Paul Krugman: "A Party Not Ready to Govern"

FakeNews said:

Cenk Uygur is the host and co-founder of The Young Turks. He is also co-founder of the Justice Democrats.

Click to expand...

RobDownSouth said:

You're simply envious that your personal hero Von Mises has been relegated to the ash can of history, thoroughly discredited and known only to fringe right-wing crackpots.

Click to expand...

Rightguide said:

...Who know more about history and economics . . .

Click to expand...

KingOrfeo said:

Not von Mises. He was a pseudoscientific crank.

Click to expand...

Rightguide said:

I think you're a cranky pseudo-intellectual exposed by your own declarations of fabricated truth.

Click to expand...

Mises' greatest work is generally considered (among his followers, at least) to be the gargantuan doorstopper called Human Action, which fully codifies the method of praxeology. Unfortunately for Mises, it was pseudoscientific upon arrival in 1949 and is even more pseudoscientific in light of current knowledge.

First, Mises completely rejects [reality] positivism and the scientific method in the social sciences and humanities:

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts.[2]

Click to expand...

He then proceeds to derive his immutable "laws" of economics from a single axiom, the "action axiom." Mises doesn't formulate it as simply as his followers like Rothbard, who usually state it simply as "humans act" or "Individual humans act with a purpose"; this is the essence of the axiom. Mises, however, distinguishes what he calls "action" from instinctual behavior. Action is defined as behavior that is done with some intention in mind, i.e. a goal-oriented one. While he admits the possibility of materialistic explanations, he argues that the assumptions of dualism and free will are necessary for a "science" of human action. Of course, besides the problem of deriving an entire system of faith-based economics from a single axiom, Mises runs into the problem of making a clear-cut distinction between "action" and "instinct" that doesn't exist in psychology and the cognitive sciences (indeed, he dismisses the whole of psychology, anthropology, etc. as merely "historical" and thus unable to make any predictions). Mises also claims this tautological axiom is irrefutable, and thus a rock-solid basis for all economic theory. If you attempt to refute the claim that humans act, then you are, by definition, acting!

Another flaw in this system is that Von Mises never gave any clear definition of how new theorems are supposed to be proven by this axiom. Methods of mathematical logic that are axiom-lite (like natural deduction or sequent calculus) were just being developed when he started, so it's understandable that he didn't mention them. This doesn't change the fact that in order to prove that this axiom implies any particular thing will require background knowledge, observations and other a posterori, challengable things. So though in theory he developed his system from a single axiom, in practice he added new assumptions ad hoc and use the time honored method of Ipse Dixit to prove them.

Mises was naturally a staunch opponent of Marxism and he held that Marx believed in a fundamentally different logical structure of the mind across different classes. In Human Action, he accuses Marxism of "polylogism," i.e. that different classes use different sets of logic. Mises builds on Menger's notions of subjective value and marginal utility to define people as "economic calculators" (this largely a rehashing of the "economic calculation problem" argument Mises made in the 1920s). The knowledge of prices (which represent peoples' subjective value of goods) is distributed across all people (economic calculators) because value is subjective and thus different for each person. This economic calculation problem provides a philosophical argument against socialism; however, it doesn't make a socialist system logically impossible, e.g., it may just be highly inefficient. As (anarcho-capitalist) economist Bryan Caplan notes:

Ever since Mises, Austrians have overused the economic calculation argument. In the absence of detailed empirical evidence showing that this particular problem is the most important one, it is just another argument out of hundreds on the list of arguments against socialism. How do we know that the problem of work effort, or innovation, or the underground economy, or any number of other problems were not more important than the calculation problem?[3]

Click to expand...

From here, Mises goes into how awesome completely laissez faire market policy is, gold buggery, and other typical Austrian hijinks. However, sane students of economics probably closed the book way back at the point when Mises declared his "theories" unfalsifiable.

Click to expand...

4est_4est_Gump said:

KingO has never read any economics.

All of his knowledge comes for hunting down blogs and using one side of the coin to tarnish the other, but he has no idea as to what he speaks of. He just assumes that his blogs are correct.

Click to expand...

EternalFantasies said:

Not even that. He has stated it. His very purpose of being here is coz he enjoys argumentation. He get a kick out of it.

I think he very often simply google's an opposing view and hits back with it; with a penchant for the left.

Click to expand...

4est_4est_Gump said:

KingO has never read any economics.

All of his knowledge comes for hunting down blogs and using one side of the coin to tarnish the other, but he has no idea as to what he speaks of. He just assumes that his blogs are correct.

Click to expand...

RobDownSouth said:

Whereas you read a bunch of economics, understood virtually none of it

Click to expand...

BotanyBoy said:

You don't get to talk about anyone not understanding something.


Now go eat your crayons in the corner Rob.

Click to expand...

RobDownSouth said:

Fuck off, dogmeat eater.

America would have been better off if you'd died in the sandbox.

Click to expand...

Mello_SixtyNine said:

We've lived through decades of Keynesian policies. What did it give us? Trillions in debt. If you factor in the other forms of debt that we're on the dole for as well, that number is around 160-180 trillion.

How many more years do you need before you come to the realization that Keynesianism does not work? We are not the first country to destroy the purchasing power of our currency and we won't be the last.

I keep this in my wallet as a reminder. I bought in a coin shop for 7 bucks. At the time, you would be lucky if you could buy a loaf of bread with this in Zimbabwe. Same thing happened in Venezuela, Argentina, Germany after WW1, etc.

Click to expand...

KingOrfeo said:

Causes debt != does not work. And in case you haven't noticed, currency inflation is not a problem we have right now.

Click to expand...

Mello_SixtyNine said:

The purchasing power of the dollar has dropped 98 fucking percent!

Click to expand...

KingOrfeo said:

Since when? If since 1913 when the Fed was created, so what? Inflation is not a problem if it's too slow to be noticed.

Click to expand...

Mello_SixtyNine said:

It was noticed when Nixon dropped us from the gold standard and it dropped 30% overnight.

Click to expand...

KingOrfeo said:

So what? That was decades ago. Nothing similar is now lurking around the corner.

Click to expand...

Mello_SixtyNine said:

Is that what your Keynesian crystal ball is telling you? I think Krugman had that same crystal ball when he predicted the housing bubble bursting. Oh wait, he never saw that coming.

Click to expand...