17
Jan
2011
Target Acquired
This post is for the econo-geeks in the crowd. On Thursday my Mises Daily article will turn the tide on this Sumner–DeLong double-team on poor Arnold Kling (who threw in the towel much too prematurely). I am giving advance notice for people who want to read up on the exchanges, and also so Scott can get his will in order. (I hope he has a sizable whole life insurance policy, but I’m betting he sank everything into indexed mutual funds.)
Suffice it to say, when we take a closer look at the data, we see that the Austrian/Klingian resource-misallocation thesis holds up very well.
Using the “data” to understand inter-related he real world economic phenomena is like using the output tape of an old IBM computer to figure out the underlying mechanical and programming structure on the other side of the tape …
Biological scientists specialize in field research. It’s what they consider science to be. Why, oh, why don’t economists do field research, even as sophisticated as one finds in the article “Zombieland” by MONEY magazine?
The “field” of sound economics is a priori ratiocination, which most economists will not, or rather cannot, do.
Data analysis is necessarily historical, a culmination of unobservable and observable events, which do not follow any constant causal operative factors, and therefore cannot be used to elicit any economic laws, theories, and principles. The subject matter of economics is not atoms, or chemicals, but individual humans. Humans learn in metaphysically unpredictable ways (for if we learned in predictable ways, we could learn everything from the outset, thus becoming omniscient Gods), and what we learn affects what we do. If what we learn is metaphysically unpredictable, then what we do MUST be metaphysically unpredictable as well. If what we do is metaphysically unpredictable, then the methods of the natural sciences, which takes predictability for granted according to constant physical laws, cannot apply to human action, and thus cannot apply to economics.
This truth scares off a tremendous amount of economists, because they know that if they truly accepted it, if everyone truly accepted it, then their careers would be over, for what the majority of economists do today is completely nonsensical. It is modern day astrology and witch-doctoring. Instead of attributing Gods to the stars where none existed, like they did in the middle ages, economists today attribute constant operative factors to human action.
Every economics advance ever made can be traced back to logical a priori analysis. Even those economists who deny it actually practice it, if not in general then at least according to their a priori assumptions regarding time invariant empirical laws, which is an assumption that cannot be elicited from empirical observations and is actually a praxeological based principle.
make their loved ones weep.