Yes, I should have distinguished between early and later Hayek.
I know they would agree. That’s why I said it.
Morgenstern was not an Austrian, and Mises disapproved of game theory.
I don’t think you know very much about Austrian economics. Every time we have a conversation you seem quite perplexed. Much of AE has been absorbed by the mainstream, and much hasn’t.
The most annoying criticism I ever heard was of Mises’ economic calculation argument, where this guy says to me: “Of course socialism can calculate, it takes so many bricks to make a factory…”
Ask him yourself. He’s hayekianxyz.
Well, there you go. Hayek was a social democrat and his philosophy makes no sense. And his economics are basically inferior to Mises in all ways.
The easiest way to reply to this is ask if the heliocentrists have added anything to the study of astronomy lately. If they say “no” then say that, using their logic, heliocentrists MUST be wrong.
That seems like a fairly frequent observation.
Morgenstern was not an Austrian, and Mises disapproved of game theory
Ok, well, I’m sorry to challenge to gospel of Mises, I wasn’t aware that archbishop Esuric of the Holy Chuch or Austrianism had excommunicated Morgenstern for his indiscretions. Well, down the memory hole he goes. Seriously now though, this Mises guy must be pretty awesome, he died like 50 years ago and yet he’s still somehow relevant for the state of game theory today.
I don’t think you know very much about Austrian economics.
People keep saying that, and I mean, it’s true that in the grand scheme of things I’ve only been studying economics for a year and a half now. But, what I find really funny is that you used to say “there’s no way you’ve read Mises and Hayek, or any other Austrian, because if you had there’s no way you could fail to opposed FRB”, well, a few months later and guess what? You’re sort of keen on the whole fractional reserves business too. It’s funny, when I toed the Rothbardian line alongside the rest of you I didn’t really get any challenges about my knowledge of Austrian economics.
But hey, I guess it’s easy to be comfortable with your views when anybody who disagrees is a priori stupid, evil or just clueless.
I probably shouldn’t be getting into all of this, but apparently it’s got to the stage where I get one serious response and three other “yeah well you’re stupid” type responses and also I’m sort of hungover.
DD5, I’d say that the different conceptions of praxeology can roughly be capture in the differences between praxeology as a method and as an area of study. Wilderness, perhaps I’m wrong but an axiom can mean many different things and I always understand a priori to mean knowledge that’s independent of experience, but perhaps I’m wrong.
But in all seriousness, doesn’t that create a massive public good problem, namely people researching and being informed about who they are voting for, their past records, and the actual correct policies which should be in place? Note I’m not using the moral argument, but one of Powell’s arguments.
Well, the standard public choice account of democracy actually can’t explain why people vote. The expected return from voting (the probability of your vote being decisive multiplied by the difference you’d gain from one party winning) is so small that even the drive to the poll wouldn’t be worth it. So of course, any explanation, such as those put forth by L&B and Caplan, that purports to explain why people do turn up (which they do) has to invoke the fact that people enjoy voting. Many people take a lot of pleasure from voting, from discussing politics and from researching the candidates. Granted, for democracy to work a strong democratic ethic would be necessary, as well as other institutional changes (more decentralized governance) but there would be other tricky prerequisites for anarchism too.
To show that I am not always out to get a jab at hayekianxyz, I say the following:
Bob Murphy pointed that the Mises “disapproved” of game theory, that is, game theory as it was at the time he “disapproved” of game theory.
I don’t understand your use of sarcasm.
I’m not sure if the term axiom is fully out of the philosophical debate which isn’t necessarily unfrutiful. The debate appears to have begun to take place since Hume tried to absolve it, Kant rebutted him resolving some of the issues, and then Karl Popper drew the line to maintain the natural sciences and keep Humean skepticism out of those sciences so it didn’t ravage those sciences as it had the philosophy department. Source here.
The path down axiom lane gets into what has been termed common sense, empiricial, sensory, assumptions, self-evident, intuition, primitive sense; and phenomenology, as far as my limited knowledge on this complicated subject goes, appears to actually dare to define where propositions, axioms, and terms come from. Hume analytically just put up a stop sign and arbitrarily said can’t go any further and even questioned axioms themselves which other consequences of Hume’s philosophy, as I’ve named one already, ie. Popper drawing the line, is it obviously questions logic itself, secondarily therefore truth-values in knowledge, and also, implied relations in the world. Not that Hume denied facts just that he put too much of an analytical inclination that has it’s philosophical consequences (analytical is only of the mind as opposed to synthetic aprior which incorporates not only the mind but what the mind can know external to itself too). There is posterior knowledge and it is not cut-off from a prior knowledge. These are two parts of a whole. I can’t make a full critique on Humean consequences, but this is what I gather so far.
Austrian philosopher-economists such as Barry Smith, Uskali Maki, and Francios Facchini currently work in this field, amongst some other people too (just don’t feel like writing out all their names). Other none Austrian’s (though philosophically in name only because their work has influenced the field) include the phenomenologists of Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and an extant fellow by the name Josef Seifert who I don’t think is an Austrian economist-philosopher wrote a great paper on the subject of phenomenology that is explanatory as well as historical in nature. Husserl and Reinach have their explicit foundations in Franz Brentano. Franz is linked to the founder of the Austrian School Carl Menger (though the link/influence is debated as to how much and some other non-important for this post details. I’ve read papers on both sides of the debate one by David Gordon the other by Barry Smith.). These are all within the tradition of Aristotle, including Carl Menger, and this is what had lifted their knowledge pursuits to a science.
All of this is important for numerous reasons, but one vital understanding that can be taken away from this is it depends on what you mean by “a prior… (being) independent of experience”. On the one hand if a prior is cut-off from experience by interpreting scientists or whomever then what good is it? In some absolute sense of the term of being ‘independent of experience’ in which experience has nothing or never had anything to do with the development of any a prior knowledge then how could a prior knowledge have any connection to experience (or the rest of the world outside of a prior knowledge)? It would leave a prior knowledge as possessing no knowledge of experience and completely cut-off from the rest of world in all ways including being able to interpret the world. But that is clearly not the case of the intention of a prior knowledge. It is an assumption like any other assumption in all of the sciences. Astronomy is one of the most physical sciences there possibly can be. Physics itself becomes a subfield within the massive undertakings of Astronomy. Yet Astronomy, like all sciences, involves assumptions. There has to be a starting point for any intellectual or science to even take place. And those assumptions necessarily imply connections with experience in which experience informs theory and theory informs what that experience is. It’s a feedback system. But those assumptions necessarily have to relate to the field of inquiry. That in and of itself is an axiom that any field involves itself and not some other field exclusive of the field in question. If the field of inquiry is X, then for the field to be about Y and not X is not to inquiry about field X, but rather field Y.
Axioms are very empirical. To believe otherwise cuts them off from the rest of reality and reduces the axiom and all theories involved with the axiom as merely analytical having nothing to do with the rest of world. To cut-off axioms from experience all together endangers all of the sciences as they are all founded upon assumptions.
Game theory is the basis of any type of social biological evolution. It is imperative to understand game theory in order to understand the most common felt uneasinesses that people try to alleviate, why people generally aren’t sociopaths, the importance of reputation, and why it is generally not profitable as an individual to do things like murder someone, become a thief, or enslave people.
Sam Armstrong,
Rothbard said game theory was a field of praxeology.
The link didn’t go to the post I wanted. Scroll down in that link to JosephBright’s post. Rothbard also apparently said ‘Theory of War’ or Hostile Action is a field of praxeology too (I mention that as that was a recent thread).
I like reading Morgenstern, but I have to agree that in terms of praxeology, catallactics and political economy Mises’ work is both more realistic and more theoretically consistent than ‘game theory’. Game theory lacks a number of the insights of praxeology and also develops a number of erroneous conclusions based on fallacious premises.
Mises isn’t holy gospel (speaking for myself, not for the tweakers that frequent this chat), but it does seem to me that Mises was almost never wrong. And as good as Morgenstern can be at times, he was wrong a lot more often than Mises was. What’s more, Morgenstern’s work wasn’t even supposed to be directly applicable to economics. It patently assumes many false conditions to make its points, game theory is much more a theoretic model with situational applicability whereas praxeology is universally applicable to all purposeful action (‘human’ or otherwise).