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.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
It’s a decent model. Models don’t have to be perfect, they just have to work good enough.
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.
Okay, good. I asked because most people that say this definitely haven’t. You have to appreciate that, independent of what it’s used for, they can replicate certain things about the real economy with pretty remarkable precision.
The deliberate ignorance for economics refusing to adapt to advances in other disciplines.
Do you have something in specific you’re thinking of? As far as I can tell the nakedcapitalism example takes issue with the heuristic Nordhaus uses, but it’s not actually inconsistent with climate science, as opposed to just very simple.
Do you have something in specific you’re thinking of?
Yes the Steve Keen link I suplied for one. ~ “Don’t study economics, study system dynamics then apply yourself to your curiosities.”
Also in the other link, when MIT came up with World3 model, the scientists were excited thinking economists were going to love this new development. They were shocked to see it rejected, because it didn’t fit the dogma, and definitely didn’t help anyone get rich. That was 1972. Here we are in 2025 facing multiple existential crises and economists are still spouting limitless bullshit about endless potential of human ingenuity, and economic substitution will progress endlessly. They are allergic to limits. Only economists and mathematicians believe in infinites, and only mathematicians are right because they study in a bubble of theory unbound by reality.
A stolen joke reappropriated:
Mathematicians build castles in the sky. Economists move into them. Capitalists collect the rent.
As far as I can tell the nakedcapitalism example takes issue with the heuristic Nordhaus uses, but it’s not actually inconsistent with climate science, as opposed to just very simple.
Nordhause’s recomendations to the IPCC are catastrophically wrong.
4°C optimal you say? At least 40% decline in agriculture. Incomprehensible loss of biodiversity risking catastrophic collapse of keystone species, like pollinators. Deaths of billions directly due to climate extremes and more due to geopolitical conflict. The likelyhood of non-anthropogenic emissions taking off due to tipping points that mean that stopping human emissions at 4C means nothing in terms of stopping warming as natural sources of GHG will dwarf anything we ever did. The warming will continue until a new equillibrium is found. How many humans on earth, eeking out a meek existence near the arctic then? Strange use of the word “optimal”.
Calling Nordhause “very simple” is like calling a medical researcher who moved the recomended dose of daily dietary lead 4 decimal places over. Tee hee, ooops! *giggle.
His recomendations to the IPCC are ringing a death bell. It’s the kind of thinking a rich man of priviledge gives to his rich buddies as a farwell dick suck because he will be dead of natural causes before the consequences knock on his door.
He is an intellectual fraud.
I mean, you had to know I wasn’t going to read the long article and watch an hour and a half of video because you said it’s articulate. And that’s not unreasonable. The first video is just generic life advice.
I’m not doing PR for Nordhause, so I’ll just say okay to the rest. Most economists don’t seriously think 4C sounds fine. Many of them enjoy coral reefs, even.
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”
I do not know of anyone being rejected there turn into a dictator yet.
It’s cringe
