Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

PART 3 – THE DEFEAT OF JARED HOWE, AND BY EXTENSION THE ENTIRETY OF ‘AUSTRIAN’ ECONOMIC PSEUDOSCIENCE. Jared Howe, I think you’re just a disingenuous at this point, and using the very method of mandated ignorance I accuse mises and rothbard of, of kant of by claiming special pleading for general rules of behavior. You see, while you can identify possible truth propositions with justificationary reasoning, you cannot prevent false propositions with justificationary reasoning – that requires competition. Or what we call ’empiricism’: the competition between the ideal and the real. —“You’re still contradicting yourself by rejecting the validity of a priorism via a priori truth statements”— But what did I say actually? I said apriorism in economics is demonstrably insufficient for the identification of *all* economic phenomenon (including both general rules, variations from those general rules.) I said economics was indifferent from the others sciences in that it required survival from a competition between the analytic(thought), logical(words), existential(actions). And that all economic phenomenon have proven to be resistant to deduction even if they are not resistant to operational (praxeologica) explanation through sympathetic reconstruction of a series of actions taken in response to available incentives. I claimed that empirically, unavoidably, we have observed, that all truth claims about reality are contingent, including in economics. That even the a prior of ‘length’, ‘space’ and ‘time’ were false. For example, “all other things being equal, increasing the minimum wage will increase unemployment” is not true in general, and is not true in all cases. In other words, it is a synthetic, contingent, a priori proposition. Which is a pseudoscientific posturing – a way of saying ‘a general rule’. I am not claiming that spectrum of categories which kant referred to as a priori, are false so much as that they reflect dimensions of reality, that the scientific method is superior in describing and testing. A Priori: “independent of observation.” There are three dimensions to claims of a priori truth claim: i) Aprioricity vs A posteriori, ii) Analyticity vs Syntheticity, and iii) Necessity vs Contingency Therefore we can produce at least the following spectrum of a priori claims. (a) Analytic A Priori: tautological: 2+2=4 and all deductions thereof. (c) Necessary Synthetic A Priori: Childless women will have no grandchildren. (b) “General” Synthetic A Priori : Increasing money increases inflation. (d) Contingent Synthetic A Priori: “all other things being equal, as a general trend, increasing demand will increase supply, although we cannot know the composition of that supply in advance, we can identify it from recorded evidence.” This produces a an ordered spectrum of declining precision: (a) Identity(categorical consistency) – Analytic A Priori (b) Logical:(internal consistency) – Nec. Synthetic a priori (c) Empirical: (external consistency) – Gen. Synth. a priori (d) Existential: (operational consistency) – Cont. Synth. a priori Both Mises and Rothbard confess to this later in life. Sorry. It is what it is. They realized they had failed. Economics is like any other science “a mix of the empirical and operational”. And the praxeological movement and all that was related to it crumbled as nothing more than a pseudoscientific resistance movement against the continuing progress of science. Competition between the rational and the real. Markets in knowledge just like markets in everything else. There is no justificationary reasoning available to man for real world phenomenon. WELCOME TO THE REAL. You are currently in the heavy-resistance phase, as the entire cosmopolitan program comes crashing down, including the marxist-postmodern, libertine-libertarian, and neo-conservative, as well as the social democratic and classical liberal. That is because all the enlightenment views of man and all the enlightenment counter-reactions against the progress of the scientific method (criticism) by various methods of justification(justificationism) have been demonstrated to be false. Man was not oppressed by aristocracy. He was a beast that a small minority of gifted martial aristocrats domesticated from animal, to slave, to serf, to freeman, to citizen resulting in the diminution of the lower and increase in the middle and upper middle classes through reproductive suppression, war, starvation, and aggressive hanging. Man is a rational actor for whom cooperation is possible and generally superior choice. But at all times he chooses moral or immoral action by little more than either habit or accounting of consequences. And as such we invented the natural common law of reciprocity since no matter how complex our social orders, all conflicts over demonstrated investments are decidable by tests of reciprocity. There is but one epistemological method and that is the the market for competition for consistency between the dimensions, and the market for competition for consistent application in reality. And because of that competition, both truth and lie can survive. If only because it is cheaper to produce deception than truth. Cheers.