Peter Boettke disses the minor league. 😉 (Peter Boettke Been thinking about you

Peter Boettke disses the minor league. 😉

(Peter Boettke Been thinking about your (honest as always) post. (You are one of my heroes really.) And it’s true. At least, given the paradigm that you’re criticizing.

But you know, I could not have done my work in the academic setting. I can’t even imagine putting together a dissertation committee. I certainly can’t imagine maintaining employment. (Karl Smith is the honest alternative to Krugman and look what they have done to him.) In fact, I cant’ imagine anyone letting me do this work at all. And if they did, how would I not be equally indoctrinated within the system? I mean, I’m not special. I could easily have been channelled into research that reinforced ‘optimizing public choice’. My only ambition was to construct a universal language of ethics and politics. No one would have let me attempt something so foolish in scope, nor take the two decades of work it will have taken. I had no idea that original idea would lead me here. I look at the impact I’m having – just this year -and I haven’t published anything other than a thousand blog posts and a table of contents.

So I tend to take the empirical test, and that is one of the explanatory power, correspondence and parsimony of theories. Look at Haidt, who is most likely right and Pinker who is increasingly looking like he’s gone wrong – because he lacks knowledge of austrian theory. Look at the failure of the profession to correctly identify the causal differences between the research programs of the Austrian, freshwater and saltwater programs. I mean. I could go on and on. So you know, I tend to look at intellectual history as the slow accumulation of people who wrote books that proposed useful explanatory power, correspondence and parsimony, and and see everyone else as clerical workers. Not that clerical workers aren’t useful. But while our models have become far better over the past thirty years in particular, I think we are solving a problem of noise not signal. Precisely because the research program we are conducting is into the effects of the creating of noise, rather than the effect of clarifying signal. So all that said, I think positions correlate because of access to information, students and time. I am not sure that if I look at the great thinkers who have been hired by the great universities that the record places much confidence in the system. Particularly in philosophy. The opposite appears to be true. The argument that authors on matters of public influence often do farm more harm than good appears to be easily defended.

The men you’re criticizing have not produced any substantive theory that increases explanatory power and their arguments are so intangible that it is not worth addressing them. People ask me to, and other than to use Horowitz as an example of someone who at least admits he is not constructing a science or a logic but a rumination on personal morals for the disenfranchised – and as such he’s at least not practicing pseudoscience – so I don’t bother. I had to criticize Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe to end libertine cosmopolitanism just as we’ve ended cosmopolitan socialism and (without much effort, just expensive empirical evidence) cosmopolitan neoconservatism.

Theories speak for themselves. And if that’s what you mean by the academic market I’m in agreement. Otherwise I don’t think history agrees.

Sorry if it took a long time to get to that point. But I’m sensitive to this issue. Especially since the 20th century in philosophy has been in the hands of the academy and has led to its demise.