Transient Meteor

@HayekianBanker He’s also the “sticky prices and sticky wages don’t exist because NUH UH” guy. Truly one for the ages.

The "everytime money is held so we are always in equilibrium" guy is speaking, listen and take notes if you want to learn something insightful.

@GeorgeSelgin It’s a billion times easier to prove how different assumptions in formal model yield different outcomes. Arguing with an Austrian over assumptions or deductions made by Mises goes no where and always gets caught in semantics. The point is to confuse, not educate, not further econ

As if no economist ever managed to smuggle bullshit into a formal model!

Exactly. Mises economics isn’t built off of a priori truths. He smuggles in unstated assumptions left and right to get the conclusions he wants. It can’t be modeled mathematically because it’s not logically consistent.

@BobMurphyEcon @mises Woah, I didn’t realize you were so sensitive. Did your doctor give you skin thinners instead of blood thinners? I was joking, but my serious point on this topic is that it’s hilarious how Austrian economists deny empirical data even when it agrees with your ideas.

There is not a single false sentence in what Peter or I said. I love Bohm-Bawerk and wrote a dissertation defending him from critics (even Mises and Rothbard). If you're just being funny OK, but it sounds like you think we're doing something wrong when no we're not. We didn't say "This paper is worthless" we made a series of true statements I'm sorry that triggered you.

These Harvard economists illustrate a pattern: what the mainstream calls "Austrian capital theory" focuses on the very element of Bohm-Bawerk that modern Austrians reject. Sorta like a Freudian today doesn't think you want to sleep with your mother.

@RishiJoeSanu The Left should reclaim the term “libertarian.” Right wing free-market nuts like yourself took it from anti-state socialists who defend actual freedom.

Libertarians should reclaim the term 'liberal'. In non-Anglophone nations, liberalism functionally means libertarianism. If you've watched Javier Milei's Spanish speeches, he calls himself a liberal.

this but unironically

Research is showing trans girls are 19% kg for kg weaker than c_s girls and and they have less leg strength and lower endurance levels than c_s girls. Alvares & colleagues suggests that trans women can produce less force per gram of muscle than both c_sgender women & c_sgender men and combined with VO2 peak/FFM findings, possible cellular dysfunction in the muscle of trans women [Alvares et al., 2022]. An INTERNATIONAL LEVEL trans woman CYCLIST in this study demonstrated an ~15% LOSS of aerobic capacity with 3 months of GAHT & a 19-33% & 15-30% LOSS of lower and upper body strength respectively with 18 months of GAHT. That’s massive… repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesi… x.com/kirstimiller30…

“I’m 14 and politically sophisticated” list of economists

@HayekianBanker Austrian economics asks the important question: “But can’t I just sit in my chair and think of what the best economic policy is?” and the Austrian answer is “duh! The real world doesn’t matter.”

How austrians who have never read anything beyond their cult see the history of economic thought:

Capitalism gives people a choice

It’s always the ones you most suspect

@SerioJoshehe “I killed them because I found out they’re trans” is a LEGAL defense in the majority of US states. You have the right to not be killed for who you are. That right isn’t protected for trans people.

Can anyone tell me one right, that a normal person has, that a trans person doesn’t? Just 1. Because if it’s ’to go to the toilet they feel comfortable in’ I’m not comfortable in any men’s public toilet, they’re all disgusting, but that doesn’t mean I get to decide to use the women’s. People confuse rights with what they really, really want.

Ah yes, the based position of “one genocide is okay, the other is bad” 🤡

@HoodDented @handre He wasn’t a pedophile, this guy just hates gay people so he thinks all gay men are pedos. He’s not libertarian at all and has no regard for the truth.

@handre What's the point of making it about whether Keynes was a pedo. The truth of economic theories doesn't change whether someone is a pedo or not

Carl Menger destroyed two thousand years of economic fallacy with a single insight in 1871: value is subjective, existing only in the mind of the individual valuer. The classical economists—from Adam Smith to David Ricardo—had spent centuries chasing their tails, convinced that value somehow resided in objects themselves, whether through labor content or production costs. Menger obliterated this nonsense by pointing out the obvious: a glass of water means nothing to a man by a river but everything to one dying of thirst in the desert. This breakthrough wasn't just academic—it was revolutionary. By grounding value in human choice and preference, Menger laid the foundation for understanding how markets actually work. Prices don't reflect some mystical "intrinsic worth" but emerge from countless individuals making subjective judgments about their personal wants and needs. And this happens spontaneously, without any central planner needed to "coordinate" anything. The implications were devastating to statist economics before statist economics even fully existed. If value is subjective, then government price controls become acts of pure violence—bureaucrats literally imposing their subjective valuations on millions of others through force. If value emerges from individual choice, then socialism becomes impossible by definition. You cannot centrally plan what exists only in the minds of individuals. But the establishment couldn't let this stand. The subjective theory of value made government intervention look like what it is: economic barbarism. So they spent the next century constructing elaborate mathematical models to obscure Menger's simple truth. British pedophile John Maynard Keynes and his disciples built entire careers on ignoring subjective value, pretending that wise technocrats could somehow calculate what only individual actors can know. The Austrian revolution began with Menger recognizing that value lives in human minds, not in objects—and every government economist has been running from this truth ever since.

@handre Mainstream economics adopted this view. “On the margin” thinking is taught in economics classes everywhere! Along with subjective theory of value, mainstream economics incorporated the useful parts of Austrian economics, and left the rest where it belongs: the dustbin of history

@christiangruber @PerBylund Of course, no TRUE Scotsman-I mean Austrian-would make a prediction in economics, they just all do. Supply and Demand models are “all else equal” but they make testable, falsifiable predictions. I asked about econometrics, which I don’t think you know. I messaged you more btw

If a prediction is made by an Austrian, they're not following their own method. Praxeology is a deductive method of reasoning, not a predictive science. It is "all else being equal" reasoning. All else is never equal. Austrian economists are humans, so they make their bets sometimes, but predicting a specific outcome in a specific circumstance is not "austrian" by definition. Statistics is a method to process data. Economics is the study of humans under conditions of scarcity, making choices about allocation of scarce resources. You can use statistics in its pursuit, but they aren't synonymous. I don't know what I'm talking about. Ok. Sure Jan.

How to say you have no clue about praxeology without saying you have no clue about praxeology #ReadMises

@christiangruber @PerBylund Do you HONESTLY believe that you sitting in a chair thinking about how the economy works will come to more accurate conclusions about economic policy than well trained empiricists with complex data analysis tools?

I'm not embracing ignorance, I'm observing an important epistemological problem, which creates ignorance. I did not say "looking at data is lying" - I'm saying, looking at the massively complex data involved in teh social sciences, which cannot be controlled, cannot falsify a hypothesis. If you think you can, then you literally don't understand how complex an economy is. Austrians may post graphs about unemployment, but ask them, and they'll tell you straight up, their own school would suggest that it isn't a proof. What it can be is an illustration. And that's the other thing. It's not like Menger and Bohm-Bawerk were against grounding econ in the real world. But you can only do so illustratively, not empirically. Again, not because no one wants to, but rather because it is propositionally impossible given the complexity of factors. Any given local example will have thousands of economic actors all playing small roles, such that you can't isolate the specific claim. If you think you can, you do it, and get yourself a Ph.D. And maybe a nobel prize. The folks who claim to have done so, are routinely shown counter-examples which go the other way. I'm not saying looking at data is lying, I"m saying economists often lie to themselves, pretending they can control for the factors. That's two different things.

@christiangruber @PerBylund Did you seriously just say “that’s not Econometri s, that’s statistics”? You don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you think is the difference between those? If a prediction made by Austrian economists using Praxeology does not manifest in the data, are they wrong?

"Isolating effects and controlling for confounding variables is what econometrics is" - no, that's statistics. And austrians actually don't do "nuh uh" in academia. They publish, and evaluate experiments, etc., with a skepticism born of their methodological difference. But you're saying "they do this" is kind of like saying "but astrologers find correlations between real life and the stars every day!" and expect me to give that the same sort of epistemic weight as when physicists do that. The social sciences are RIFE with absolute horseshit "empiricism." You need only look at the replication crisis, the crisis of circle-jerk-citation-fests, etc. And you also need only look at the absolute failure of econ to answer the question "does a price floor on labor cause job shortages, all else being equal" - a pretty important claim that Krugman made in his book, and austrians make deductively. Did krugman come to that view experimentally? No. He used received wisdom. Did any other economist actually come to that view empirically? No, they had a point of view, and they cherry picked their data to suit their conclusion - both those who take the yes and the no position. And in the end, there is no arbitration of that question, because it's not actually possible to do that science. It's only possible to pretend to do it, and hide it behind fancy obfuscation. I've studied statistics, linear programming, etc., I'm not speaking from ignorance here. I've read what passes for empiricism. And Austrians, while they still engage in academia, doing mainstream econ with their peers, are rightfully skeptical of the usefulness of empiricism here. Effectively you, yourself, haven't done anymore to answer my methodological claim than say "nuh uh" anyway. How do you anticipate being convincing? And you are arguing with me - if you actually have a critique of austrianism - go read the arguments of the methodenstreit and show how they're wrong. This penny-anti social media nonsense isn't going to resolve anything. You're not going to convince someone who has read all of the arguments for and against by repeating the shittiest of them on X, and declaring victory.

@christiangruber @PerBylund You’re gleefully embracing ignorance. “Looking at data is lying.” Austrians post graphs all the time showing inflation or unemployment when they think it supports their ideas. That tells me you do care about empirical reality, but not enough to depend on it.

@transientmeteor @PerBylund Put it another way, you can pretend to do empiricism in economics, but you're lying, every time, except for the most weird edge-case situations. Austrians chose not to lie about their methods, but instead recognize the epistemic humility we are faced with, and use other means.