While F.A. Hayek is known for his term “spontaneous order,” Mises saw institutional development as coming from growth in human understanding of things.
Original Article: Mises versus Hayek on the Future of Civilization
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Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, two of the best-known Austrian school economists in the twentieth century, may have followed the same school of thought, but they greatly differed in their work. In consideration of human action, the two men differed in their methodology: Mises advocated for a pure use of reason through praxeology, and Hayek, alternatively, defended the compositive method.
In regard to the market process and entrepreneurship, Mises’s and Hayek’s views are not just different, but opposed. Hayek, in his articles “Economics and Knowledge“ and “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” highlighted the role of knowledge in the social process and how the price system is an institution that spreads information over the markets. Mises, on the other hand, asserted
Austrian economics is defined by its adherence to the a priori methodology, not empiricism. That places it at odds with mainstream economics, which stresses the methodology of positivism.
Original Article: "Austrian Economists and Empiricism"
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Since its emergence in 1871, the Austrian school of economics has provided systematic opposition to empiricism in the development of economics. The Methodenstreit persists, even with different players. Several papers and publications have criticized the concept of economics based on empirical evidence. Positivism, and its different currents of thought, are consistently criticized by Austrian economists.
But the roots of attempts to make research objective are much older. In the Renaissance, the development of natural sciences neglected essentialism. Essentialism was seen as part of the Middle Ages and so was attacked by Renaissance thinkers.
We can also remember Francis Bacon, an English philosopher. Bacon advocated for the mathematization and quantification of
Recently, I published an article in the Mises Wire, “Woke Egalitarianism and the Elites,” in which I presented the true intentions behind woke egalitarianism. The article also described how elites attempt to rebuild society through collectivism. But more than discussing the goals of progressivism, we need to discuss the intellectual basis of these attempts. What assumptions and intellectual framework guide these actions?
Progressivism is based on a disrespect of individuals, their actions, and their ability to choose. First, progressivism groups people into collectives based on a particular criterion (e.g., race, gender, and sexual orientation). Moreover, progressivism homogenizes their thinking, values, and actions based on these collective classifications. To
In the research paper Egalitarianism and the Elites, published in 1995 in the Review of Austrian Economics, one of Murray Rothbard’s most brilliant insights was that even the implementation of an egalitarian society requires leadership. As the fall of one system to the implementation of a new model of society cannot come out of nowhere, someone must command and lead this process. And naturally, these leaders will occupy powerful positions.
Indeed, Rothbard’s affirmation demonstrates how human existence is unequal and how some are naturally more qualified to lead the social processes. In a free-market society, the leaders are the entrepreneurs. With their ability to forecast future needs, they generate new solutions and create new productive arrangements. As a
At least since 2008, the financial world has been in a financial spiral caused by central banks’ growing monetary impression. As a consequence, key economic concepts (e.g., that business cycles are caused by credit expansion, and higher prices by monetary expansion) started to be considered just “old ideas” and their defenders prophets of the apocalypse. Some economists, especially the modern monetary theory (MMT) defenders, attempted to substitute these ideas with new ones. Their new analytic framework resulted in a countless number of enterprises claiming to be part of a new economic era.
Even though the MMT narratives are beautiful and can thrill the most unsuspecting, reality always buries impossible dreams in the end. In the market process that deals with
