Author: Curt Doolittle

RE: –“Why Modern Economics Is Built on a Lie w/ Bob Murphy”–
See:
https://
youtube.com/watch?v=hYtf9O
p3poA
…

Bob is pretty much always right. I’ll try to clarify:
a) Economics consist of high causal density.
b) Economic variables vary constantly in time.
c) Therefore economics is limited in its reducibility (Reducibility: {operational, algorithmic, mathematic, categorical, identity, naturalism, realism})
d) Therefore economics is more post-hoc descriptive than ex-ante predictive. (ergo: predictability is a property of reducibility, the lower the reducibility the more limited to descriptive.)
e) Therefore we can construct general rules of descriptive economics even if we are limited in general rules of predictive economics.
f) We can discuss economics in the same realm as any other science using operationaism and empiricism as long as we realize that the limit of reducibility is using natural indices (Labels) rather than cardinal (Numbers).
There is no need to carry such rules further into philosophical rationalism – it devolves into an analysis of language not cause and consequence. This was a mistake of the early 20th. Mises did not realize he had discovered operationalism in physics at the same time that operationalism (under various labels) was discovered in physics and mathematics. But he was captured by rationalism. Philosophy had not yet reached the dead end it had by the 1960s.
g) So just as euclidean geometry is a system of measurement for human scale, and fails and post-human-scale, economic rationalism is a system of measurement for human scale and fails at post-human scale.
h) Bob’s narrative of the comparison with geometry vs its limits, or Gödel’s theorem (which is a very limited arithmetic and so overused example) and its limits, is correct. All systems have limits. All systems must only account for closure within its limits.
The problem austrians face with the apriori is an unnecessary abstraction that does not improve anything that cannot be stated in scientific prose if we understand reducibility and indexability as I’ve stated here.
So it is better to attempt a formalism in rationalism (set theory) than cardinality, but then it is better to adopt a formalism in operationalism than rationalism. And we can leave the archaic reasoning of our ancestors behind.
i) All language constitutes a system of measurements. The question is only the precision given the demands of the context we wish to measure.

Cheers
Curt Doolittle
NLI

cc:
@BobMurphyEcon

@RobertBreedlove