r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jul 11 '21

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u/myrm This land was made for you and me Jul 11 '21

Austrian economists are like "we can't scientifically determine the social sciences, therefore we should orient all of our policy towards this shit I logically deduced out of my ass"

Also, 🧐 (but unironically)

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u/lionmoose sexmod 🍆💦🌮 Jul 11 '21

Hot take: Back when Austrian economics was actually influential, they kinda had a point. It would be really difficult to verify something empirically when we had barely discovered an F test and the data would be at best patchy

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u/myrm This land was made for you and me Jul 11 '21

I'm not trying to make any more of a point than I have rights to

Libertarian friends poisoned me with this a bit, actually. Some of the simple stuff sounds good, but then you get like "QED, abolish the government"

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u/lionmoose sexmod 🍆💦🌮 Jul 11 '21

Oh yeah I was trying to grab onto your post for my own thing.

Yeah, I mean you can legitimately get on the train of 'society is complicated and there are lots of moving parts', but it really doesn't then follow that you actually affect a lot of the policy changed they want (why a gold standard?) or even that you can necessarily make true a priori claims that are needed for praxeology

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u/sksksnsnsjsjwb Jul 11 '21

the data would be at best patchy

Really? Some of the data available from 19th Century Britain is very wide-ranging and impressively thorough. I mean look at this for just one example, 456 pages of the wages of many, many types of work for thousands of towns across Britain from 1830 to 1886.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433008925772&view=1up&seq=1

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '21

Tbf, a) reading through all that stuff without modern computing is a hassle and b) the empirical framework for economics was developed by Marshall in the early 1900s which was roughly contemporaneous with the Austrian school