I think it was a good step forward in our understanding of economics at the time, and I think a lot of what was proposed by this school of thought has stood the test of time.
On the other hand, this is a bit like asking what you think of Newtonian physics. It isn’t necessarily “wrong”, but it isnt what any real expert things is true anymore. No real economist is actually an Austrian anymore (… except, yaknow, actual Austrians…) - they are just economists, who study economics as a science rather than cloistering themselves into rigid schools of thought.
Im more Keynesian. I just wish they would do both sides of the scale rather than just tax cuts and interest rates in the us. increasing taxes, having rainy day funds
IIRC it’s Marxism for people who lean hard the other way.
C’mon, we’ve had nearly hundred years of economics nicely capturing real systems, and I still have to talk about both of these.
It’s a decent model. Models don’t have to be perfect, they just have to work good enough.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_school_of_economics#Fundamental_tenets
The only-the-individual-is-real, collectives/groups do not either think or act, as agents, is spectacularly rejecting evidence.
The psycologist/psychoanalyst/whatever to dug into the question “are we individuals, or are we groups”, to crack group-therapy, discovered that both is the ONLY valid-answer.
In Marganalism, they’re essentially re-discovering that principle identified by the root-guru of the Christians, that if a person only owns 1 shekel, & they give that, that is IMMENSE giving, compared with some wealthy person giving what they didn’t care about, no matter how much that was, compared with the median-income.
shudder seems divorced-from-reality, the more I read about it…
There are 2 books which combined give the understanding that “economics” education seems to … ignore?
Thom Hartmann’s book “Screwed” identified, in its beginning, what was wrong with all the other economics stuff I’d read, simply & clearly.
& the book “Who Gets What, and Why” is on how markets work, & what their requirements are, which really gives a better understanding of what Hartmann was pointing-out, that the normal economics … consistently misframes.
A fundamental point is that among nature democracy is normal ( animals ).
Not representative-republic, but democracy.
Among post-agriculture humans, however, feudalism, whether monarchy-anchored, or oligarchy-anchored, or corporate-feudalism, is normal.
Why?
Human-nature. ( the dark end of it )
Force-dismantling that dark nature’s mechanisms-of-ruling … that’s going to take SPINE, if any portion of humankind finds the courage to do it…
Force-emplacing evidence-based fixes, no matter what machiavellianism does … would be beneficial, for the people in that regime…
but it would take spine.
Anyways, until now I’d only known about their Marganalism principle, but now I know they’ve anchored on a whole-set of bogus, contradicted-by-evidence, principles, & … I don’t respect that kind of thing.
Thank you for prodding me into reading a bit more about 'em, though: actual-learning’s necessary…
LMAO … I just realized that they held that collective-action isn’t real, WHILE CORPORATIONS EXACTLY ARE COLLECTIVE-ACTION.
That’s about as ivory-tower divorced-from-actuality as anybody could possibly get, isn’t it?
_ /\ _
“Psychopathy is Good, Actually”
Most thoroughly debunked philosophy in all of history 🗑️
Well, it’s good for the oligarchs.
I think almost all schools of economics are polluted irreperably. Instead of a legitimate field of inquiry backed by scientific rigour, we have a billionaire dick-sucking contest; who can suck the best dick. Research, funding and public disemination is based on who can make the rich cum fastest and hardest. It’s not science, it’s porn.
Whatever narrative serves the few at the expense of anything and everything get the funding and media amplification. We are facing multiple existential crises simultaneously because economics has failed us completely and fought scientific consensus at every turn. It refused to accept obvious, hard fought and subtle truths instead of incorporating and adapting truths in exchange for the penis polishing of the rich. Austrian, doubly so.
So what is my assessment of Austrian economics? Answer: ** gestures broadly out the window. We have a few thousand extremely happy prosperous people on a dying planet. You tell me how well you think it’s doing.
Have you actually read much (real, contemporary, so not this) economics?
Sadly, yes. It’s plagued by externalities, the replicability crisis and a narrow minded neoliberal paradigm. It suffers from it’s own dogma, austrians especially. Deregulation is a key focus of austrian economics and its penispolishers despite the overwhelming dangers it presents. Instead of obvious corrections to identify safe limits between catastrophic deregulation and strangling over regulation they just spew the dogma and ignore the tragedy. Being co-opted by the fascists isn’t helping.
I was trained as an ecologist, and when I started digging into economics from Smith, Malthus, Keynes, Ricardo and Veblen I could start to see the mindset and could appreciate the insight an early incomplete nascent understanding of the field could bring.
When I started following modern economics it felt less illuminating and more tortured. Conclusions were wrong and dangerous things were being said. Stupid things were being held as truths. The reductionist view of translating everything into dollars and GDP without measuring the impacts of events and policies on systems, the people in them and the environment. The deliberate ignorance for economics refusing to adapt to advances in other disciplines. It’s as siloed an ivory tower as it gets.
When you can say the economic consequences of climate change can be mitigated by moving everything to airconditioned indoors for 5% of GDP and get a “Nobel” Prize, well, it puts the entire field in disrepute.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/the-cost-of-climate-change.html
Steve Keen says it better than I ever could.
I do not know of anyone being rejected there turn into a dictator yet.
It’s cringe
