Laudato Si
The classically liberal economic tradition I utilize around here is generally the Austrian method. An explanation of why I believe this economic/legal path to be the correct one is present in the following ten reasons why Austrian economics is better than any other school.
1. Austrian economists make it their priority to make sure that the theorems they formulate are derived from self-evident axioms and constructed according to the proper rules of logical deduction. These considerations are at best of secondary importance to their mainstream colleagues.
2. Austrian economists make it their priority to make sure that the assumptions they base their theorems on are thoroughly realistic, i.e., corresponding to the state of the world as it is. Mainstream economists, on the other hand, admit that their hypotheses are based on deliberately false assumptions.
3. Austrian economists make it their priority to make sure that the theorems they formulate elucidate exact causal connections between economic phenomena, rather than deliberately assuming away their existence or importance by falling back on the physics-inspired notion of mutual determination.
4. The predictive track record of Austrian economists is incomparably superior to that of their mainstream counterparts (see, e.g., here and here).
5. The theorems and conclusions of Austrian economics are perfectly comprehensible to every intelligent layman, which cannot be said about the mathematical puzzles of mainstream economics.
6. In terms of their views on the method and aims of economic theorizing, Austrian economists have a much better claim than their mainstream colleagues to being the heirs and successors of the classical economists, such as Smith, Hume, Say, and Bastiat.
7. Austrian economists never tire of emphasizing the strictly value-free character of their discipline. Thus, unlike their mainstream counterparts, they never presume that the existence of any non-voluntary extra-market institution is justified, and, a fortiori, never make any “public policy recommendations” based on such presumptions. On the contrary, they confine their scholarly research to investigating the logical origins and outcomes of various economic processes and phenomena as they are, not as they would like them to be.
8. Identifying the concept of demonstrated preference as the keystone of economic analysis allows Austrian economists to avoid the twin pitfalls of behaviorism and psychologism, which their mainstream colleagues cannot navigate in any principled and methodologically robust manner.
9. Austrian economists reject academic and professional hyperspecialization in their discipline, thus stressing the holistic, integrated nature of the science of economics. In the words of F. A. Hayek, “the physicist who is only a physicist can still be a first-class physicist and a most valuable member of society. But nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist – and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger”.
10. Austrian economists cannot retreat into the safe haven of epistemological nihilism when the logic of their arguments turns out to be faulty. Mainstream economists, on the other hand, when the facts fail to correspond to their hypotheses, can always claim that “this time things are different”, which is a straightforward implication of the fact that any given set of sufficiently complex empirical data is compatible with a number of mutually exclusive empirical (but not logical) interpretations.
For those of you that have not dropped off the column after wading through those ten reasons, here are ten commonly-cited critiques of Austrianism that you might be aware of if you are delving deeper into the economic “sciences”:
- Bryan Caplan- Why I am Not An Austrian Economist
- The Austrian School is an example of Crank Science
- The Hangover Theory – Paul Krugman
- Some Capital-Theoretic Fallacies of Austrian Economics – Robert L. Vienneau
I believe the first article to be the best – or at least it is clear that Caplan actually understands Austrianism as opposed to the tomfoolery of the other articles – of all of them.
On a related note, the following:
- Does Stimulus Work? – The Empirical Case(s) (Bottom line: over the short term, aggregate spending is increased, but in the long term stimulus programs do more harm than good.)
- Arthur Laffer’s comment on the results of the above studies.