Walter block sent out a survey to the Mises blog in support of some research he has been doing. In it, he asks, what problems should Austrians solve? I read the list, and, thought that almost none of the categories of interest were actually problems that needed solving.
The problems that economists need to solve are not those which derive from the antiquated process of pooling, or aggregating quantities into categories. We know that aggregation of categories a failure as a strategy. We know that we must apply statistical methods across periods of differing utility and differing sentiments in order to find correlations from which we can deduce theories of causation. It is a loose set of tools for a complex world.
The problem is to define institutions that would allow us to posses knowledge of human activities so that we can measure distortions of policy. The problem is institutions and data. It is not how to further plumb the depths of error – to divine nonsense from the nonsensical.
The problem is our institutions.