Essentially I’m saying that I could only abandon AE if suddenly the entire nature of the universe, human action, and logic were dramatically altered/reversed; if man was not man, and reality was not reality. AE is logically sound, and is empirically supported by all of human history (though some object to its business cycle theory on empirical grounds).
chloe732: The only way AE could be undermined would be to undermine the foundation of human action.
…or by showing that an accepted Austrian theory was improperly derived from these irrefutable foundations. It could be that Mises or Rothbard or one of the other treatise-writing greats simply got some logical deduction wrong along the way, and some of us might not have the cognitive capacity to identify where such an error might have taken place. I think there is only a modicum of brilliant minds in this world capable of evaluating whether the thousands of little logical connections all properly fit together, all completely free of logical fallacies and therefore universally true. I know that I am not (yet) capable of such a thing, so it is not unreasonable (while I am striving for such perfection) to be swayed by empirical evidence that seems to contradict the central tenets of Austrian economics. I’m merely doing the best I can in light of my own uncertainty about whether it all perfectly fits together. It certainly does sound flawless, but can all of you really say with 100% certainty that the edifice of Austrian theory has been perfectly derived from the irrefutable axioms of action, that nowhere along the way was some important deduction overlooked or that some logical fallacy took place? I think it to be pretty unreasonable to boast of such absolute certainty. It’s one thing to be certain of the extremely basic axioms, another to be certain that the logical edifice derived from them was flawlessly constructed.
To disprove “humans act”, a researcher would need to show that action is not interpreted by the actor in any way.
This means: Hebbian learning must be disproved. Hayekian learning must be disproved. Pribram and other peoples concept of target in visual perception and movement must go. And so on.
This means: behaviorism of the McCulluch and Pitts Neuron, which people use to model computers, and Von Neumanns idea of multiplexing must be the correct and full explanation of the brain. (Which neither McCulluch or Pitts or Von Neumann or anybody else assumed.)
Oh, and the researcher must not “act” or use any of the mentioned processes to “figure out how to show he is not acting”…
Edit: Alex, read Jevons. You would only waste your time to get probabilities when you could get straight inferences.
Alex M, you are saying that perhaps there could be a hidden logical flaw somewhere within the vast edifice of AE, but no one has yet been smart enough to locate this error. If the error is located, the whole thing would come crashing down like mainstream economics during a credit crisis (sorry, couldn’t resist the analogy).
Do you think perhaps you are actually questioning one aspect of AE, ie, are you questioning whether Austrian Business Cycle Theory is flawed as opposed to AE in general? Should your post say “What sort of empirical evidence would it take to contradict Austrian Business Cycle Theory?”
I just don’t see how one empirically disproves human action. Where is the logical flaw in human action? How does one even approach such a question? Now, of course one could use empirical data and historical trends to attempt to refute ABCT, but empirically refute or find a fatal logical flaw in “Austrian economics”, ie, human action?
Regarding ABCT, it too is derived from human action. It is about central bank money printing and credit expansion, etc. but the elements of it (time preference, subjective value scales, time structure production, etc.) all these things are built, ultimately, on human action. So, we are back to square one. Human action.
To summarize: How to refute AE - 1) Find the logical flaw in human action (how would one conceive how to begin such an endeavor?), 2) use empirical data and historical trends to refute human action (wrong approach since these things have no meaning relative to human action).
If we were to observe business cycle after business cycle that didn’t adhere to the ABCT, Austrian scholars would (hopefully) look at their theory and figure out what they’re missing. Theory and empirical work complement one another, without the former you can’t do the latter, without the latter the former is likely to turn out to be incomplete at best and hopelessly wrong at worst. Science proceeds by the interaction of the two, not solely by deducing economics from first principles.
Man acts in the Misesian sense because that’s how he’s defined. Of course, in the real world actors are far more complicated than that, they have all sorts of cognitive imperfections and without these insights any economics is going to be very dry.
chloe: If the error is located, the whole thing would come crashing down like mainstream economics during a credit crisis (sorry, couldn’t resist the analogy).
Not necessarily. It could simply be missing a gap of insight or two, perhaps that, in fact, “animal spirits” or psychological factors play a bigger role in business cycles than previously thought.
You keep referring to how I must find a flaw in human action, one of the fundamental axioms, in order to disprove Austrian economics, but again, I’m not questioning the axioms, just the process of derivation. Yes, the ABCT is an example of a rigorously derived theorem which is grounded in axioms, but still, its process of derivation is so complicated that something could have been missed along the way. And I don’t think it’s entirely unlikely that the Austrians throughout years could have overlooked a logical fallacy in the ABCT; if it turned out that business cycles really occurred as a result of some fundamental flaw in the free market system, eminent Austro-libertarians would find it decidedly inconvenient. My point is that they will be focusing their energies on proving the ABCT rather than trying to disprove it, considering the implications if it were found to be damningly incorrect.
“What a ridiculous comment.” - I. Ryan
What a meaningless response. Let me illustrate wanking; I deal somewhat in nutrition, fitness, dieting, etc. Used to be a hobby, I used to train people, it’s coming back more into my life now for some reason and I’m training and advising people again. And it’s a difficult job because their minds of ful of crap from wankers. Wankers tend to cite a whole boatload of studies in which there are conveniently no controls on calorie intake to ‘prove’ calorie intake isn’t the cause for obesity or being over weight, and they then blame ‘carbs’ or high fructose corn syrup or some other line of shit in an attempt to distract people from basic laws of physics and the fact that if they want to lose weight they need to stop being in a calorie surplus/equilibrium, plain and simple. Or, they will cite endless studies about mTOR and other processes in the muscles to justify some ridiculously complex training protocol to distract people from realizing that both men and women got into very, very fine shape with basic diets, using no protein powders, no specialized pyramid training protocols, but by just lifting heavy shit repeatedly and running a bit.
In other words, when someone pelts you with a boatload of shit that’s perhaps relevant but not crucial to an issue or debate, they’re wanking. They’re meandering up and down lines of shit when it’s not necessary and there’s a simple issue in front of them to deal with. Likewise, a few pages about Hume and Mises and precise definitions are not necessary to answer this OP’s question. If a friend of yours has a relatively simple ethical question in front of them and asks your advice and you hand them a copy of Nicomachean Ethics, you’re wanking.
And you’re not answering the question.
“Did you not even read what I linked to?”
Yes I did. Why don’t you link to a straight answer? OT has a concern about the perception that Austrians reject empricism. Now while this is clearly not the case as empirical examinations of current and past events are standard in Austrian analysis, it is a commonly raised objection to and criticism of the Austrian school in my experience. So why not just say, “The ‘rejection’ of empiricism is a misunderstanding of the Austrian position based on an out of context quote of Mises’; we just think there are limits to what you can reliably test in such a complex system which severely limits empirical examinations unless they are backed up with a sound logical framework that starts from some axiomatic principles.”? You don’t need three pages of definitions to do that, even if you would have worded it differently. Nor do you end up looking like you’re deflecting the question. You just end up looking like you’re full of it, because it’s a simple question. Any field that claims to study and describe reality has to conform to reality and be testable against reality by some means. Otherwise it’s wind baggery, plain and simple.
Poor analogy. Unless the premises plugged into a logical statement are as precise as the measurements of a Euclidean geometry formula, it doesn’t hold. The sum of the angles in a triangle may never be more than 180 degrees, however if you’re not measuring the angles correctly that formula looses its usefulness.
I have no interest to prove anything. I do know that I went on low-calorie diets for years, only to end up feeling like crap and not losing weight. I then ate many eggs with yolks for breakfast, roast chicken for lunch, and a couple steaks for dinner for a few years. I lost 100 pounds in that time, increased my lifts, and didn’t feel like crap. That’s proof of nothing, but it is empirical evidence of…I don’t know what.
Continuing, when a field claims to talk about reality, it can mean one of two things. The sciences mean that they make predictions - since Descartes they’ve stopped claiming to properly explain mechanism. Philosophy means that it explains what observations mean. I think of Austrian economics in that regard. Observations simply do not come with their own interpretations, you have to view them through a lens.
“I am afraid xahrx probably thinks mathematical induction (basically iterative deduction) is actually inductive in the sense of “observation”, and that Austrians are the only people who use deductive logic.” - thelion
No, I think the idea that Austrians reject empiricism is wrong, they just have a proper understanding of it’s limits, especially as regards prediction, vis a vi a system like economics, or the weather as another example. And I also think some Austrians, such as yessir above, are a bit disconnected enough to think that a proper logical construct alone guarantees truth, and perhaps arrogant enough to think they know everything and that their premises must therefore be 100% correct, their syllogisms perfectly constructed, and their conclusions unquestionable. It’s important to remember that between Kirk and Spock, Kirk was the captain, and Spock didn’t get cool until he dropped the logic as the end all be all of existence and tried to some old fashioned wisdom.
Once more, limit the wanking and get to the issue. There’s no need for paragraphs about inductive vs deductive logic when all the OP wants to know is: do Austrians really reject empricism; what empirical evidence might disuade one from being an Austrian? I can certainly name one circumstance: a sustained inflation over a long period of time with no collapse, and no reason to see why it shouldn’t.
“But for economic questions, since there not technological, but originate from a demand, we can deduce all theorems from preference vectors, and to rely on empiricism for economic theory is at best quackery and at worst muddling the truth (since we are already capable of knowing it exactly). Empirical knowledge gives us examples. It does not give us theorem (which are universally true).”
Have I said differently? Is not the historical examination I mentioned a perfect example of an empirical example used to illustrate the universal truth of the theory by showing how it fits and explains events better than other theories? Is not the use of Austrian theory to suggest avenues for investigation into past events to bring new or hidden facts to light a means of proving by example it’s explanatory power?
To a meaningless attack, I give a meaningless response. In other words, you never even made any sort of attempt to justify that I was “wanking”:
What I quoted above is the only part of your response addressing the posts that I linked to. The first sentence is just your assertion that it is “wanking”. The second sentence, though, probably is supposed to be your justification of that. But it fails. For I was not even arguing about definitions. I was just clarifying what I meant before I made my points. Or should I just jump into it next time without defining my terms? Do you call it “wanking” when people try to be precise? Are you like the masses of people who like to take refuge behind ambiguous terms and attack those people trying to be precise by saying that they are pedants? Or are you just saying that I am unnecessarily complicating a topic that is actually pretty simple? I assume that you mean the latter. But you made no effort to explain why that was so; you just asked a bunch of questions that I already addressed in what I linked to.
A long definition of your use of the term “wanking”.
An unsubstantiate assertion, again.
If so, you did not read it carefully enough, to say the least.
I did link to a straight answer. It directly addressed the question.
It is common to me, too, which explains why a part of what I titled my other thread was “[A] Popular Objection to Austrian Economics”.
Because that would be an unsubstantiated assertion.
Because that would be a misinterpretation of Mises. He did not just say “oh, no, there are too many variables”. He said something much more important, that there are no constants:
Now:
That is just a restatement of what made me ask you whether you even read what I linked to. Because you said that you did, yet you are still saying the same thing, I guess that I will have to be more specific:
The content of the rest of that paragraph is commentary on the first assumption:
So I will just focus on that. What made me ask you whether you even read what I linked to is because what I wrote contradicted that assumption:
So I am explicitly saying that both pure and applied praxeology are falsifiable; I am saying that the assumptions that make the theories conform to reality are falsifiable. But, because we do not expect to find that we no longer desire things and because we do not expect to find that we are no longer different than each other and, because of that, each better suited to producing different things, we hardly speak of those things as being “falsifiable”. So what results is that, because those things are basically uncontestable, we pay attention to the connections between the definitions, instead. But there is one way which makes it possible to observe higher level things like business cycles and make us question whether our theories are adequate:
AE is not directly refuted by empirical evidence,that is true.
But it seems to me that if AE predicts that X should happen, based on a priori reasoning, and then Y consistently happens in the place of X, that is a serious sign that your a priori reasoning went wrong somewhere, and you should go back and re-examine your premises.
In that sense AE is no different from mathematics and physics. If your formula says that something should happen a certain way, and it doesn’t, you don’t just say “this formula now means this instead of that”, and redefine the logical relationships so they conform with experience - you go back and you try to find the flaw in your calculations, which can either be a mistake that you made, or the influence of some factor you did not account for.
In my opinion, when Austrians say that it’s propositions are not refuted by empirical evidence, they don’t mean “ignore the empirical evidence and blindly go forward assuming you are correct” - only that in order to find exactly WHERE and HOW you went wrong, you have to rely on a priori reasoning. Just like a geometrist or a mathematician.
“I have no interest to prove anything.” - JAlanKatz
I do.
“I do know that I went on low-calorie diets for years, only to end up feeling like crap and not losing weight.”
Then while your calories may have been relatively low compared to your usual intake, you were still eating too much. Unless of course you would like to argue for a space-time anomaly located somewhere inside your digestive system that mysteriously pumped energy and/or matter with caloric content into your system. Otherwise, you were eating too much. Feeling like crap is normal, it sucks to be hungry. Which is why many people would rather look for some other answer despite the laws of thermodynamics.
“I then ate many eggs with yolks for breakfast, roast chicken for lunch, and a couple steaks for dinner for a few years. I lost 100 pounds in that time, increased my lifts, and didn’t feel like crap. That’s proof of nothing, but it is empirical evidence of…I don’t know what.”
Just for you and not really relevant to this thread:
It’s proof, anecdotally and backed up the research, that protein and fat makes you feel fuller and sates your hunger more effectively than carbs, and that eliminating carbohydrates from your diet while not magical, does usually mean you’re eliminating a massive chunk of your daily calorie intake. If you’re on a standard 40/40/20 diet where percentages of your calories are coming from protein, carbs, and fat respectively that means you’re taking in kCal/grams 1000/250 for protein and carbs and ~500/55 for fats for your standard 2500 kCal diet. Cut carbs and you’ve just eliminated 40% of your calorie intake, and you’d need an additional 250 grams of protein, another ~100 grams of fat, or a mix of the two proportionate to their calorie contribution to make up the difference. Hence, you feel fuller, and you’d have to eat as much again in protein or about half as much again in fat in terms of raw mass just to hit maintenance calorie levels. Which is why, in studies where they actually control for calorie intake, the predominant factor in all weight loss/gains is calorie intake and not macronutrient percentages, give or take a few percentage points for metabolic changes which are complex and hard to account for, but which do not in the end violate the laws of physics.
And take the typical US diet which tends to be dominated by processed and unprocessed carbs, and it’s even harder to make up for the calorie deficit when you remove them. So, in short, you lost weight because you ate less. If you’re of a mind check out the studies available at the NIH databse and compare the methods. When you control for calorie intake, all the complex diet rules go out the window and it turns out you just have to eat fewer calories than maintenance to lose weight. That’s not to say a diet of nothing but 1200-1500 kCal a day of Krispy Kremes would be good for you in health terms, but you’d be skinny when you died.
“Continuing, when a field claims to talk about reality, it can mean one of two things. The sciences mean that they make predictions - since Descartes they’ve stopped claiming to properly explain mechanism. Philosophy means that it explains what observations mean. I think of Austrian economics in that regard. Observations simply do not come with their own interpretations, you have to view them through a lens.”
I disagree. The sciences study cause and effect in the end which is the point of isolating variables. They’re just smarter these days in knowing and admitting that their goal is an ideal and not really possible to get to, so they allow for the fudge factor, which generally speaking means no matter how well settled a point is, some percentage of the research will go against it for reasons that can’t be pinned down. Plus you’ve got the nice field of quantum mechanics which seems to us at least to break common sense rules of logic. But the same limits apply to economics when it comes to experiments, they are just much more severe. Not only is there no objective measure of value, even subjective valuations can’t be known in advance. It’s like studying the weather with clouds that have free will. So in this field which I think you properly identify as philosophical, the only predictions you can make are the kind you see here regularly, like: “you can’t continually inflate the money supply without a subsequent collapse of the economy.” When, where, how, etc., are what can’t be predicted.
Problem is, when you tell a layman about the economic ‘sciences’ and then try to deny testing, reproducability, etc., you sound like you’re bulllshitting.
Basically, your claiming because they can’t always follow the long chains of deductive reasoning, empirical observation is somehow better.
- This is not really a fair argument, however. If physics is difficult to follow, if mathematics is difficult to follow, if material science is difficult to follow, etc., is this evidence against these sciences, or does the statement merely discredit the maker of this sentence? (Once again, I’m totally paraphrasing Yves Guyot.) 2) And to top it off, the argument is not even unfair; but it is false. Probabilistic logic is much more difficult than non-probabilistic logic, because every probability may need to be reestimated after every new premise, but the logical form is the same with deductive logic for the same statement. On top of that, we get only a probabilistic result. So it is not somehow easier to follow at all at a rigorous level!
The logical deductions don’t have to be faulty for praxeology to be wrong, just the premises.
A few examples of humans not acting:
sleeping
sneezing
seizing
coughing
vomiting (usually)
Feel free to add more.
Man acts purposefully refers to conscious man and his voluntary action. Not to man in a vegetative state.
What are you trying to say?
Scineram,
Ludwig von Mises distinguishes between human action and subconscious “knee-jerk” reactions to stimuli. As such, praxeology does account for non-rational, or biological, actions such as sneezing and coughing. Sleeping, on the other hand, can be a conscious action. I choose to sleep at a certain time because I feel that I will garner greater utility by sleeping than by choosing any other action (like staying up and watching television, partying, et cetera).
Man acts purposefully refers to conscious man and his voluntary action. Not to man in a vegetative state.
Oh ok, so man acts purposefully when you’re defining man as something that acts. That’s useful I guess.