@til Today I learned that the Austrian School of Economics, on which our current economic models are based, is not itself based on empiricism and in fact argues that it should not be based on empiric studies at all but on thought experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology#Austrian_economics#til

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[+] 21 points 5 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Currently we use the Keynesian economics model. This is one of my favorite videos on the subject. https://youtu.be/GTQnarzmTOc

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    tacitly. politicians are fine doing half of it like manipulating interest rates and lowering taxes and borrowing but not so much on raising taxes or rainy day funds. Politicians treat all times as bad times and if they want to slow down growth they only raise interest rates and do austerity.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Current systems aren't based on Australian but incorporate ideas that have proven useful or correct like Opportunity Cost.

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    [–] 9 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    You kinda can't fully empirically study economics. Austrian economics is still stupid.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    If the Austrians were right, the USD would have collapsed due to Pandemic money printing. I was one of the people who didn't have a degree in economics and was sure the Austrians were right. I was wrong and made a lot of investments that failed spectacularly.

    Austrians are economists who 100% know the correct model. And it doesn't matter what stupid reality does.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    It might not have fully collapsed (yet), but I think all the money printing had a lot to do with the subsequent relative price boom of various assets. For instance if you had bought gold and waited a few years it would have worked out pretty well. Inflation relative to stores of wealth has been a lot higher than inflation relative to consumer goods.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Been hearing that for 20 years since the GFC

    Hint: if your economic theory makes a prediction but has no time horizon, then it has NO PREDICTIVE POWER

    Edit: retroactive price predictions, be they in gold bitcoin or beanie babies, also is spectacularly unimpressive for an economic theory

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    To clarify, I'm not saying that this proves correctness of a particular economic theory, more that your (probably?) implied claim that pandemic money printing didn't have a big negative impact on the value of the dollar is very much not self-evident given how things went.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    That's wrong.

    The current economic model is based on the Keynesian model, popularised by explicit detractors of the Austrian school.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    austrian school of economics is pseudoscience. Marxism all the way.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Right, the labour theory of value is not pseudoscience then? It's based on empiricism? Care to substantiate that with literally anything other than "Marx said so"?

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Labour theory of Value has actually been proven with empirical evidence, heres a research paper regarding that: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2623737_The_Scientific_Status_of_the_Labour_Theory_of_Value

    Show me one research paper proving other theories of value.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    How is this proving anything about broader economics? Or any of Marx's boondoggle social claims?

    This just says that calculating the summation of all labour costs is a good predictor of the overall cost of production and thus price, Marx makes way broader and wilder claims than that.

    Defending marxist views on the LTV with this paper might as well be a motte and bailey; there is no substantial dispute that the sum total of costs is a decent predictor of an industrial good's price (industrial production per-product margins are notoriously slim), while there is plenty of dispute that the generation of "surplus value" causes "alienation" and "dehumanization".

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