" You can read a two-hundred year old book on economics or a two thousand year old book on philosophy, and the ideas you will find there are still relevant. It is therefore really kind of stupid to compare them with a silly analogy saying ‘ergo, old economics books are irrelevant.’"
Ah no they are not. Philosophy leads itself a little better in this instance since many philosophers get a woody from the classics which is understandable. However, if you go back centuries, economics was not the same as we think of it today.
Also you talked of history. History is my field. History is not a science by any means. It is not even a “social science.” It is apart of the humanities. It did not become a formalized profession until the late 19th century and it is not an “armchair” profession. You cannot sit and pontificate about the social history of temperance advocates in early republic America. The “tools” are out in the world, not in your mind. There is personal basis toward sources, which is something I personally think historians should relish in, which is not to be in the world of economics.
Please show us where anyone here even suggested that.
I agree. Not actually reading what someone writes, and then beating a straw man is quite childish. Pretty effectless too. Unless you count making a fool of yourself.
"History is not a science by any means. It is not even a “social science.”
I am curious, I thought history was a science inasmuch as it deals with the empirical facts of history - - but this is not to say that it is a natural science, but merely that it does deal with facts as they are.
Well history is experienced so it is empirical but I would not use the word “facts.” I mean there are dates which are factual but that is middle-school level history. When you get up into the philosophy of history and the interpretation of it, it is not “facts” persay. I think there can be truth in history but like I said I would not use the word facts.
But then again what is the difference between truth and facts? Hmm maybe I just have a personal distaste for the usage of the word when it comes to history. I mean really history is the debating of opinions regarding the “why” of human action. Everyone has a bias as to why an event happened, but that does not preclude truth from being discovered. I mean I am not a post-modernist who thinks that history is unknowable or unrelatable therefore causing there to be no truth but I do not think that there is a monocausal reason for a specific event.
Thomas Sowell is pretty much an Austrian who doesn’t delve into money and banking that much. He doesn’t support a central bank and prefers a gold standard, but I believe he would agree with his mentor Friedman on the rate of monetary expansion.
Anything by him is great. And his colleague, Walter E. Williams, who focuses even less on monetary matters than Sowell but has espoused a clear cut Austrian view in that area.
I don’t think Sowell is even close to being an Austrian, and he probably would never identify as one either. His economics writings are decidedly neo-classicist in the Chicago tradition (big surprise). That doesn’t mean Sowell isn’t worth reading; the bulk of his writing is nothing short of essential for any economist to read. But an Austrian he’s not.
Williams is far closer to being considered an Austrian than Sowell; he has openly admitted his admiration for Mises (although he’s more of a Hayekian in practice) and was an early driving force of the economics department at GMU, which is the Austrian home away from Auburn.