Mein Gott, I Wish I Were Freed from Gottfried!

By -
I've just begun reading Haberler's Prosperity and Depression, at the recommendation of George Selgin, and am experiencing the bittersweet feeling I have been disturbed by a few times before: what I thought was an original idea of mine was thought well before I thought it. That is disappointing. On the other hand, the person who arrived at it was a brilliant thinker, so that is reassuring.

For instance, Haberler writes:

"That by analysing various theories it should be possible to give an explanation of the business cycle which, while leaving some questions open or offering in other cases alternative answers, nevertheless clarifies a number of problems presupposes that the difference between the theories analysed is not so radical as is sometimes believed." -- p. 2

Oy, I thought I was original in concluding this today, but Haberler saw this 75 years ago.

Or, on page 6, paragraph 2, he essentially foreshadows the paper Steve Horwitz and I wrote on ideal types and Austrian cycle theory.

Well, it is nice to know a genius agrees with one. But it stinks that he got there first (at least in terms of one's academic reputation).

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy10:39 PM

    If he applied ABCT to the dot-com crash then you're really screwed.

    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