Experts in economics? What kind of experts are they if they don't know the reasons for the transition of primitive society to civilization? They are experts in secondary problems, and what can they predict without knowing the main thing - the reason for the birth of civilization and modern economics. Tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written to find out the reasons, starting with Morgan, and all to no avail. The phenomena that scientists consider the reasons for the emergence of civilization or its signs do not work. The value of an academic education after the advent of the Internet as a source of knowledge is not worth the lost time.
In the early 1990s I had the opportunity to dispute some of the finer points of the foundations of economics (with me taking a pro-Austrian point of view) in email exchanges with Bryan prior to his going to Princeton and studying economics under Ben Bernanke (Bryan received his Ph.D. around the same time that he wrote the 1997 article mentioned above).
The key shortcoming of the intellectual trajectory Bryan has been on is that he doesn't seem to have fully understood Austrian criticisms of the use of experimental methods in economics (and other social sciences). With individual mental states being the key causal factors driving human action, economists simply are not in a position to set up controlled experiments involving them or even to directly observe the relevant mental states of other economic agents (let alone quantify them by comparing them to concatenation of a measurement standard). It is this false methodological analogy with the natural sciences that Austrians reject in their critique of what they call behaviorism.
Moreover, the "modern neoclassical" assumptions that Bryan embraces are not founded any experimentation, nor even on a pretense of experimentation. For example, when Bryan protests that indifference between two contemplated courses of action can somehow be a basis for action, he is embracing a logical impossibility, not a proposition that has been verified somehow in something claiming to be a controlled laboratory experiment. Unlike Austrians, Bryan has never attempted to make a rigorous case for his preferred foundations, let alone resolve the contradictions implied by them that Austrian critics like Rothbard called attention to.
Economists have in fact set up controlled experiments: Vernon Smith won the econ Nobel for experimental economics. Pure logic is for abstract domains, for messy reality you need empiricism. Psychology should be the science of "mental states", though unfortunately much of it is woefully unscientific and begat the replication crisis. "Much" is not "all" though, as some things have in fact replicated.
No they haven't; they are fooling themselves. To perform a rigorous logical induction of a universally-valid causal law, one must construct a system such that one systematically varies one causal factor at a time while keeping all the other causal factors constant. One then measures what effects follow from the particular variable causal factor that the experimenter has introduced.
It is not "empiricism" when the aspiring experimenter can't set up controls for the relevant causal factors and can't even make direct observations of them (which is necessary for any quantitative measurements of them, since measurements involve comparisons against concatenated standards). The rigor that physicists and chemists can achieve with highly simplified systems in laboratory settings simply isn't available to social scientists, or even to many fields of the natural sciences (which from a logical standpoint are engaged more in abduction rather than induction, making use of already-verified physical and chemical laws to explain the complex natural systems they study).
One can introspectively confirm the existence of various kinds of mental states within oneself, but one can only indirectly infer their presence in others via observations of words, body language, and actions (hence the messiness of psychology you noted). One can also correlate subjective reports of mental states with measurables like magnetic resonance images of brain activity, offering a neurobiological approach to studying mental phenomena. Neither psychology nor neurobiology offers much help to economists, however.
What economists can do to get around this problem is to start with a proposition that is self-evidently true--the mere existence of a mental process whereby such a proposition can be asserted and comprehended is itself conclusive evidence for the truth of the proposition, making any further empirical testing of it unnecessary. The self-evident truth that is relevant to economics is the fact that each human engages in purposeful action, with a discussion of economics being such an action.
The conceptualization and logical implications of purposeful action are not merely true over a hypothetical domain; they are necessarily and universally true for all human beings. It is absurd for anyone to deny that humans are purposeful agents, and demand that an experiment must be performed to prove it. The making of absurd statements is a purposeful action too.
Great letter. Look forward to your response.
Haven’t read this piece yet, but love the photo!
Are you planning to write a response to Matthew's query, Bryan?
😊
And well? Are you?
Experts in economics? What kind of experts are they if they don't know the reasons for the transition of primitive society to civilization? They are experts in secondary problems, and what can they predict without knowing the main thing - the reason for the birth of civilization and modern economics. Tens of thousands of scientific papers have been written to find out the reasons, starting with Morgan, and all to no avail. The phenomena that scientists consider the reasons for the emergence of civilization or its signs do not work. The value of an academic education after the advent of the Internet as a source of knowledge is not worth the lost time.
In the early 1990s I had the opportunity to dispute some of the finer points of the foundations of economics (with me taking a pro-Austrian point of view) in email exchanges with Bryan prior to his going to Princeton and studying economics under Ben Bernanke (Bryan received his Ph.D. around the same time that he wrote the 1997 article mentioned above).
The key shortcoming of the intellectual trajectory Bryan has been on is that he doesn't seem to have fully understood Austrian criticisms of the use of experimental methods in economics (and other social sciences). With individual mental states being the key causal factors driving human action, economists simply are not in a position to set up controlled experiments involving them or even to directly observe the relevant mental states of other economic agents (let alone quantify them by comparing them to concatenation of a measurement standard). It is this false methodological analogy with the natural sciences that Austrians reject in their critique of what they call behaviorism.
Moreover, the "modern neoclassical" assumptions that Bryan embraces are not founded any experimentation, nor even on a pretense of experimentation. For example, when Bryan protests that indifference between two contemplated courses of action can somehow be a basis for action, he is embracing a logical impossibility, not a proposition that has been verified somehow in something claiming to be a controlled laboratory experiment. Unlike Austrians, Bryan has never attempted to make a rigorous case for his preferred foundations, let alone resolve the contradictions implied by them that Austrian critics like Rothbard called attention to.
Economists have in fact set up controlled experiments: Vernon Smith won the econ Nobel for experimental economics. Pure logic is for abstract domains, for messy reality you need empiricism. Psychology should be the science of "mental states", though unfortunately much of it is woefully unscientific and begat the replication crisis. "Much" is not "all" though, as some things have in fact replicated.
No they haven't; they are fooling themselves. To perform a rigorous logical induction of a universally-valid causal law, one must construct a system such that one systematically varies one causal factor at a time while keeping all the other causal factors constant. One then measures what effects follow from the particular variable causal factor that the experimenter has introduced.
It is not "empiricism" when the aspiring experimenter can't set up controls for the relevant causal factors and can't even make direct observations of them (which is necessary for any quantitative measurements of them, since measurements involve comparisons against concatenated standards). The rigor that physicists and chemists can achieve with highly simplified systems in laboratory settings simply isn't available to social scientists, or even to many fields of the natural sciences (which from a logical standpoint are engaged more in abduction rather than induction, making use of already-verified physical and chemical laws to explain the complex natural systems they study).
One can introspectively confirm the existence of various kinds of mental states within oneself, but one can only indirectly infer their presence in others via observations of words, body language, and actions (hence the messiness of psychology you noted). One can also correlate subjective reports of mental states with measurables like magnetic resonance images of brain activity, offering a neurobiological approach to studying mental phenomena. Neither psychology nor neurobiology offers much help to economists, however.
What economists can do to get around this problem is to start with a proposition that is self-evidently true--the mere existence of a mental process whereby such a proposition can be asserted and comprehended is itself conclusive evidence for the truth of the proposition, making any further empirical testing of it unnecessary. The self-evident truth that is relevant to economics is the fact that each human engages in purposeful action, with a discussion of economics being such an action.
The conceptualization and logical implications of purposeful action are not merely true over a hypothetical domain; they are necessarily and universally true for all human beings. It is absurd for anyone to deny that humans are purposeful agents, and demand that an experiment must be performed to prove it. The making of absurd statements is a purposeful action too.