Quote:
Originally Posted by u-Bob
snip....Night of Clarity
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Mainstream economists and the overwhelming majority of higher education in economics considers the Austrian school to be social theorists more so than economists. They are shunned because they don?t provide anything that is considered robust economic analysis. They provide no formulas or mathematical models. It's ideology, not economics.
And clearly there?s no shortage of nut jobs who use the Austrian school to support their economic conspiracy theories. Coincidence? I think not.
Austrian School:
Critics have concluded that modern Austrian economics generally lacks scientific rigor, which forms the basis of the most prominent criticism of the school. Austrian theories are not formulated in formal mathematical form, but by using mainly verbal logic and what proponents claim are self-evident axioms. Mainstream economists believe that this makes Austrian theories too imprecisely defined to be clearly used to explain or predict real world events. Economist Bryan Caplan noted that, "what prevents Austrian economists from getting more publications in mainstream journals is that their papers rarely use mathematics or econometrics."
A related criticism is applied to Austrian School leaders; these leaders have advocated a rejection of methods which involve directly using empirical data in the development of (falsifiable) theories; application of empirical data is fundamental to the scientific method. In particular, Austrian School leader, Ludwig von Mises, has been described as the mid-20th century's "archetypal 'unscientific' economist." Mises wrote of his economic methodology that "its statements and propositions are not derived from experience... They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts."
Murray Rothbard was also an adherent of Mises's methodology, and though Rothbard assigned a quasi-empirical description to it, he comments that "it should be obvious that this type of 'empiricism' is so out of step with modern empiricism that I may just as well continue to call it a priori for present purposes". Additionally, the prominent Austrian economist, F. A. Hayek, stated his belief that social science theories can "never be verified or falsified by reference to facts." Such rejections of empirical evidence in economics by Austrian School leaders have led to the school being dismissed within the mainstream.