Someone Has Missed Something

By -
I ran across this:

"Back in August I had an interesting talk with Richard Maybury, an economist of the Austrian school and editor of the financial newsletter Early Warning Report. He is the author of a big idea, actually a model with which to help predict long term trends in global politics and finance. It's called Chaostan, and basically it means that enlighenment ideas of liberty and property never made it past Marx in Germany in their natural spread eastward..."

So, this fellow is supposed to be an Austrian, and he creates models that "predict" history and thinks that ideas have a "natural spread?!

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy9:58 PM

    Did not Mises, Rothbard and Raimondo predict the fall of the Soviet Union based of the fact that communism doesn't work?

    I don't know about the other two, but I'm pretty sure Mises didn't. (If anyone has a relevant quote to prove me wrong, by all means I'd love to see it.)

    I don't mean to go off on your comment too much, Scott, but this is something that I think a lot of Austrians misinterpret. They say something like this: "Mises claimed in 1920 that socialism was impossible, and the fall of the Soviet Union proved him right." I don't think I need to spell out why this (typical) formulation is just plain silly.

    Anyway, what Mises did say was that socialist economy was impossible, from day one. I.e. it wasn't that it would take time for it to finally catch up with the central plenners; no, from the beginning, they would not be able to retionally allocate resources. But that is a different proposition from saying, "Not enough stuff would get produced to keep the masses from revolting."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more