FROM ELSEWHERE: CLASSIFYING ONE’S SELF AS ‘AUSTRIAN’: INVESTIGATION VERSUS EXPLA

FROM ELSEWHERE: CLASSIFYING ONE’S SELF AS ‘AUSTRIAN’: INVESTIGATION VERSUS EXPLANATION.

I think most people who self identify as austrian outside of their employment:

(a) mean that they use the austrian model of incentives and partial knowledge to understand the world we live in.

(b) are merely using “I am” for the purpose of brevity, rather than the fully articulated: “I practice austrian economic models when I think of social questions.”

The thing is, we can test statement (b), and have tested it, and it turns out that people can actually make use of that model, and that their use of that model is highly predictive, and highly explanatory.

So given that the misesian austrian program (versus the christian austrian program) evolved as a legal-rational one, rather than an empirical one, I am not sure that the average person who uses the Austrian model is not practicing Austrian thought. I disagree that he is practicing empirical investigation, but I agree that he is practicing rational explanation.

So given that to ‘be’ something is a verbalism (obscurantism using the verb to-be), and that Austrian thought falls into both empirical study, and rational explanation, I think that the debate as to whether one self identifies as Austrian or not, is simply a verbal criticism in itself.

The empirical economist investigates phenomenon, and the rational modeler explains phenomenon by deduction from incentives. And both classify themselves as Austrian but fail to distinguish between the two schools of Austrian methods.

Unfortunately Mises (and all the fruitcake-fringe at the Mises institute) conflate the empirical attempt at defining general rules, and the deductive application of general rules (modeling) for the purpose of explanation.