Why don’t we just rename each branch of econ operationally instead of geographically:
1 – Austrian: Economic Social Science.
2 – And then follow with Chicago: Economic Rule of Law.
3 – And follow finally with Saltwater: Economic Discretionary Spending.
There is plenty of reason there is such conflict between schools over method when the schools seek three different ends:
1 – Institutional improvement seeking to eliminate frictions and asymmetries of information.
2 – insurance against shocks and errors given asymmetries of information and natural frictions.
3 – disinformation to force corrections to the asymmetries of information and natural frictions.
There is no monopoly methodology to be found in social science. There are just actions we can take at different points in the inter-generational organization of production of offspring(families), goods and services(market), commons(govt), and polities(nations).
Each group specializes in their reproductive interests:
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good intergenerational families (Austrian/social-science),
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aspiring families (classical liberal / rule of law ),
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and unsuccessful families and their priesthoods (saltwater / progressive / discretionary spending)
When you argue (falsely) that some method is true or false for the purpose of providing a monopoly of decidability, then you’re engaging in fallacy. When you argue that we have only so many domains of action in economics, and that each school studies that means of action, that’s simply true. When you state that the consequences of three intertemporal strategies: eugenic long term, pragmatic medium term, and dysgenic short term, then just admit that’s what we’re doing.
The fact that we (a) try to create a monopoly framework of decision making from (b) a set of tools of limited utility, (c) serving different reproductive (and therefore class and race) strategies, then we are just making the same fallacy that monopoly majoritarian, first-past-the-post rule does: that we need a monopoly rather than a market in government and therefore a monopoly rather than a market in economics.
Let’s imagine for a minute that we had three houses of government, and that economists in each field held one house: austrian/social science, Chicago/rule-of-law, and freshwater/discretionary-rule .
Now let’s imagine that these three groups had to create a policy where all three compromised upon the result. What would we see? Smaller government(medium term) and better normative behavior(long term), in exchange for higher redistribution (short term).
Now let’s extend this model and ask why we don’t have a senate (Austrian), a house (freshwater), and a lower house (saltwater), and that these economists advised members of each house.
This is what we had in the old English system of monarchy, lords, house, and church.
We had a perfect government. The classical liberals were just wrong. Not all of us can or wish to, join the middle class. Most people simply wish to consume the most that they can with the least effort and risk. The rest of us want to compete for the crown.
There is very little new under the sun. Most human discourse is as polluted as the waters of Bangladesh with error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, propaganda pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and outright deceit.
Our rhetorical problems exist largely because it is so easy to engage in error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, propaganda, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and outright deceit.
And that problem exists only because, while we force producers to involuntarily warranty goods, involuntarily warranty services, we do not force them to involuntarily warranty their words.
Lying was industrialized by combining pseudoscience, propaganda, and diminution of standards of education by the elimination of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and economics from our education system.
So we have the perfect storm: the ability to saturate the environment with propaganda, a population insufficiently educated to falsify it, and no means of juridical defense by which a minority can prosecute it.
When we could create a perfect opposition: a population sufficiently educated to falsify it, a media with incentives to speak truthfully, and the juridical defense of the informational commons by which any minority can hold speakers accountable.
We cannot warranty perfection but for the purpose intended. What we can do is warranty that we have done due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, propaganda, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and outright deceit.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.