7. Decision-making
There are fads and fashions in the treatment of scientific problems and in the terminology of the scientific language.
8. Confirmation and Refutability
In the natural sciences a theory can be maintained only if it is in agreement with experimentally established facts. This agreement was, up to a short time ago, considered as confirmation. Karl Popper, in 1935, in Logik und Forschung3 pointed out that facts cannot confirm a theory; they can only refute it.
9. The Examination of Praxeological Theorems
The epistemologist who starts his lucubrations from the analysis of the methods of the natural sciences and whom blinders prevent from perceiving anything beyond this field tells us merely that the natural sciences are the natural sciences and that what is not natural science is not natural science. About the sciences of human action he does not know anything, and therefore all that he utters about them is of no consequence.
Mises Daily Thursday: Cryptocurrencies and a Wider Regression Theorem
If cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are being used as money, and if Carl Menger correctly tells us that money must have some kind of antecedent value, then as economists it becomes our job to discover what exactly is that antecedent value.
At a recent conference on cybercrime, Judge Richard Posner, a well-known federal appeals court judge and one of the founders of the “law and economics” movement, said that the needs of national security trump a supposed right to privacy. The NSA spying programs should be allowed to proceed unimpeded by the wishes of people to keep their private activities from the public.
8. Recent Writings on the Problems of Interventionism
In Germany, the classical country of interventionism, the need to deal seriously with an economic critique of interventionism was scarcely felt. Interventionism came to power without a fight. It could ignore the science of economics created by Englishmen and Frenchmen. Friedrich List denounced it as being injurious to the interests of the German people. Among the few German economists, Thünen was scarcely known, Gossen completely unknown, and Hermann and Mangold without much influence. Menger was “eliminated” in the Methodenstreit.
Dick Langlois on Joel Kayne’s new book, A History of Balance, 1250-1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2014):
7. The Historical and Practical Arguments for Interventionism
Put on the spot by economic criticism, the representatives of the Historical-Realistic School finally appeal to the “facts.” It cannot be denied, they assert, that all the theoretically unsuitable interventions were actually made, and continue to be made. We cannot believe, they contend, that economic practice did not notice this alleged unsuitability. But interventionist norms survived for hundreds of years, and since the decline of liberalism, the world is ruled again by interventionism.
6. The Doctrine of Intervention
To prescientific thinkers, a human society built on private property in the means of production seemed to be naturally chaotic. It received its order, so they thought, only from imposed precepts of morality and law. Society can exist only if buyer and seller observe justice and fairness. Government must intervene in order to avoid the evil that flows from an arbitrary deviation from the “just price.” This opinion prevailed in all remarks on social life until the eighteenth century. It appeared for the last time in all its naiveté in the writings of the mercantilists.
