[there is a video version of this article here]
I’ve learned a lot from Austrian economists. I've watched more Mises Foundation content, and read more Austrian economics works than I have any convincing reason to, given that it’s not even my job. I also agree with the Austrian view on many issues. However, I believe that I have disagreements with the Austrian school that are fundamental enough that I can’t justifiably cite it as the school of economic thought that I support.
This is important because the Austrian school is probably the most common school among the most radical libertarians. I’m about as radical a libertarian as you can get, and yet on economics I am decidedly not Austrian.
So let’s get onto those disagreements. I’ll keep the list limited to 5 disagreements in order to keep this article at least plausibly readable.
Praxeology
Rationality
Indifference
Subjectivity
Utility
Let’s begin.
1. Praxeology
"The Austrians use praxeology ... so of course, the Austrians think that economic laws are necessarily true—so long as you did the deduction process correctly. That it's not that you could go out and see a counterexample to an economic law, and the analogies I always use are with geometry—that's the one that really clicks with people ... I can show you the Pythagorean theorem I can prove it and if you think it's wrong the point is not for you to go out and start measuring triangles, the point is for you to look at the steps in my proof and say "wait a minute you went from step three to step four, and you said this but I don't think that's justified" ... "result four line four and your proof does not follow from line three", that's the way you would attack me. You wouldn't go out and try to measure triangles, because if the proof is true you know there don't exist triangles that violate the proof. Right? Because that's that's how proofs work, and so in the same same way, if as Austrians we say "other things equal, if the price of the good goes down when the quantity demanded goes up" you don't need to go out and start looking at statistics of prices and quantities. Because, first of all, the way we get out of that is the phrase "other things equal"; and the point is, once you know what those terms mean and you think through the logical implications that result, the law of demand has to be true. Now, it might not be useful. We can spin out all sorts of tautologies that might be totally irrelevant. But the point is, it's not that you are going to test them ... in contrast to the natural sciences, the physical sciences, you do have to go out and do experiments."
-Robert P. Murphy, speaking at Mises University on Austrian vs. Neoclassical Analytics
That’s Bob Murphy on what Praxeology is. The method of logical deduction of economic laws. I want to start by pointing out that there are two ways of interpreting this. The more extreme interpretation is that you can make statements about the real world using nothing but logical deduction. The less extreme interpretation is simply that you are making plausible logical frameworks, and while the statements you make may be true within the bounds of that framework, you would then need to use evidence to determine whether that framework reflects reality in any significant way.
The first interpretation, that you can make necessarily true statements about the real world on logic alone, is obviously wrong. Even the example Murphy uses, the Pythagorean theorem, can’t tell you anything about the real world without evidence to back it up. It’s true that to prove the Pythagorean theorem you don’t have to actually measure triangles. But the Pythagorean theorem doesn’t say anything about real world triangles directly, only about the hypothetical perfect triangles that exist in theory. You come up with a logical framework about hypothetical 3 sided objects called right-angle triangles, and it includes the deduction that the two shorter sides squared equals the long side squared. But you can’t tell whether any real world object actually matches the perfect triangle you have in your theory. In fact, they almost certainly won’t. The angle is probably not exactly a right angle, it’s probably at least some fraction of a degree off. The sides are probably not perfectly straight. You can still apply the Pythagorean theorem to a real object that seems to closely resemble the theoretical triangle and if it works, that is evidence that your theory does seem to describe parts of the real world.
Similarly, the law of demand that Murphy mentions might be logically consistent, but to determine whether it actually describes something about the real world requires evidence. The law of demand as Murphy put it is that if the price of a good goes down then the quantity demanded goes up. The argument for this goes that there will be so-called “marginal” potential buyers which are the people who think that purchasing some good was just barely not worth it, therefore if you lower the price a little those people will change their minds and purchase the thing. The people who already thought the price was worth it at the higher price will obviously still want it at the lower price, and so in total the quantity demanded is higher at the lower price. This is a logical and consistent framework, but it doesn’t necessarily say anything about the real world. Perhaps the lower price will drive away customers who would otherwise have purchased the product because they feel a cheap must mean crappy. Now, I realize that Murphy already gave his preemptive response here–the law only applies if all else is equal. If people value the product more with a higher price sticker on it then that just means a product with a higher price sticker is a different product than one with a lower price sticker. And this is a fine response, but it shows that you’re not really saying anything about the real world here. You’re saying something about theoretical constructs that may or may not resemble any aspect of reality. How do you know that all else is ever equal?
But what you can do is take that logical framework you call the law of demand, compare it to actual price changes in the real world, and see if it does a good job of predicting how people respond. And it turns out that it often does, so the law of demand is pretty good. But this is the second interpretation. This is just using logic to construct plausible ideas about how the world might work and then testing them against the evidence.
Now, of course, Murphy does seemingly acknowledge this in that quote. He says that the logical structures we create may not be useful even if they’re tautological. So why do I bother to debunk the first interpretation if that’s not even the one Murphy uses?
Well, if praxeology doesn’t imply that we can make necessarily true statements about the real world on logic alone then it’s no different from mainstream economics. In mainstream economics, as Bob pointed out, they make assumptions, work through the logical implications of the assumptions, then test those implications against the evidence to see if their economic theory matches economic reality. So either praxeology says you can make statements about the real world based on theory alone, in which case it’s wrong, or it’s simply a renaming of what mainstream economists would call “economic theory”, and does not provide the meaningful distinction between Austrians and mainstream economists that Austrians claim it does.
2. Rationality
"Let me give one more clarification on what Mises means by this idea of "action", which you might call "purposeful behavior". It has to do with this word "rational" ... Some economists say "oh, well economics; it kind of assumes people are rational; and let's see how far that gets us in terms of predicting human behavior ... in the real world people aren't totally rational, but that's a good benchmark to sort of give us a frame of reference". Again, that's not what Mises means. Purposeful behavior means when people have a goal in mind and they choose a means to try to achieve that; whether or not their means is a good one, is successful. Okay, so if you see people doing a rain dance and we, with our perspective think "Oh, those people don't understand meteorology, dancing around like that, and chanting certain things, that's not going to make it rain!" Nonetheless, that is action, because you could say "why are they doing that?" It's not just because of the laws of physics or chemistry or biology, we can say "oh, because it hasn't been raining, they're concerned that they're going to lose the crop, and so that's why they're doing this ritual." Because they believe (perhaps we would say erroneously) that doing that will cause it to rain, right? So they have goals in mind that they're trying to achieve and they're using their minds—their reason—to try to achieve them, even if we happen to think that the means they're picking are not really going to be successful in this particular example."
-Robert P. Murphy, speaking at Mises University on Human Action.
The problem here, is that if you don’t have some assumption that people are using the correct method to achieve their actions, then no useful economic statements are possible. Let’s consider one of the simplest economic insights, that a mutually agreed upon trade benefits both parties. This is something I agree with. But if rationality only means purposeful, then you have no reason to say that a voluntary trade benefits anyone. I might think the trade will benefit me, but afterwards discover that it didn’t. To go with a more Chicago school rationality assumption, let’s turn to David Friedman’s definition of economics in his book Hidden Order:
“Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.”
-From “Hidden Order” by David D Friedman
With this assumption we can say that a mutually agreed upon trade benefits both parties. Or at least that it tends to. You might say that this assumption isn’t always true, sometimes people make consistent and dire mistakes, and I would agree. The practice of rain dances being a good example. However, it is true enough for many purposes. Most people successfully purchase food to sate their hunger, successfully purchase shelter to shield them from the elements, successfully consume media to assuage their boredom. Evidence for this is the fact that most people report enjoying at least some of the media they’ve consumed, the vast majority of people have somewhere to live, and almost nobody starves to death. So the rationality assumption seems to hold well enough to explain purchasing decisions in consumer goods to a high degree. In the stock market and other capital goods markets the assumption holds even better because those who do not make good purchasing decisions in these markets end up with less money to invest in the future, and so the average dollar spent on capital is spent very rationally by this definition.
Again, no, it’s not always true, and there will be times that this assumption fails us. But remembering our discussion on the applicability of logical frameworks, there are times when the Pythagorean theorem fails us too. The neoclassical rationality assumption is part of a logical framework that we are applying to reality, and might I add, it’s one that has an imperfect, yet highly successful track record of describing the real world. Unlike the weaker, Austrian rationality assumption, which merely says that action is intentional. From this we can derive no understanding of economics. Economics is the understanding of intentional behavior, but nothing anyone does can be traced back to some intention that the person has unless we assume that what they did has something to do with what they wanted to do. We can ask the guy doing the funny dance why he’s doing it, and he can say it’s to make it rain, but why are we assuming his speech act was a successful attempt on his part of telling us why he’s dancing? Perhaps he meant to say it was to stop it from raining! At some point, to make any attempt to understand the behavior of actual people by reference to their intentions, you must assume that people’s actions are successful to at least some degree.
3. Indifference
Mainstream economics often steals Austrian ideas, and often doesn't credit the Austrians for it. This is something that Austrians often complain about. But I think stealing good ideas is a good thing, and in fact, I want to criticize the Austrians for refusing to do so, even when the mainstream ideas are valid. For example, indifference curves.
First, a quick explanation of indifference curves.
Consider a graph, with a different good represented by each axis. We can put you at any point on this graph, and at each point you will have some bundle of x and y. The further to the right you are, the more of good x you have, the further up you are the more of good y you have. Goods x and y can be cheese, computers, houses, gallons of petrol or anything else. All we assume is that they are goods and opposed to bads, meaning you will always want more of them. If you want less of something then it’s not a good and we’re only talking about goods here.
Let’s start you off at x3y1. You have three x’s and one y. You’re glad to have them because they’re goods. Now consider your position at x3y1 compared to the point at x3y2. You would prefer to be at this new point. We know this because we’re assuming that x and y are both goods. If you preferred having less of y, then y would not be a good.
Okay, so, what if, still at your position at x3y1, you were offered the opportunity to trade it for x2y4. In this case we can’t be sure which bundle you value more. It depends whether you’d rather keep your third x or gain another three y’s. Let’s say you prefer x2y4. You would then accept the offer, and be better off.
What if you were instead offered the opportunity to trade from x3y1 to x2y2? Do you still want to trade now that you’re only being offered one additional y for your third x? Let’s say you do not. Your third x is worth more to you than one measly y!
Well, would you look at that. We know you’d be willing to trade x3y1 for x2y4, but you would not be willing to trade x3y1 for x2y1. So the turning point must be somewhere in between.
What if you’re offered x2y3 for your x3y1? Perhaps in this case you’re humming and hawing, you’re definitely less confident that you’d be willing to make the trade, but ultimately you accept, and are slightly better off for it.
As you can see, as the offer gets lower and lower in terms of y’s to your x, you become less and less sure about whether you want to trade, and by the time we get down to x2y2, you’re no longer willing to do so. So there must be a turning point somewhere between x2y2 and x2y3 where you go from wanting to trade to not wanting to trade. Maybe that point is x2y2.5. Any lower than that and the deal is off. Any higher and it’s still on.
Introspectively we know that we sometimes feel indifferent between different options, and this turning point is the only place that indifference could possibly come from. As we just said, any lower than that and the deal is off. Any higher and it’s still on.
We now have two points between which you are indifferent. You could repeat the exact same process for different amounts of x to hypothetically trade.
We would then find more and more bundles of goods that we value equally to x2y3. Fill in enough of these points and you will start to see a distinct curve of indifference.
If we were to repeat the process with other starting points we could construct more and more of these indifference curves. There are a lot of useful things that we can reason about the shape of these curves, and once we starting considering what kinds of choices you might have available (search “budget line”) or comparing it to other people’s indifference curves (search “Edgeworth box”) then you’ll see why this is such a foundational feature of neoclassical economics. But for the moment, all I want to convince you is that these curves are a coherent and valid theoretical construct.
In his work “Man, Economy & State”, famed Austrian Economist Murray Rothbard has the following criticisms of indifference curves:
“The tendency to treat problems of human action in terms of equality of utility and of infinitely small steps is also apparent in recent writings on “indifference maps.” Almost the entire edifice of contemporary mathematical economics in consumption theory has been built on the “indifference” assumption. Its basis is the treatment of large-sized classes of combinations of two goods, between which the individual is indifferent in his valuations. Furthermore, the differences between them are infinitely small, so that smooth lines and tangents can be drawn. The crucial fallacy is that “indifference” cannot be a basis for action. If a man were really indifferent between two alternatives, he could not make any choice between them, and therefore the choice could not be revealed in action. We are interested in analyzing human action. Any action demonstrates choice based on preference: preference for one alternative over others. There is therefore no role for the concept of indifference in economics or in any other praxeological science.”
-From Man Economy & State by Murray N. Rothbard.
Rothbard is correct that indifference is not the basis for action, but that’s literally the point of an indifference curve. It’s the point at which you stop acting. You trade x for y until you get the point where you’re indifferent between x and y and then you stop taking further action because you’re indifferent. The other criticism is about infinitely small steps, which he expands upon as follows:
“If it is a matter of indifference for a man whether he uses 5.1 or 5.2 ounces of butter for example, because the unit is too small for him to take into consideration, then there will be no occasion for him to act on this alternative. He will use butter in ounce units, instead of tenths of an ounce. For the same reason, there are no infinitely small steps in human action. Steps are only those that are significant to human beings; hence, they will always be finite and discrete.”
-From Man Economy & State by Murray N. Rothbard.
There are two problems here. First, even if we accept that you can’t have infinitely small steps of valuation, that would just mean that the indifference curve would be jagged, rather than a smooth curve, if you zoom in far enough, like a curve on a computer screen. The pixels analogizing nicely for the discrete steps of valuation. Also like a curve on a computer screen, it’s still perfectly useful to treat it as a real curve for most purposes, and even when it isn’t that doesn’t mean you can’t map indifference, just that your map will be jagged not curvy.
But the second problem is that there is a sense in which humans do value things in infinitely small steps. Let me give you a hypothetical. Now the hypothetical isn’t meant to be totally realistic as it will involve a time machine, but I think you’ll see how the point it establishes still stands.
Let’s say I offer you a drink for a dollar. You take a look at the drink, then politely decline as you think it’s too small a drink for a dollar. I want to see how much bigger I’d need to make it before you’d accept the drink. You might think that a single drop would be ineffective, as you couldn’t possibly tell the difference between a drink with one more or one less drop in it. But you’d be wrong. To prove this, I go back in time, and add one additional drop to the drink before I show it to you. Everything else is the exact same, at the same time, except the drink is one drop larger. You still decline. So I go back in time and repeat the process, adding one drop each trip, until eventually you accept the drink. On that final trip, the difference between you accepting and not accepting the drink, is only a single drop. If there is any amount of drink that you’d be willing to accept, then at some point there must be that final drop that pushes you over the edge. Now, a drop is not an infinitely small step either, but how small could a hypothetical step be before it could not possibly make a difference in this way? I would argue there is no such size. Even a single molecule, or a single sub atomic particle, or whatever, must be able to be the difference between you accepting and not accepting the drink, therefore in some sense we do value things in infinitely small steps.
So I don’t think Rothbard’s criticisms work, indifference curves are still valid, and if Austrians are upset about mainstream economics stealing their good ideas, they should get revenge by stealing ideas from the mainstream - it’s only fair!
4. Subjectivity
Austrians are correct that value is subjective… but no serious economist actually denies this. The example that I’m going to use, though perhaps a bit obscure, is the one that recently bothered me when I found myself reading it. It comes from the end of a 1997 review of David Friedman’s Hidden Order, which is the Chicago school economics book that I quoted from earlier. The review was published by the Foundation for Economic Education, so it is a serious and respected Austrian source:
“Unfortunately, before Friedman gets to the fun stuff, he spends a third of the book getting bogged down with David Ricardo’s debunked labor theory of value, which Karl Marx embraced. Friedman writes: price equals both cost of production and value to the user, both of which must therefore be equal to each other. Subjective value, the insight of the Austrian school, is never mentioned. If value exactly equals price, why would anyone ever make the trade? Besides, what I pay for an item or service, does not depend on how much it cost to be produced, but the value I place on the item at that particular moment.”
-Douglas French in his review of Hidden Order by David D Friedman, published by FEE.org
Intentional or not, this is a strawman of what neoclassical economists believe. It’s not that neoclassical economists believe that change in costs will equate to a change in value, rather a change in costs or price will equate to a change in MARGINAL value. For any good, there is some minimum price that the sellers will sell at, and at such a minimum price there are buyers who only just barely value the good enough to willing to buy. The buyers who would not be willing to buy if the price rose even a little bit, because at that point the price would exceed their subjective valuation of the good. These buyers are called the “marginal” buyers. If the price were to increase, and the marginal buyers were no longer willing to buy, it would mean that the buyers who valued the good a little more than them, would become the new marginal buyers as they would now value the good just barely enough to buy. This means that the value placed on the good by the marginal buyers is higher than it was before the price increase. It’s not that people’s subjective valuation of the product has increased, instead the people who valued the good less left the market, and therefore the marginal value of the good has risen.
This is the sense in which cost does affect value - it affects the marginal value. Neoclassical economists do not say that the value which individuals place on goods is determined by cost - in terms of labor costs or anything else. David Friedman clarifies this several times in the book, so there really is no excuse for this misunderstanding.
As for the question of why anyone would make a trade if value exactly equals price, the answer is that they wouldn’t. But they would if marginal value equals price. Because those who value the good more than that would purchase it, and those who value the good less than that would not.
Now, perhaps you think that the end of a book review from 1997 is an insufficiently prominent source for me to respond to, and to be fair I did only pick it because I’d read and enjoyed Hidden Order and I wanted to see what the Austrians thought about it, so I found a review from a respected Austrian source, then promptly got annoyed by what I’d read. But the fact remains that the subjective theory of value is often held up by Austrians as a distinguishing feature of their work, and yet the mainstream economic explanation of value is perfectly consistent with it. The fact that I embrace the subjective theory of value is not a way in which I’m more Austrian or less neoclassical in my economic views.
5. Utility
In a lecture Professor Walter Block gave at Mises University, he starts by drawing a standard graph that neoclassical economists use to explain the effects of monopoly. If you’ve learned any economics before you very likely know what I’m talking about, if not, the important point is that the graph shows the loss of production that can be caused by monopolization. From there, Block continues:
[Believe it or not, Block’s graph is one of the more legible drawings of this graph I’ve seen]
“The real thing that they hate is this thing called “deadweight loss”. This triangle here at K (so it's KMC is the deadweight loss) and they just hate that with a purple passion; and what they say is that they should be producing a QC but they're only producing at QM. They're withholding! They're engaging in restrictive practices of some sort, and they’ve got all sorts of laws about this. But this is just interpersonal comparison of utility! This is just Cardinal utility! … What they're saying is we should be producing QC we're only producing QM and therefore there's a misallocation of resources! Now, think of it in terms of Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods engages in (I don't know) eight tournaments a year; and what they're saying is he really should engage in twelve tournaments a year because we value the extra four tournaments more than he values the disutility of the extra tournaments. Now come on! I had a full head of hair before I saw this, and look at me now! I mean, this is nonsense! This is nonsense on stilts!”
-Walter Block, speaking at Mises University on An Austrian Critique of Mainstream Economics
So, strictly speaking, monopoly theory does not necessarily rely on interpersonal value comparisons. So long as all you conclude is that a monopoly can be expected to result in less production, price discrimination and/or arbitrage, then you’re just making positive claims about what will happen, you’re not interpersonally comparing utility or value (utility is sometimes but not always distinguished from value by economists, but I’ll be using them interchangeably here). But when an economist uses monopoly theory to say that a monopoly is worse than a non-monopoly, then okay, now there’s an interpersonal value comparison. But so what? Now, I do get that interpersonal utility is not the same as intrapersonal utility. Normal, intrapersonal utility is just a theoretical construct we use to understand your behavior. If you buy a red shirt instead of a blue shirt we say that you get more utility from the red shirt as really just another way of saying you prefer the red shirt. It doesn’t imply that utility is a real thing that must be maximised, and certainly doesn’t imply that we can tell who has more of this purely theoretical stuff! Utility is a way of explaining your actions, and whose actions would be explained by an interpersonal utility? There is no actor that experiences utility across two people and takes actions based on that… at least not directly.
But while we don’t experience the two different people’s values directly ourselves, we do operate on the basis of interpersonal utility judgements all the time. You have two friends and one spare beer, one of the things you might use to determine which one you’re going to give the beer to is who would value it more. That’s an interpersonal comparison of value, on which you’re making a decision. That’s just a simple one though, let’s take a more complex example. Let’s say you’re thinking of donating to one of two different charities that are going to do different sets of things for two different groups of people. Which one you donate to might be determined by which charity will produce the most net benefit for the people involved. There it’s interpersonal comparison of values again but since it’s a very complicated comparison you might want to use some economic theory to help you figure it out. Now, it’s true that you are implicitly setting some kind of exchange rate there. Standard economic models assume that one dollar of benefit is one dollar of benefit no matter who gets it, so in that monopoly model it’s showing that (assuming that a dollar is just as useful to anyone as anyone else) the net benefit everyone is reduced by the size of that deadweight loss under monopoly conditions. Maybe you think that a dollar is more useful to a poor man than a rich man, so you’d need to figure out how wealthy the monopolist is compared to his customers before you can determine the answer, or maybe you have some other kind of exchange rate you want to use. But however you look at it, we take action to achieve a net benefit to multiple people all the time, and therefore we do accept that interpersonal value comparisons are in some sense valid. Well, economics can help us do those comparisons better, if we’re willing to apply it.
If you’re an Austrian still resisting this point, how can you justify any economic criticisms of the government? Or of any other band of thieves for that matter? Using economics can show that the government provision of services will be low quality and high price. Heck, we could do that using the very same monopoly model that Professor Block just criticized there. But why should we assume that this means we shouldn’t have government control of some given service? The government and their cronies would benefit from it at the expense of everyone else, and the expense to everyone else would be higher in dollar terms than the benefit to the government and their cronies… but if we’re to use Block’s logic that shouldn’t be taken as a reason to oppose government provision of services. To say that a large monetary expense to the people outweighs a small monetary benefit to the government would be interpersonal value comparison! Now, I understand that any Austro-libertarian might have an alternative criticism of government services on the grounds of deontological ethics, which I will criticize some other time, but even if they’re valid, that’s not an economic argument. I just want us to recognize the fact that a refusal to admit any validity to interpersonal value comparison renders all economic arguments against the State incoherent.
The one final way you might attempt to salvage these economic arguments without interpersonally comparing values, would be by appeal to Pareto improvements. “Pareto improvement”, for those unaware, refers to any event in which at least one person benefits and nobody is harmed. If a beer magically appears in your hand, for example, this is a Pareto improvement because you gain a beer and nobody loses anything. We can tell this is a good thing without appealing to interpersonal value comparison because there’s no negative utility to anyone that needs to be balanced out by the positive utility to you. Pareto improvement is a useful concept because voluntary trades are Pareto improvements, at least with respect to the utility derived from the property we own, and assuming that both parties are rational. If you and I trade, each of us must value what we got more than what we gave up or we wouldn’t have traded, two people are made better off, nobody is made worse off, that’s a Pareto improvement.
The attempt to salvage the economic arguments against non-voluntary interactions like theft or being taxed to pay for government services would be to point out that this reasoning about Pareto improvements do not apply to non-voluntary interactions. At least one party did not consent to the interaction, therefore we can’t say that it’s a net improvement without interpersonally comparing values and declaring the utility gained by the voluntary participant (those who receive government services) outweighs the utility lost by the non-voluntary participant (the taxpayer). However, the problem with this argument is that we also can’t say that a non-voluntary interaction is not a net positive without doing an interpersonal value comparison. It’s not counter to the logic of Pareto improvements that a non-Pareto improvement is nonetheless a net improvement. Perhaps the value to the thief does outweigh the value taken from the victim!
If we’re willing to accept interpersonal value comparisons we can show that it likely doesn’t - a thief must expend some cost to steal, the victim will expend some cost to reduce the chances that he will be stolen from, only the remaining value is transferred from the victim to the thief. But that argument is assuming an interpersonal utility comparison of $1:$1. I could instead assume a different exchange rate and run the argument again, but in order to make any sensible economic argument for or against the theft, I would need to compare value between people somehow.
But again, given that we all do compare value interpersonally all the time, the more careful analysis of interpersonal value comparisons is not only valid but useful.
Okay, so I think I’ll leave it there. I want to make it clear that every single one of the people I have responded to here is a genius and I’ve learned a lot from them all. I don’t want any of my criticisms here to be taken as my rejecting the many significant and positive contributions of Austrian economics. I also don’t want this to be taken as my whole-sale endorsement of neoclassical economics. I could just as easily done a video debunking bad neoclassical attacks on Austrian economics. But given the ubiquity of Austrian economics among my fellow libertarians, I thought it was important for me to explain why my disagreements with the Austrian school are so significant, that I can’t justify calling myself an Austrian at all. That being said, I do hope that some Austrians can give me a good talking to and correct some of my silly neoclassical mistakes, because it sure would be good to all be on the same team! Thanks for reading.
By Danny Duchamp
PS: I'm currently looking for someone who wants to come onto my Libertarian Infighting series to explain to me why I'm wrong about Austrian economics. If you're interested please contact me either via email at dduchamp@protonmail.com or on Twitter @dannycantalk.
[there is a video version of this article here]
