What are the reasons why the Austrian School isn’t more mainstream?
Schools of economic thought don’t start with foregone conclusions.
Reality is also not very mainstream.
Understanding epistemological subtleties with regard to methodology often proves too intellectually rigorous for today’s garden variety, State-churned, “scientific method”-worshiping scientists.
If you want to refute AE then you’re going to have to actually present an argument, and not rely on passive aggressive rhetorical questions.
I’m not trying to refute Austrian Economics. I have an honest question as to why it’s not more mainstream.
Those that engage the mainstream are accepted by it, those that don’t aren’t engaged by the mainstream. It’s quite simple really.
It would be counter-productive for the powers that be to allow it to become mainstream.
On a side note, I read somewhere that Economists really have two routes to take. The honest route, is the route where government will hate you for reminding them of reality. Taking that road makes it much more difficult to get prestige, fame, and money! On the flip side, lying about economics and reality makes you governments best friend and the money, prestige, and fame starts rolling in. Take this guy for example.
Is the fact that politicians don’t want to hear that they can’t fix it the main reason? The difference in approach vis a vis. how formulas, data, scientific method, types of reasoning?
If AE suddenly became mainstream, almost all the people in the universities and government who have the job of getting stats, doing analysis, building models, and advising on economic policy would lose their job. Today’s economics is based on self serving for the economists themselves. Like the old joke- don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut.
It was mainstream, but then government took over the intellectual profession and discredited thinkers that did not benefit it.
hmm for it to become mainstream you couldn’t write and sell useless shit like this anymore
Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism
Is any school of economic thought mainstream?
Are even the basic fundamentals of this field mainstream?
Of course not!
There is no particular school of economic thought favoured by the mainstream - only the foregone conclusions that allow one to win elections.
There are still politicians advocating protectionism and you’d think the idea of trading without such harsh barriers (favoured by anybody who studied in this profession) would come to the basics of policymaker’s knowledge. If the fundamentals are not clearly there, why should more complex things like how the financial institutions work be to their knowledge.
It’s not mainstream because it undermines the power of the coercive monopoly that is the state. If Austrian Economics were mainstream then there wouldn’t be a state.
Then why is there a state? Because it feeds on people’s fears and there are lots of people who benefit from it in the short term (at the expense of others). Once public schools were introduced it was a straight road to big government. With the advent of the internet we can finally do some unlearning and relearning.
good blog
I bring up some of the same things here when it comes to philosophy, namely Aristotelian v. Kantian, with additional sources that pertain to this same idea. Though I don’t exactly come from the angle of ‘problem with non-Austrian economics’ that makes complete sense. That was very interesting.
Engage in what manner? You seem to present the environment as one in which if we simply quibbled with Keynesians then Austrian economics would be mainstream. The battle of ideas has been going on for several decades. Austrian economics isn’t taught in the mainstream because it threatens the legitimacy of comprises the mainstream. It is either glossed over, treated as benign or not even taught to begin with.
Here are some reasons why:
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AE embarrasses all other schools very easy.
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AE is a direct threat to the Fed and system in place.
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AE is also intolerant in nature.
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AE too libertarian for society.
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AE theories need revision…specially on the Gold matter
What’s more important is how incapable its members are to accept criticism. Just watch the replies to my post…
BTW…shouldn’t Milton Friedman be considered a knight of freedom and economics???
I don’t get this one.
Well AE doesn’t demand gold. Just gold happens to be a very good commodity for money.
Re: The state. Has the Austrian community come to a consensus about the state? I was under the impression that there were still a number of minarchists in the bunch(?)
An assertion is not a form of argumentation, hence there is nothing to accept.
