I love how you expand the empiricist camp to include just about everyone with “I mean empirical in a broad, not positivistic, sense. Introspection, even knowledge of what we mean when we say something, is empirical.”

But you are wrong. Actually, the only way of knowing anything is the rationalist way. I mean rationalist in a broad, not Cartesian sense. Observation, even accumulation of raw data when reflected light hits our visual organs sending electrical impulses to our brains, is rationalist.

Cheers!

I love how you expand the empiricist camp to include just about everyone with “I mean empirical in a broad, not positivistic, sense. Introspection, even knowledge of what we mean when we say something, is empirical.”

But you are wrong. Actually, the only way of knowing anything is the rationalist way. I mean rationalist in a broad, not Cartesian sense. Observation, even accumulation of raw data when reflected light hits our visual organs sending electrical impulses to our brains, is rationalist.

Cheers!

Yes, and the I’d estimate the percentage of Buddhists economic law doesn’t apply to being a fraction with the denominator being the total number of proported Buddhists and the numerator being the number of Buddhists who die from privation. In otherwords a number so close to zero as to be insignificant.

I can agree with your sentence on the empirical.

Your economic example didn’t violate the law. In your example the government did not set the price ceiling of the good below the market price.

If you are going to assume that everyone likes the governments edicts so much that they will change their behavior based on mere requests then I don’t see the need for the price cap at all. There is no need for it to be mandatory. It can just be a suggestion. Nor does the number of people matter. If you are going to assume ten or one hundred zombified subjects then why not assume a million or a hundred million.

I can think of lots of situations that seem to violate the law but the really violate the “all other things being equal” clause. In your example the violation was that you assumed everyone became a saint. I can think of other ways to twist things so that a shortage doesn’t occur. 1) The government doesn’t enforce the cap 2) The cap is of so short a duration that people can postpone their transactions to avoid it. 3) The cap coincides with a rise in supply or a fall in demand. 4) The government could spread lies about a product saying it was dangerous and at the same time set a price cap below the old market price.

So what. Does it violate a law of physics if I can fly … during a tornado. Of course not, but it seems you would hold this as some sort of violation.

Part of the reason why Mises wrote what he did about Buddhists was to indicate that economics doesn’t deal with certain special cases. Economics isn’t going to tell you what kind of behavior to expect from people like the 9/11 terrorists. The fact that suicide terrorists exist doesn’t somehow invalidate economic law.

In effect you have not shown that the mandatory price caps are “effective” or “neccessary”. By definition price caps are mandatory, and there would be no way for the government to know whether they were effective without the chance of also causing damage.

Even in your example the government is in effect causing damage if it really set the price below market (which you admit it really didn’t). If there really were people who would derive a benefit from the good at the higher price your “price cap” is in effect diverting the good from those people who have a more valuable use for the good to those who have a less valuable use.

I can see no way in which this is beneficial.

There is a well-kknown model within which, by definition, ceilings below the market price cause shortages. It is a “law” of the model. But, as a matter of fact, there are lots of ways to avoid shortages with price ceilings. They are very unlikely, but do not contradict the nature of the elements in the system. For instance, the economy is very small, everyone is very public spirited, and they understand that scarcity (there was a hurricane) is driving up prices, and see the cap as a request from the government to demand less, and so they economize and consume less, driving the price down to equal to or less than the cap. So here’s a perfectly intelligible case, fully consistent with human psychology, in which a price cap below the market price doesn’t lead to a shortage, but just a reduction in demand and the market price. Unlikely? Absolutely. But ruled out by scientific “law”? No way.

No other ways? That depends on how you define empiricism, and if you do so wrongly you can end up with the kind of mistakes Skinner made. He defined the empirical so narrowly that he missed alot. Our personal expericences with motivation, emotion and the like are empirical. Yet, Skinner treated them as subjective. We aren’t after all avitars but real existants in the real world. So internal subjective observations count as empirical in a broader sense.

I disagree with you about economic laws. Seems to me that all physical laws are “ceterus paribus” also. The apple would fall at such and such rate, if …. it wasn’t tied to the tree by a string. Physicists are careful to avoid such things. They use qualifiers. The 2nd law of thermodynamics only applies to “closed systems” for instance. Economists do the same thing but many amateurs just don’t pay attention to that.

Seems like you are saying that you think you can violate economic laws. Hate to tell you this but economic laws are just as unavoidable as the laws of gravity. For instance, if you legislate price controls that set a price ceiling below the market price you will get shortages. No avoiding this.

In any case it is the same in all disciplines. The laws only apply “all other things being equal”.

The economic laws about the behavior of prices arise from individual action in a similar way that laws on gas pressure and temperature arise from the behavior of individual molecules of gas.

Look I’m not a professional economist, nor do I have a lot of time for following the latest research, so I have missed this. Could you give me some examples.

I have read Human Action. I have also read several non-Misesian takes on Austrian Ecomomics like Rothbards “Man, Economy, State”. These seemed perfectly reasonable to me given the state of the rest of the economic profession, like for instance Keynesian theory, which I learned in college.

I consider myself in the Austrian camp. However, I find some of Mises pronouncements on the nature of economic knowledge a little embarrassing. He talks like some kind of foundationalist and I don’t find that appealing. My memory of this is vague but I have heard quotes from Mises on this subject and on the physical sciences that I would find impossible to defend, and easy to attack.

All in all my opion of Mises is positive and it think it is a mistake on the part of many to think that believe that say Keynes is more empirical than Mises.

In any case, there are no strict economic laws, only extremely hedged ceterus paribus laws. That is, regularities that obtain in wider or narrower contexts. We think of the “laws” as the widely obtaining regularities. But these aren’t laws in the same way that physical laws are.

And by the way, if you’re an apriorist, Hartry Field’s Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism will blow your mind.

There are a fair number of Austrians, especially at GMU, doing just what you say they have “shut themselves out of.”

You are wrong that Misesians “disdain the empirical.” They just say it can never establish economic laws. And it can’t. You might see also _Economics and Reality_, by Tony Lawson of Cambridge, who is not a Misesian, an Austrian, or a libertarian, but demonstrates this at length. He is an econometrician by training, and he contends that every single economic “law” that has been developed by econometrics has broken down as soon as it is formulated.

Empirical methods cannot even differentiate economic from non-economic phenomena.

Mises when to far in trying to found his economic theories on one half of this false dicotomy. He should have stuck to showing why other economic theories were improperly applying both empirical and deductive methods. Instead he ended up making what are unsupportable philosophical claims that are used to undermine his perfectly reasonable economic theories. Miseans are using empirical methods whether they like it or not and are missing out on additional methods in there distain for the empirical. Theories that could be improved dramatically by using some of the other methods of science, such as model building.

I think it is reasonable to point out that methods that work for the physics of macro particle aggregations will not work for something that does not have the same basis. It is quite another thing to claim one can only use “a-prior knowledge” and deduction as the only means to obtain knowledge in the area of economics.

With the advent of computers, you’d think that some Austrian economists would try to build models of their theories in order to show how they work, and to explore possible subtlities that armchair deduction might fail to expose. I am a computer scientist and have thought about this. It really would be possible to simulate human action as envisioned by Mises on a computer. Another area of exploration might be some form of subjective mathematics. They seem however to have shut themselves out of such avenues.

Only a gleeful frenzy to dump on Mises could make one overlook such an obvious point.

It was a mistake to make a special case for Buddhists. Now what?

One paper that deals with both themes simultaneously is:

“Functional Explanations and Reasons as Causes” by G. Sayre-McCord in Philosophical Perspectives (1989) pp. 137-154.

As for how we know about these connections (in particular, whether or not a prior) there does not seem to be as much interest. (But I’m not an expert.)

Mises own assertions and arguments on the matter do not seem to have garnered much interest or respect. But there is Nozick’s paper “On Austrian Methodology” in Socratic Puzzles.