I have a question for you. A lot of hedge funds and investment banks hire economists, who, generally, tend to like empiricism. My question is, under free market Mises Austrianism, will all the hedge funds which hire these economists fail? Has the persistence of empiricism in finance and macroeconomic advisory, (not to be confused with the success of pharmaceutical companies in producing drugs developed using statistical analysis of the most arbitrary trial and error for complex and varied human biological systems), been solely due to state bailouts and implicit guarantees of empirical science-using institutions, while the praxeological ones are suppressed under burdensome anti-logical regulation?
Basically, if empirical evidence doesn’t work in economics, why are free market institutions able to survive using it? Seems like a market failure to me.
That’s a very good question. I would say that most private financial institutions such as hedge funds rely more on finance than economics, and when it comes down to it they are more likely to listen to someone with a finance degree than a economics degree. (Although I’m not particularly knowledgable when it comes to Austrian economics I would guess that is what people in AE would also say, that hedge funds success are due to good financial instead of economic advice.)
Even if empiricism or the heavily mathmatically dominant economics are inferior as AE says they are, that still doesn’t mean that it is completely useless. Accuracy is the problem with mainstream economics, which I believe the better read Austrians would agree. However that doesn’t mean that you can’t get a very general idea of what will happen, at least in my opinion.
So we agree that empirical economics isn’t completely useless- actually, that it’s used sometimes in free market economics. Perhaps things are different outside GMU academia.
Like his response better all you want. I couldn’t care less.
Your trolling is obvious because your strawman is obvious. Austrian-school economists don’t dislike empirical evidence per se. Mises himself was quite an economic historian.
It depends on the troll really. If it’s of the “youz al suck c***” variety then sure they don’t deserve anything other than a boot up their poop shoot. Mustang isn’t a troll in my opinion, just dogmatic in his belief in empiricism, if dogmatism = troll then, well pretty much everyone would be a troll it would just be a matter of degree. You aren’t likely to be persuaded by what Mustang has to say just as he isn’t persuaded by what you have to say. I believe he would actually be willing to change his mind under the right circumstances however, which is why I don’t consider him a troll.
Because in the Misesian framework the so-called ‘economists’ you are talking about are actually thymologists and not solely praxeologists (economics being a subset of praxeology). They are making forecasts based on their beliefs about people’s future ends based on their understanding of people’s past ends. This is a completely different field to the formation of economic theory. Although the latter may be drawn upon by these ‘economists’, it is by no means the only part of their analyses nor necessarily is it the key part of their analyses.
In the thread which Autolykos linked to, people corrected you numerous times, you obviously weren’t persuaded because you insist on empirical results. I’m also not a fan of the aprior deductive reasoning which most people on this site seem to love, but the posts in that thread raised major issues with the studies you linked to, yet you seem to have continued to find the studies convincing. I may be wrong about you being dogmatic in regards to empiricism but so far you haven’t given me a reason to believe otherwise.
Depends on how you define “theory”. Certainly things like production functions and liquidity trap theory are used frequently by these banks.
Whatever it is that analysts do, it involves making testable predictions on the effects of government activity on the economy (and the conclusions are not usually very libertarian-friendly).
You’ve seen RevLeft right? If you were to go to that site and get banned would you consider it a bad thing or a good thing? Mustang see’s the people on this site about the same way we would see people at RevLeft, he believes we are dogmatic in our beliefs, and thus he would consider it a compliment to be banned.