Hey, my statist friend sent me this link: http://economics.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm
Some of it is a bit over my head, I was wondering if anyone here has read this or could comment on the criticisms he makes, spefically in reference to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory as that it the area I am most familiar with. Thanks,
Grim
A few years ago I replied to this paper of Caplan’s, t he focus of which was his criticism of the ABCT.
Edited to fix a broken link: here is the link.
It says access denied 
I fixed it.
Did you send him your paper? Did he ever respond? It is well written and in the Austrian praxeologic tradition.
Props.
Thanks - no I never bothered to send it to him… but it has been fairly well-received by the forum ppl here
(I just re-read it today and noticed some spelling & grammar errors.)
Awesome, thanks for the link. I will check this out now.
Well, what I cant understand is why one can be a mainstream economist when the mainstream loves Paul Samuelson, a guy responsible for extremely moronic stuff. A quick read on him shows some interesting stuff:
1 - He said that with the end of World War 2 the economy would collapse. Because killing and bombing each other is economically productive! He had equations to prove it!
2 - He and some other guy came with the Philips Curve, that affirm that high inflation is the cure to unemployment. A big “LOL! WUT?”, but he had equations to prove it!
3 - He said that the Soviet Union would be successful, in 1989, well, he had equations to prove it!
If someone has link that shows him explaining all those absurds, I really would appreciate.
Bryan Caplan
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
George Mason University
I thought Mason was supposed to be one of the few Austrian schools?
It’s not really an “Austrian school”, although it is one of few schools where one can do graduate studies in Austrian economics (I think WVU, Suffolk, Rey Juan Carlos would be other places). More importantly is the fact that Caplan isn’t a normal neoclassical economist, if you read his works there exist a lot of affinities between his thought and Austrian thought. If you watch the debate between him and Boettke you’ll see that Caplan and Boettke are essentially saying “you’re really a neoclassical economist!” and “you’re really an Austrian economist” respectively, to the other party.
NB: The other guy was William Philips. He is largely credited with coming up with the Philips Curve. Samuelson and Solow popularized it.
more info via EconLib, along with summary of Friedman’s objection:
Both Friedman and Phelps argued that the government could not permanently trade higher inflation for lower unemployment. Imagine that unemployment is at the natural rate. The real wage is constant: workers who expect a given rate of price inflation insist that their wages increase at the same rate to prevent the erosion of their purchasing power.
OP says his statist friend is referencing Caplan, an avowed anarcho-capitalist…
I don’t think this statist friend has thought this through.
See this thread for paper trail of rebuttals and back-forth with Caplan and the Austrians.
https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/any-rebuttals-to-critiques-of-austrian-economics/2653/10
Is Caplan a David Friedman Ancap?
More or less, but he isn’t a utilitarian. He started as an Objectivist, went through a Rothbard stage, and now is basically an intuitionist in ethics and anarchist in political philosophy.
I don’t get it. It’s STILL telling me “access denied.”
The link in Snowflake’s reply is still the old broken one. You’ll have to follow the link in my first comment.
or copy & paste:
http://nothirdsolution.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/ecn593.pdf
Fixed.
I think there’s a way to formalize some of it to a more of a “neoclassical” rhetoric; more talk about incentives and whatnot. It would make the argument “scientific” and “rigorous”, and Caplan (and GilesS) would like it more.
I’ve always thought that Caplan’s problem with the Austrian school has more to do with the lingo than anything else. The best example of this is the Boettke v Caplan debate on youtube. Caplan seems completely unable to distinct between knowledge and forecasting. The whole point about probability being ‘knowledge’ and his unwillingness to understand radical uncertainty is, to me at least, a little bit hilarious. It’s a game of semantics which he makes out to be a methodological breakthrough.
Agreed, I could use more of that.