4 ms·

Rothbard has gaps, but he's light-years past most. Never trust "historical evidence" when it comes to economics. There are no controlled experiments, and the w

by mhartl 17y ago

Rothbard has gaps, but he's light-years past most. Never trust "historical evidence" when it comes to economics. There are no controlled experiments, and the winners write the books. In this case, there are four concepts masquerading as two. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058639 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058639.

philwelch 17y ago
What "evidence" is there to trust, other than Rothbard's amateur philosophizing?
- mhartl 17y ago
  Evidence in economics is messy---and political. Trust logic instead. Of course monetary contraction causes deflation; you don't need evidence to tell you that when people have less money, ceteris paribus prices will fall. As far as the "gold standard" goes, beware: most so-called historical "gold standards" are not gold-as-money, but rather some weird bastardized version, such as "paper currency (partially) backed by gold". As I said: messy. This conflation serves the interests of those who benefit from manipulating the money supply. Messy, and political. I take it you mean Rothbard is "amateur" in the pejorative sense. Have you read Rothbard? He is many things; "amateur" is not one of them.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    "Evidence in economics is messy---and political. Trust logic instead." The problem is, Rothbard's logic is also every bit as political as, say, Marx's logic. You're talking to someone who was a confirmed libertarian, Austrian sympathizer, and Ayn Rand enthusiast from roughly the age of 16 to maybe 20 or so. I know the arguments and I know inside and outside the kind of thinking they come from, which is simply put, a tendentious effort to justify one particular political ideology over another. That is the exact opposite of what any science should aspire to, even economics. And that is the sin Rothbard is guilty of, a sin he relentlessly accuses others of in order to distract from his own guilt. This is not to say he in specific, or the Austrians in general, were totally bereft of good ideas--just that their ideas should not be taken as proven unless tested. You're suggesting the scientific equivalent of "the code looks reasonable so there's no need to test it".
    - mhartl 17y ago
      I certainly don't agree with everything Rothbard or other Austrians say, and indeed I agree that their greatest errors are driven by ideology. (And despite my general sympathy with Ayn Rand, this goes triple for her and her followers.) That being said, a substantial subset of economics is analogous not, as you say, to a programmer saying the code looks reasonable, so there's no need to test it but rather to a mathematician saying the proof is correct, so there's no need to test it That is, what is the point of testing the Pythagorean Theorem? Perhaps we should measure a bunch of triangles? Why would you do that, when you have a proof? And yet, many people seem to believe that, e.g., raising the minimum wage might not (ceteris paribus) raise unemployment. They even sometimes collect "evidence" that it doesn't! (See, e.g., the paper by Card & Krueger showing a rise in employment after a minimum-wage hike, which Bill Clinton used as political cover to get Congress raise the minimum wage.) Of course, you'd better be double-sure your proof is right, and I agree that the Austrians sometimes fall down on this point (Rand, triply so). But their approach is right: economics, correctly done, is much closer to mathematics than it is to physics. N.B. I too am a reformed libertarian-Objectivist, and I too know the arguments forward and backward; I could crush a traditional libertarian in a debate, because I know the weaknesses all too well. But it seems that my ultimate parting of ways with them has taken me in the opposite direction from yours. You see, I'm even more radical (or, rather, reactionary) than they are. :-)
      - philwelch 17y ago
        Mathematics doesn't deal with the real world, nor does it use induction (in the normal sense of the term--mathematicans use the word "induction" to refer to a type of recursive proof method, but inductive logic is the method of reasoning general rules from particular pieces of evidence). Triangles are an abstract concept that abide to rules that we make up, and if we make up a different set of rules, triangles no longer obey them. That's why simply measuring triangles doesn't work. Economics does deal with the real world, and like any other science it's subject to the demands of empiricism rather than merely the demands of logic. You can use logical and mathematical reasoning to come to a lot of useful conclusions in physics, for instance, but we're constantly substantiating those by experiment as well, and occasionally we are wrong. (Use Newtonian mechanics to calculate the orbit of Mercury and it won't match.) Do you really think that human behavior is so much more simple than physics that we can model it without evidence at all?

by mhartl 17y ago

philwelch 17y ago

What "evidence" is there to trust, other than Rothbard's amateur philosophizing?

mhartl 17y ago
Evidence in economics is messy---and political. Trust logic instead. Of course monetary contraction causes deflation; you don't need evidence to tell you that when people have less money, ceteris paribus prices will fall. As far as the "gold standard" goes, beware: most so-called historical "gold standards" are not gold-as-money, but rather some weird bastardized version, such as "paper currency (partially) backed by gold". As I said: messy. This conflation serves the interests of those who benefit from manipulating the money supply. Messy, and political. I take it you mean Rothbard is "amateur" in the pejorative sense. Have you read Rothbard? He is many things; "amateur" is not one of them.
- philwelch 17y ago
  "Evidence in economics is messy---and political. Trust logic instead." The problem is, Rothbard's logic is also every bit as political as, say, Marx's logic. You're talking to someone who was a confirmed libertarian, Austrian sympathizer, and Ayn Rand enthusiast from roughly the age of 16 to maybe 20 or so. I know the arguments and I know inside and outside the kind of thinking they come from, which is simply put, a tendentious effort to justify one particular political ideology over another. That is the exact opposite of what any science should aspire to, even economics. And that is the sin Rothbard is guilty of, a sin he relentlessly accuses others of in order to distract from his own guilt. This is not to say he in specific, or the Austrians in general, were totally bereft of good ideas--just that their ideas should not be taken as proven unless tested. You're suggesting the scientific equivalent of "the code looks reasonable so there's no need to test it".
  - mhartl 17y ago
    I certainly don't agree with everything Rothbard or other Austrians say, and indeed I agree that their greatest errors are driven by ideology. (And despite my general sympathy with Ayn Rand, this goes triple for her and her followers.) That being said, a substantial subset of economics is analogous not, as you say, to a programmer saying the code looks reasonable, so there's no need to test it but rather to a mathematician saying the proof is correct, so there's no need to test it That is, what is the point of testing the Pythagorean Theorem? Perhaps we should measure a bunch of triangles? Why would you do that, when you have a proof? And yet, many people seem to believe that, e.g., raising the minimum wage might not (ceteris paribus) raise unemployment. They even sometimes collect "evidence" that it doesn't! (See, e.g., the paper by Card & Krueger showing a rise in employment after a minimum-wage hike, which Bill Clinton used as political cover to get Congress raise the minimum wage.) Of course, you'd better be double-sure your proof is right, and I agree that the Austrians sometimes fall down on this point (Rand, triply so). But their approach is right: economics, correctly done, is much closer to mathematics than it is to physics. N.B. I too am a reformed libertarian-Objectivist, and I too know the arguments forward and backward; I could crush a traditional libertarian in a debate, because I know the weaknesses all too well. But it seems that my ultimate parting of ways with them has taken me in the opposite direction from yours. You see, I'm even more radical (or, rather, reactionary) than they are. :-)
    - philwelch 17y ago
      Mathematics doesn't deal with the real world, nor does it use induction (in the normal sense of the term--mathematicans use the word "induction" to refer to a type of recursive proof method, but inductive logic is the method of reasoning general rules from particular pieces of evidence). Triangles are an abstract concept that abide to rules that we make up, and if we make up a different set of rules, triangles no longer obey them. That's why simply measuring triangles doesn't work. Economics does deal with the real world, and like any other science it's subject to the demands of empiricism rather than merely the demands of logic. You can use logical and mathematical reasoning to come to a lot of useful conclusions in physics, for instance, but we're constantly substantiating those by experiment as well, and occasionally we are wrong. (Use Newtonian mechanics to calculate the orbit of Mercury and it won't match.) Do you really think that human behavior is so much more simple than physics that we can model it without evidence at all?