**COMMENTS, VITRIOL, AND BREVITY** From: April 26th, 2009 I have more fun being

**COMMENTS, VITRIOL, AND BREVITY**

From: April 26th, 2009

I have more fun being inspired by the comments on popular economics blogs than I do by the half-hearted, telephone-game-around-the-campfire, noncomittal opinions that dominate the online dialog. The comments are often pithy, vitriolic, and brief. Which makes for good sound bites to use at dinner parties, so to speak.

My favorite quote today was posted on [hoocoodanode.org http://hoocoodanode.org ](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhoocoodanode.org%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1jxWP0Wcr_P8acmozQgUDaitv2WrNX0FEgOviV3jXPUg6rcCY0NwdL63s&h=AT0vYWp5xdL38B-Q3TnbyzPLLNAK8jeecTFK4IAcVSocJUUoVWH_fzYA_LgOuVikBHYRKs0LqMaMxM2OaAl3oehlaA00cfiywI3QddF8Dxs7dfj7E1zOjNznb6EgNSlzL_-DhbM0vH2tsfT7cuMvRneSeN8jOVqEml0vnKRi_gJggE7kZLNs7yzY8pn918ZclXFIrKKFgsjC-NTCQrD0SaVk8IMlAjCZAfRKfLOzfxf9yTfef8pD2vyOysTMW71Zoo8NeoN2z9rTdCFSC1wsGtZ6XEYzt45DadA9iaGAoRaZLi3qhHILE-39t1tRXXheMtOZNvT3FFr8yVuw6dy0pm5G2TF0Uz0u_OHq1bEn5Klx1FE_idJuxoJouVANgs4Bf8hKlFnGAsrIAOCvptz_9Cj6Ghee66ho8v7kBgpLOjP6gdznyyKvwe3UvSEcygWHrHk4zaT2HjIU8HJomNdTw3t-Ai2UnGdRv9gsvNTsYHuf19Gfo19bTV7atEx5VJNL3ELjN2fyW8xxBxrczOUd_C8zn_lEG-wF2D5jQfupSBpm4N1gqIb5Ks3j2DHJ_sEOto_8NW_MYvBkmJ-8zrFgftVvNDsIRMwKFYKrbioF8Q-dEFG3zbttaAExmdcxasv2pslJQZk15VfAgFmwnn4X) by Byzantine_Ruins, in response to a Krugman posting on an L-shaped recession:

“There are two kinds of recessions that are bad – those that take place because of financial crises, and those that are synchronized around the world,” he said. “In both cases, the recessions tend to last longer and be deeper.”

And why is that? Go on, Krugs, say it, “because the Austrian model of the credit cycle is the correct one.”

Of course, this utterance of exasperation illustrates the problem. The “Austrian Model” is simply the most correct model we have yet developed for describing human cooperation. The other models simply propose tools for testing and bending the activity of human beings a bit. But the model, the Austrian corpus, is simply more correct than any other model we have.

I’ve noticed that, in general, the predictive content (how people phrase their anticipations of the future) is coalescing into a generalized surrender. Of course, any Austrian will tell you that we knew this would be an outcome. Most of us (me too) talked about it for YEARS.

I blame Hayek for not correcting Keynes. I love the man but am frustrated by the consequences of his decision not to refute Keynes. He could have saved us a great deal of trouble. But Hayek was just another person who, like Popper, warned us that we were not at all aware of the negative impact of the scientific method on our civilization. Its impact on philosophy was to emphasize the linguistic method of diagnosis, which has almost no value whatsoever in itself, only in its use to solve real human problems. It de-legitimized philosophical thought as a means of solving political problems and destroyed our philosophy departments and possibly our civilization. It deprived us of history as the primary means of learning about humans and what they can do by what they have done. It inserted skepticism into the social sciences so that we denied human behavior and embraced an idea of human functional equality despite the fact that the vast differences in human abilities face us every day. It forced economists, or, rather, a few foolish economists, to think that they could derive formulae that describe human behavior that would emerge as rules that could be enforced upon people, so that the religious and legal/political establishment could be replaced with a merchant/political establishment promising, not order or salvation, but prosperity.

Argument is an extension of politics. Its purpose is political. Reason was developed to solve political problems of consensus and to help each other learn, to calculate that which we cannot without others, and to persuade others or ourselves to act in one way rather than another. If you destroy philosophy, myth, history, and debate, you destroy politics. You destroy cooperation. Politics is human cooperation.

We have been taking education in the wrong direction for a hundred years. Certainly since the early sixties, and so the claims that the economics profession has been invalidated by this economic crisis is understated, not exaggerated. We not only invalidated quantitative equilibrial economics, we invalidated our belief that science can solve problems of human cooperation. Science is the process of discovery. Cooperation is a process of invention. You discover what exists. You invent what does not. It is not possible to describe in finite terms what does not exist.

We never know anything for certain. The world is far too complex. Only know that we accumulate lots of perishable knowledge, largely in the form of history, which must be constantly reinterpreted in every generation. We can only reinterpret that knowledge by debating each other. And, while a simple person can learn the application of a formula, debate is a complex process and fewer of us can use it effectively. Formulae are part of the democratic mythos. Debate is part of the mythos of excellence, not egalitarianism. But egalitarian results can only be produced by the pursuit of excellence.