“Animism ascribed to all things of the universe the faculty of action. When experience moved people to drop this belief, it was still assumed that God or nature acts in a way not different from the ways of human action. The emancipation from this anthropomorphism is one of the epistemological foundations of modern natural science.”
—Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method
Daniel Kuehn objects to my referring to Austrian economists testifying in Washington as “Misesians in Mordor.”
With every new leap of technology, we hear cries that the Age of Abundance is dawning and that we must reject the old economics of scarcity for the new economics of abundance. At the tail end of the technological boom of the the 1920s, John Maynard Keynes foretold that his contemporaries’ grandchildren would be living in an era of abundance as long as interest rates were driven down to zero to overcome the artificial scarcity of capital.
Krugman gets a bit snippy at 48:20. His objection is confused. He says Professor Schwartz tried to criticize his credentials. But Schwartz criticized Krugman for going beyond his capabilities, not for going beyond his credentials.
Schwartz makes a strong point about the “ratchet effect” in government policy at 1:09:00. He credits “ratchet effect” studies to the Public Choice school, although of course, it’s mainly an insight of Robert Higgs’, who isn’t usually classed as a Public Choice economist.
In an article published last week, I reviewed, in not altogether favorable terms, Stefan Molyneux’s book Universally Preferable Behavior.
“A social system based on this natural position regarding the assignment of property rights is, and will from now on be called, pure capitalist. And since its ideas can be discerned as the dominating ideas of private law, i.e., of the norms regulating relations between private persons, it might also be termed a pure private law system....This system is based on the idea that to be non-aggressive, claims to property must be backed by the “objective” fact of an act of original appropriation, of previous ownership, or by a mutually beneficial
An amusing thing about Friedmanite positivism is its remarkable naïveté about how empirical social science research is actually done. Quantitative empirical analysis in practice is nothing at all like the model described in Friedman (1953). Results are rarely conclusive. Disagreement (and fighting) is widespread. Some theories are so widely believed that no amount of empirical evidence will dislodge them.
