it then. For all third parties please take note of this and discount any weight you might otherwise put on my posts accordingly.
I don’t think that’s quite fair. I don’t know about Giles political views (a Hayekian social democrat seems rather unlikely, but I suppose there’s stranger..), but he doesn’t seem opposed to Austrian economics. Rather, he is a supporter of the Boettke wing of the Austrian school, rather than the Rothbardian wing.
There’s a lot of heterogeneity in the “Austrian school”, so much so that labels can be really deceptive. I didn’t fully realise the differences until my own views drifted quite a bit from the Rothbard/ LvMI approach and Austrian economics in general. Regarding my (trollish) views, let me try and make myself clear. To be somewhat original, there is good economics and bad economics, the former helps us understand the real world and social phenomena, the latter doesn’t and often obfuscates the truth. Let me also say I don’t think that there is any single way to do economic research, different tools are suited to different phenomena and we can’t tell a priori which tools will be best suited for the task. Austrian economics is just one approach that has its own comparative advantages, but I don’t think it’s the only valid approach, nor do I think that it’s as opposed to other approaches as a lot of people here seem to think it is.
Let me give a brief example, experimental economics and others have shown that under certain conditions (repeated interactions, situations where mistakes are costly) the standard supply and demand model fits fairly well. Within a few iterations the actors within a “market” will converge on the equilibrium solution.
So, perhaps for these cases the standard mathematical models will do a fairly job good of explaining what goes on “out there”. For others, they need to be modified, even if this involves developing more complicated mathematical tools (or relying on verbal reasoning). The fact is, we can’t tell a priori what tools we should use, and humans can be very inventive with math. Various insights of behavioural economics have been formally modelled and the result is a more complete depiction of real actors in the real world. Moreover, as Nicolai Foss points out in his paper, evolutionary game theory and other game theoretic tools have allowed for the representation of of various Austrian (Hayekian) features of the economy such as emergent order. And these tools have been used in applied work by self described Austrian such as Leeson.
Most mainstream economists say that math is just the language of economics, I think this is true to an extent and it captures an important insight. I’ll grant that sometimes the methodology drives the research, and this is unfortunate, but if Austrians can develop the mathematical tools (as some have done) to model their insights, all the better for them, and it’ll pay off in the long term.
As for my political views, well, who knows? I certainly don’t. Kind of keen on the whole democracy business though.
I think that Boetkke (and the like) and the traditional Austrians (Mises, Hayek, Bohm-Bawerk) ask different questions and investigate different phenomena, but employ the same general premises. The former studies observable phenomena dealing with organizations and institutions. They are essentially institutional economists. The latter studied markets, that is, broad/objective and relatively unobservable phenomena. They were interested in capital, value, monetary theory (ect) and how human actions (praxeology) effects market forces. I think Boettke takes praxeology and focuses on other social institutions, which are intrinsically different in nature. I would say that Boetkke is not a theoretician; he’s into applied political economy (which resembles sociology more than anything else really).
Wait, what? Hayek didn’t study observable phenomena dealing with organizations and institutions? Hayek didn’t work in the economics department at Chicago, he was in the Committee on Social Thought, furthermore, what about “The Fatal Conceit”, “Constitution of Liberty” and “Law, Legislation of Liberty”? Even Mises wrote “Socialism” and other works on political economy.
I’m not really sure it what sense it’s sociology, I’d grant that it’s interdisciplinary, but it borders on legal and political theory, not sociology (not that there aren’t Austrian scholars who do work on the border of sociology and economics, see Storr and the blog "The Sociological Imagination). And why shouldn’t Austrians do political economy? In terms of comparative advantage, I’d say that’s exactly where their advantages lie.
As for Boettke and all not being theoreticians, I’m sure they would agree. In fact, I’ve heard many commentaters on the Coordination Problem blog explicitly stating that to be the case. But using the usual definition of theoreticians very few Austrians are (even the LvMI folk) and to the extent that there are, there are still too many and I’ve not seen all too many breakthroughs from them.
The mainstream basically considers the controversies of the 20s and 30s to be settled, and some Austrians (though I wouldn’t really call them Austrians) believe that the mainstream has absorbed a significant amount of Austrian insights. So the theoretical framework is essentially established and now economists want to actually use what they’ve learned.
If you really deny that a lot of Austrian economics has been incorporated into the mainstream, I’m not sure what to say. Hayek has had huge influences on experimental economics, NIE, economics of information, public choice and ACE. Game theory, which makes up most of modern day micro, was initially developed by Oskar Morgenstern, an Austrian economist.