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Why is the austrian school unpopular

Slartibartfast

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http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae3_1_3.pdf

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This pdf presents its own analysis, but I am curious what the posters opinions are.
 
for the same reason economics is sometimes called "the dismal science"
 
Because it's quite literally the "Psychoanalytic" school of economics. It's a pseudoscience. It uses the language of science, but it actually dismisses empiricism as a valid methodology. Hayek and Von Mises, for example, actually argued against the application of empirical methods in Economics, claiming it was neither possible, nor desirable. Instead , they pushed for a rationalist axiomatic foundation. They put "theory" and deductive conclusoins above rigorous scientific methods. This is why many of their ideas aren't even falsifiable. They don't care to be, because "theory" steming from axioms, and deductions from them, are all that matter. They got one solution to every problem, and it's determined before any problem is analysed. It never changes.

The Austrian School is the Marxism of the Right.
 
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for the same reason economics is sometimes called "the dismal science"

So you consider this school to be dreary and desolate?
 
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Compared to *who else*?

You can't just look at that one sector and determine anything - you have to compare and analyze a large # of statistics and so forth to come to a solid conclusion about - well - anything.

It's too narrow for me to make a judgment call, but it seems interesting.
 
The Austrian school is better than the others.
 
This pdf presents its own analysis, but I am curious what the posters opinions are.

Depends on what kind of Austrian but largely because people like to think that they have a firm control over things, with little negative side effects.

I believe my economic philosophy mostly represents Austrianism.
I think that economics is, largely, a coming together of physics and psychology.
 
Given the significance resulting from that school? Well! You then have your answer.
 
So you consider this school to be dreary and desolate?

it's disenheartening to those who wish to control an economy, or even steer it in particular directions; generally either telling them how their attempts to do so will fail, or backfire in ways well beyond what they want to accept.
 
If anything, though, this chart and following review show a new up-tick in interest in this area.

There was a drop that lasted for 30 years - and it's slowly on the rise, which is good . . . so they're heading in the right direction, whatever that is.
 
If anything, though, this chart and following review show a new up-tick in interest in this area.

There was a drop that lasted for 30 years - and it's slowly on the rise, which is good . . . so they're heading in the right direction, whatever that is.

It goes from 0 to 2%, by any measure, its still unpopular, even at its peak of 10%
 
Austrian economics is fine when discussing purely economics, but in comparison to other schools of economics, it fails to address the sociological aspects of it's particular ideology.

It is a cold and heartless school, where the weak and old would be put out to pasture to die. As anything else would be harmfull to the economy
 
Because it explains the reality of situations that incumbent career politicians don't want to hear.
 
Because it explains the reality of situations that incumbent career politicians don't want to hear.

In the chart from Mises.org, it shows that the number of academic economists is roughly 2%. How does this apply to politics?
 
Austrian economics is fine when discussing purely economics, but in comparison to other schools of economics, it fails to address the sociological aspects of it's particular ideology.

It is a cold and heartless school, where the weak and old would be put out to pasture to die. As anything else would be harmfull to the economy

I think that is a bit of an embellishment.
That didn't happen before we adopted a mostly Keynesian economic policy.
 
I think that is a bit of an embellishment.
That didn't happen before we adopted a mostly Keynesian economic policy.

We never had a fully austrian economic policy either. The closest being the UK in the 1800's.

You know the country that ruled over Ireland during the great potato famine, a country that sent childern who were orphans, or from poor families to work in Cananda or Australia as indentued servants
 
We never had a fully austrian economic policy either. The closest being the UK in the 1800's.

You know the country that ruled over Ireland during the great potato famine, a country that sent childern who were orphans, or from poor families to work in Cananda or Australia as indentued servants

A sign of the times and not an economic system.
It was perfectly acceptable before then to send your children off to work like that.

You can't blame Austrians for that.
 
A sign of the times and not an economic system.
It was perfectly acceptable before then to send your children off to work like that.

You can't blame Austrians for that.

I wasnt blaming the Austrians, just the economic system that only values people as factors of production nothing more
 
I wasnt blaming the Austrians, just the economic system that only values people as factors of production nothing more

That isn't true at all.
People value other people.

It was completely socially acceptable at that time, to send children off to work.

During the height of the Depression my grandmother quit school, in the 8th grade, to work for her family.
Was that Austrianism in action, as well?
 
That isn't true at all.
People value other people.

It was completely socially acceptable at that time, to send children off to work.

During the height of the Depression my grandmother quit school, in the 8th grade, to work for her family.
Was that Austrianism in action, as well?

When she was about 13, not when she was 6, and shipped accross the world to work for a family she did not know against her will and against her freedom
 
Austrian Economics is unpopular because I refuted their theory. Nobody wants to be associated with a loser.

But everybody knows this. So I will take this opportunity to lecture you on tactics instead.

Marxism flies in the face of all logic and can easily be dismantled by any first-year economics student or even - gasp! - by the fourteen-year-olds who populate the Mises forum. And the Marxists know this. They've lost enough arguments to realize that logic is not on their side.

So, instead, the Marxists resort to two stratagems:

1) They re-define the term "scientific method" to mean Marxism, particularly the labor theory of value, which they will attempt to support with a blizzard of statistics.

That is what this guy is doing:

They put "theory" and deductive conclusoins above rigorous scientific methods.

2) The Marxists derail any thread about modern academic economics with references to events that took place hundreds of years ago in entirely different cultures. This is what Mentork (now banned) was doing when he responded to my thread about GE Theory (invented in the 1950s) with a picture of a teenager working in a factory circa. 1900.

That is what this guy is doing:

Quite they were not highly valued factors of production and were left to starve or move. Allowing for the English lords to reorganize the estates free of the lazy Irish tenants

The obvious response is to point out that the Irish potato famine occurred in 1845, twenty-six years before Carl Menger published Principles of Economics in German, a language that few English lords read.

Also, you could have simply quoted footnote #6 of my Critique of Austrian Economics:

Böhm-Bawerk was a better social philosopher than he was an economist. For instance, he writes, “We may define social capital as an aggregate of products which serve as a means of the acquisition of economic goods by society” (1959, v. 2 p. 32). He specifically excludes the means of subsistence of productive workers as a part of social capital. This focus on definitions may seem pedantic until we read that “There is but one basis for a contrary conclusion. That would be to classify workers, not as members of a civil society for the benefit of which the economy is conducted, but to regard them as objective labor machines. In that case – but only in that case – the workers’ maintenance would be in the same class as fodder for beasts of burden and fuel for machines; it would be a means of production; it would be capital” (1959, v. 2 p. 71). Böhm-Bawerk denounces “the tendency among English economists – often and quite justifiably censured – to regard workers as producing machines; that view made their wages a component part of production costs, and counted them a deduction from national wealth instead of a part thereof” (1959, v. 2 pp. 72-73).

C'mon you guys! Learn some tactics!
 
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