Economics Questions

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

John James — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 12:05:28 GMT

Smiling Dave:
Yep, that's the one.

If that's the case, I wonder if Selgin is including that Mises Daily in his criticism, and claiming Danny is lying.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Smiling Dave — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 11:00:45 GMT

Easy SD. You don't want another month. Just something to consider.

Read Horwitz's article. Decide for yourself if I'm right.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Smiling Dave — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 10:44:38 GMT

Smiling Dave is exactly why we can't have nice things.

Oh, you will have plenty of nice things, Student, now Bernanke is going to end the recession. He's doing just what you want, no?

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Clayton — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 06:33:25 GMT

don't laugh at us. We are the good guys. We know math, too.

Nice.

I think there is this unspoken assumption in the debate over the applicability of mathematics to economics that math is somehow "more irrefutably true" than plain language explanation of the same ideas. This is, of course, nonsense. Every mathematical expression can be translated into natural language. After all, the symbols are just shorthand for natural language statements. "The sum of three and four is seven."

The fact is that mathematical language is strictly less powerful than natural language. That is, everything that can be proved in mathematical language can also be proved in natural language, but not the other way around. So, mathematical language is merely a specialized subset of natural language.

When we look at the concepts, mathematical concepts are based on abstract conventions that are rooted in language. Steven Pinker talks about this here (the "intuitive theory of physics" embedded in human language). So the concepts of mathematics are no more foundational than any other concepts in human language. We just have this unspoken bias in much of science that assigns some kind of foundational role to mathematical concepts that is superior to the foundations of other concepts.

And the hard-to-kill attitude that drives this is the prospect of a "closed canon" of mathematics - the idea that mathematicians might one day discover a complete and consistent mathematics that could act as the foundation for a complete and consistent theory of physics, that is, a Theory of Everything. But this hope has been dispelled since at least 1931 when Godel published his incompleteness theorems.

On every count, we see that vaunting of mathematics to some kind of foundational status is a mistake. It's not even necessarily a sinister mistake, perhaps it is driven by the era of quantification that we are living in. But the bias towards mathematics as being more irrefutable, more solid or more foundational than other lines of inquiry is mistaken - it is simply incorrect.

Clayton -

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

John James — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 05:22:31 GMT

It's a forum on the Internet. And the owners of it don't even seem to like it or care about it. I can understand the last time, as there was borderline insult of a faculty member. But I see no real issue here.

Obviously the owners of the server space can do whatever they want to an online forum but I'd say this one begins to end the day people start getting banned for anything in this thread.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Wheylous — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 04:57:58 GMT

Easy SD. You don't want another month. Just something to consider.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Student — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 04:53:14 GMT

Smiling Dave is exactly why we can't have nice things.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Smiling Dave — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 00:07:42 GMT

Yep, that's the one.

The underlying tone is "Mainstream, don't laugh at us. We are the good guys. We know math, too."

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

John James — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 22:49:42 GMT

...we're not talking about this Horwitz essay, are we? Cuz that would be kind of funny.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Selgin — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 21:51:52 GMT

That's <i>Horwitz</i>.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Smiling Dave — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 20:04:08 GMT

P.S. to SmilinDave: I'm a great Hazlitt fan, and I never disparaged non-academic Austrians as such. Had you really read Horwitz (I do not believe your claim to have done so) you'd know why I referred to "bona fide" academics.

In that case, apology accepted.

And, as Ripley is my witness, I read that Hurwitz article.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Selgin — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 18:48:20 GMT

Clayton, nowhere in my article to I suggest that I disagree with Mises view that you can't derive "economic laws" using regressions. Like SmilingDave and Adam Knott, you seem to have done a poor job of reading what I wrote, assuming that you actually read it at all. Here for the record is the relevant passage from my article:

"there is something between merely checking to see whether an occurrence satisfies all of the “contingent claims” needed to apply a particular theory to it, and pretending that you can construct economic theories using regression coefficients. What’s in between is trying to arrive at an informed estimate of just how much of any observed phenomenon an applicable theory explains and, when there are several equally applicable theories, their relative worth."

Do you see that word "pretending"? Do you not understand that that is agreeing with Mises on the matter of not being able to use regressions to construct theoretical laws?

I could go on with many other examples, but the main point I wish to make, to those following this forum who are innocent of the ways of certain "hard-core" Rothbardo-Misesians, is that they should heed the principle of caveat emptor, and note that much of what is passed of as fair criticism here is just plain lying.

P.S. to SmilinDave: I'm a great Hazlitt fan, and I never disparaged non-academic Austrians as such. Had you really read Horwitz (I do not believe your claim to have done so) you'd know why I referred to "bona fide" academics.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Smiling Dave — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:36:06 GMT

To the OP.

Selgin's attack on Rothbard has nothing to do with ethics. In the very excerpt you quoted, he writes about "the potential utility" of printing money that Rothbard denies. Meaning even if we all agree on the ethics, Rothbard is saying printing money will not help the economy as a whole, and Selgin thinks it will.

If he's lurking here still, you could ask him.

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Smiling Dave — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 14:09:46 GMT

Massachets paper money had a declared value, and was accepted in payment of taxes.

Bitcoin is not generally accepted.

My humble blog [and especially the comments] spells it all out: http://smilingdavesblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/bitcoin-all-in-one-place/

Re: George A. Selgin's critique of praxeology

Selgin — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:49:32 GMT

Hi Nielsio. I am a bit puzzled by your question, as I do not at all think Mises regression theorem inconsistent with Menger's. On the contrary: I believe it perfectly consistent. Some of my thoughts concerning it are in my JMCB paper "On ensuring the acceptability of a new fiat money." I confess, though, that my views there are challened by certain episodes, including the Massachussetts colonial paper money and bitcoin.