Category: Epistemology and Method

IS IT A CONTRADICTION TO ACCEPT BOTH AUSTRIAN OPERATIONAL, AND EMPIRICAL CORRELATIONAL METHODOLOGIES?

QUESTION: –“Is it a contradiction to accept Austrian theories (ie. business cycle theory) but to also accept empirical methodology?”– Robert Beattie

ANSWER:

Argh. No!

Austrian Economics is best understood as a higher scientific standard, wherein any instrumental observation (regular correlation), must also be operationally constructed (existentially possible) in order to be testified as truthful. (In common vernacular:true).

A sequence of sympathetically testable human operations in economics are identical in class to a sequence of possible mathematical operations in mathematics: they determine existential possibility.

In mathematics we explore using the same operations as instruments as we do to construct our proofs: the analogy to truth in math. We use the same descriptions to explore with and demonstrate with. But that coincidence is unique to mathematics.

In the study of human activity that we call economics we explore using many different instruments to arrive at a theory – most of which are the evidence of demonstrated preference recored as monetary transactions – but unless we can explain that theory as the RESULT of a sequence of sympathetically testable human operations, then it is not existentially possible, and as such the theory cannot be truthfully testified to be ‘true’. The impossible cannot be true.

But unlike mathematical operations in the construction of proofs, or physical transformations in physical science – a violation of which are merely an error in understanding, recording, measuring, testing, which may cause others to bear costs in order to refute – when we make untrue statements in economic policy, WE CAUSE THEFTS.

Unfortunately Mises intuits this approximate way to articulate the difference in disciplines, but as a German rationalist and Jewish hermeneuticist, rather than anglo analytic and empiricist, he made a pseudoscientific proposal instead: praxeology.

As far as I know, in my work I have corrected this error and restated the Austrian position in ratio scientific terms.

EINSTEIN, BRIDGMAN, BROUWER, HOPPE,

Hoppe came very close to figuring it out but was too committed to imprecision of aprioism and rationalism – both of which are of limited use and only of use at human scale, just as Newtonian physics is limited in scale.

Poincare was the most vocal critic of analogistic pseudosciences (correlation is just a form of empirical analogy not an operational description). It was Einstein who demonstrated that apriorism was dead by showing that if we cannot depend upon such basic premises as time and length then we can depend upon no premises, and Bridgman, Brouwer, and Bishop that explained why we cannot depend upon premises: because only operations expose changes in the properties of premises that analogies (words) obscure and imply are constant.

So for those of us that correctly intuit that something is immoral and wrong with Keyesian and New-Keynesian macro, we are partly right: correlative economics was expressly invented to obscure the systems of redistribution and theft that such policies perpetuate. Analogies, even if they are empirical or rational, are still merely analogies, and only operations can be demonstrated to be true. Analogies are good for the transfer of meaning – and to some degree they are necessary for the purpose of condensing into the verbal and mental equivalent of functions that which is too complex to understand as a series of operations (counting numbers and the square root of two are the most obvious examples). But analogies are not the same as truths, any more than adding colorful and illustrious details to on a witness stand is telling the truth.

CLOSING

Austrian economics then is a higher constraint upon truth telling: it is the study of moral economics and Keynesian macro is the study of immoral economics. This is a simple unavoidably proposition without possibility of refutation. The question of economic science is instead- how can w increase the volume of economic activity without committing immoral acts? This is what separates moral Austrian Economics from immoral correlative economics.

Truth and volition are central to western civilization and unique to western political systems. Marxist, Keynesian, Freudian, Cantorian, Misesian pseudosciences are violations of the central competitive strategy of western civilization: truth before the jury of ones peers, the hight trust that evolves from pervasive truth telling, and the velocity of economy that develops from trust.

Cheers.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute,

Kiev

See Horowitz for more colloquial language

http://www.cato-unbound.org/…/empirics-austrian-economics