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Sydney
Independent scholar, trained in Agricultural Science, working in the policy and planning of human services.
Interests: political economy, epistemology, science., classical liberalism
Recent Activity
We could use more short and funny books.
BTW the early Austrians were interesting (funny?) in some ways.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/04/28/those-dang-austrians/
Lawrence White on The Clash of Economic Ideas
|Peter Boettke| Yesterday (Wed., April 25th, 2012), the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus Center hosted a public event highlighting Lawrence H. White's The Clash of Economic Ideas. Providing formal comments on the book were Doug Irwin o...
Part of the problem is that we have been seriusly let down by the philosophy and especially the philosophy of science of the 20th century. You sometimes get the impression that some of the influences around the beginning of the century were more helpful than the revival of positivism/logical empiricism, the Wittgestein diversion and the degeneration of phenomenology driven by Heidegger.
The worst aspect of the positivist philosophy of science was the banning of metaphysics, so the most powerful drivers of intellectual effort, the fundamental presuppositions of research programs, could not even be talked about in polite society. But don't worry, Karl Popper and Barry Smith have shed some light there. No I am not going to tell you about it here, you will have to wait and buy the book. It will be an e book priced at $9.99.
Is It True that Economists Often Mistake Beauty for Truth?
|Peter Boettke| Paul Krugman early in the self-evalution of economists in light of the financial crisis of 2008 claimed that one of the reasons that economists got it wrong was because of the intellectual penchant for confusing beautiful mathematical systems to truth about the economy. The focu...
I think I'm with Roger as well, that is, confused about the tensions and inconsistencies in von Mises. Like the tension between the 'critical rationalism" we find on page 68 of Human Action where he talks about no certainty, just subjecting our ideas to criticism, and the apparent dogmatism of strong apriorism. And his idea that positivism/empiricism works just fine in the natural sciences.
Presumably he followed his friend and colleague Weber in adopting a value-free attitude towards economics as a science (positive economics in modern parlance) and a personal commitment to values as a responisible citizen. However it seems that he struggled with the justification of moral positions, as indeed we all do, given that there is no way to achieve the kind of justification that we would like.
Mises, Hazlitt, and Rule Consequentialism
|Peter Boettke| Mario Rizzo uses the term "rule consequentialism" to describe Mises's social philosophy. I think that is right. His scientific approach to economics is a version of the Weberian ideal of positive analysis prior to the rise of positivistic philosophy of science. It is a strict ...
Did I answer your question about the purpose of attending those schools?
Development Economics to Believe In --- Private Schooling in Less Developed Economies
|Peter Boettke| Prof. Pauline Dixon is one of the great spokespersons for private schooling throughout the world. Her work has taken her into the field all over the world, and she has found her voice as a scholar/intellectual through telling these real stories of bottom up life affirming develo...
Don't know what you mean by extralegal, I suppose that is a slur. The aim is to provide whatever education the people want and need at that time and place. And to do better than the 'legal' systems which on OECD stats release almost 20% of students after ten or twelve years who are classified as functionally illiterate. That is pretty awesome too:)
Development Economics to Believe In --- Private Schooling in Less Developed Economies
|Peter Boettke| Prof. Pauline Dixon is one of the great spokespersons for private schooling throughout the world. Her work has taken her into the field all over the world, and she has found her voice as a scholar/intellectual through telling these real stories of bottom up life affirming develo...
Don't miss all the other great resources on the E G West Foundation site, continuing the work of the late Ed West on private education and classical liberalsm at large.
http://research.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/index.html
Development Economics to Believe In --- Private Schooling in Less Developed Economies
|Peter Boettke| Prof. Pauline Dixon is one of the great spokespersons for private schooling throughout the world. Her work has taken her into the field all over the world, and she has found her voice as a scholar/intellectual through telling these real stories of bottom up life affirming develo...
"woodenheaded laissez-faire" :)
The 20th Anniversary of Hayek's Death
Steven Horwitz In remembrance of the death one of this blog's favorite thinkers, I invite our esteemed commentariat to contribute their personal favorite Hayek quotes in the comments below. I won't even start it off because I know there are so many good ones that folks will bring to the table.
Thanks Bill, I wanted to say that but I was too shy to put my hand up in class.
Folks, As a Matter of Historical Fact Hayek Was Keynes's Rival in the 1930s
|Peter Boettke| Tim Congdon reviews Wapshott in the TLS, and in the process repeates the often made error in intellectual history that thinkers like Krugman continually make --- namely, to deny that Hayek was a serious intellectual rival to Keynes in the 1930s. As Congdon puts it: But Wapshott...
More seriously, looking at Steve's paper, the Austrian approach gells with a broad approach to the social and human sciences. There is a systemic tendency to integration rather than over-specialization and fragmentation. This comes through the analytical scheme of praxeology and also Popperian situational analysis and Parsonian action theory (1937). As sketched in this reading guide to The Poverty of Historicism.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/Popper-papers/PH-READER.html
All three offered a framework for the study of economics and the other human sciences which could have:
Maintained sociology and economics as an integrated discipline.
Sponsored partnerships between economists and students of all social institutions – law, politics, literature, religion and cultural studies at large.
Ensured that “high theory” and empirical studies informed, enriched and corrected each other.
Contributed to good public policy, especially by monitoring the results of increased regulation and intervention in the marketplace by Big Government and the impact of the erosion of the “bourgeois virtues”. This work could have commenced when the role of government was much smaller and less entrenched.
It didn't happen. Still, better late than never.
Teaching Austrian Economics
|Peter Boettke| New issue of Journal of Economics and Financial Education is now available and it contains a symposium on teaching Austrian economics.
Because there is a fantastic cafeteria and very reasonable prices?
Teaching Austrian Economics
|Peter Boettke| New issue of Journal of Economics and Financial Education is now available and it contains a symposium on teaching Austrian economics.
This book looks relevant, fairly hot off the press, found by accident (checking the Popper Web)
http://networkedblogs.com/tYYj4
Blurb.
It’s often claimed that some people—fundamentalists or fanatics—are indeed sealed off from rational criticism. And every month new pop psychology books appear, describing the dumb ways ordinary people make decisions, as revealed by psychological experiments. The conclusion is that all or most people are fundamentally irrational.
Ray Scott Percival sets out to demolish the whole notion of the closed mind and of human irrationality. There is a difference between making mistakes and being irrational. Though humans are prone to mistakes, they remain rational. In fact, making mistakes is a sign of rationality: a totally non-rational entity could not make a mistake.
Rationality does not mean absence of error; it means the possibility of correcting error in the light of criticism. In this sense, all human beliefs are rational: they are all vulnerable to being abandoned when shown to be faulty.
Error is Obvious, Coordination is the Puzzle
|Peter Boettke| That is the title of a new working paper with Adam Martin and Zachary Caceres. Behavioral economics has made its mark by bringing under intense scrutiny the limitations of individuals’ cognitive abilities. The conclusions of such inquiries call into question results from stand...
Barry Smith is one of the authors of an excellent paper on the debilitated state of philosophy at present.
http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2010/04/12/whats-wrong-with-contemporary-philosophy/
One of the problems is detachment from problems outside philosophy, not looking out the window as Pete would say.
Stanley Wong provided a paradigm case of how to do the philosophy of economics, he was smarter than most academics and he went off to become a senior partner in a law firm.
http://www.nd.edu/~pmirowsk/pdf/Wong_Introduction.pdf
On the Relationship Between Economics and Philosophy
|Peter Boettke| Here is my most recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. There I ask professional philosophers what they think of the relationship is between the two disciplines. Here it would be wise to reverse that question, what do professional economists (this is not a conversation for ...
Yes. But the dominant schools of the 20th century practically shut down the kind of philosophical discussion that could help scientists. Hans Albert wrote a nice paper that described how the Continental (Husserl and the Austrians) and Analytical (Bertrand Russell) schools were looking good at the start of the century but Wittgenstein derailed one lot and Heidegger killed the other.
Barry Smith is probably the best value at present among living philosophers (assuming he is still alive, he didn't reply to my email last month). Check out his stunning work on the Aristotelian metaphysics that Menger picked out of Austrian philosophy and used to launch Austrian economics. Actually it is interesting to see the overlap with the best of the non-living Austrian philosophers.
http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2010/08/17/popper-smith-and-the-aristotelianaustrian-program/
On the Relationship Between Economics and Philosophy
|Peter Boettke| Here is my most recent post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. There I ask professional philosophers what they think of the relationship is between the two disciplines. Here it would be wise to reverse that question, what do professional economists (this is not a conversation for ...
How about no 8: When you destroy both the moral AND the legal framework of a society for more than a generation (so nobody remembers what it was like before the revolution) you will really struggle to establish the rule of law, property rights, civil society and the market order. So the European satellite states rebounded quicker.
Andrei Shleifer on What He Learned From the Transition Experience
|Peter Boettke| Andrei Shleifer is in my opinion the most important economic thinker of his generation, and he happened to be part of a generation that had to wrestle with the collapse of communism and the transition to a market economy. He was an ideal person to tackle these issues as a Russia...
Hayek was very keen on pattern predictions.
Capable, but Fallible Actors; Orderly, yet Inefficient Systems
|Peter Boettke| To my mind, one of the really serious problems with modern economic thought is to confuse the concept of rational action with 'correct action', and to conflate the orderly coordination of the market economy with the perfect dovetailing of plans that defines an equilibrium state o...
Paris gets fed (one of Pete's favorite lines).
Amidst the uncertainty and complexity there are underlying propensities or tendencies, the essences that Menger wanted to capture with exact laws, like the natural sciences.
If we have a grip on some of these we can make "pattern predictions", if...then expectations that certain things will tend to happen.
One of these tendencies is the rationality principle, that a lot of the time people will try to do the best they can in the situation as they see it.
If you mean something different by the rationality principle, that is fine, just be clear because words like rationality carry too much baggage in the form of conflicting theories and connotations, often it helps to use different terms to minimise confusion. Someone wrote a book on Weber's use of the term and found about 12 different senses of rationality and reason.
Capable, but Fallible Actors; Orderly, yet Inefficient Systems
|Peter Boettke| To my mind, one of the really serious problems with modern economic thought is to confuse the concept of rational action with 'correct action', and to conflate the orderly coordination of the market economy with the perfect dovetailing of plans that defines an equilibrium state o...
A lot of conceptual confusion is swept away if you operate with critical rationalism and conjectural knowledge. And learning as quicly as possible from mistakes. However the philosophers are still obsessed with justified beliefs and so they add no value to issues that should be their bread and butter.
Capable, but Fallible Actors; Orderly, yet Inefficient Systems
|Peter Boettke| To my mind, one of the really serious problems with modern economic thought is to confuse the concept of rational action with 'correct action', and to conflate the orderly coordination of the market economy with the perfect dovetailing of plans that defines an equilibrium state o...
Check out Bowles and Gintis on "homo reciprocans".
http://bostonreview.net/BR23.6/bowles.html
Ian Suttie, the great neo-Freudian revionary ("The Origins of Love and Hate" 1935) was onto altruism as a basic trait. Pity he died while his book was in press.
Deirdre McCloskey and The New Theory of Moral Sentiments
|Peter Boettke| Dalibor Rohac has a great profile on Deirdre McCloskey in the WSJ. I invoked McCloskey on a similar point yesterday in a post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, where I will be guest blogging throughout the spring term. One of the topics I was thinking I might address, and now defi...
The game of cricket is a byword for good values, hence the saying "it's just not cricket (old chap)". Is it accidental that McCloskey became a huge cricket fan when he visited Oxford? On return to Chicago, after departmental shindigs, he would invite all comers to go back home for indoor cricket.
Deirdre McCloskey and The New Theory of Moral Sentiments
|Peter Boettke| Dalibor Rohac has a great profile on Deirdre McCloskey in the WSJ. I invoked McCloskey on a similar point yesterday in a post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, where I will be guest blogging throughout the spring term. One of the topics I was thinking I might address, and now defi...
As Pete knows, sports and games provide good models for explaining some of these things. It is a shame that so much effort went into the mathematical analysis of two-person games instead of the game of cricket (without using maths). This piece dates from 1970 (coincidentally while the Australians were playing India, as they are doing this week) but I only got around to tidying it up recently.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/EvenMoreAustrianProgram/OffspinneronReductionvsExistence.html
In this analysis the rules of the game stand in for all the institutional factors in a social context.
New Issue of Studies in Emergent Order
|Peter Boettke| The new issue of Studies in Emergent Order is out, and contains a symposium on Richard Wagner's Mind, Society and Human Action. My contribution to the symposium can be found here.
My comment on the original site has been in moderation for three days so it might as well run here (from memory since I can't read it myself). It contains a "neutral" point, some positives and a carping criticism.
The neutral point is that it will really help to get over discussing political positions in terms of left and right. Hayek in his famous essay sketched a non-conservative or classical liberal position that cannot usefully be categorised as left or right. We get hit from both sides. I think if we allow ouselves to be tagged "rightwing" we have practically lost the debate before we start. My "non-left" friends have not been receptive to this argument but one of our colleagues at the Uni of Buckingham has made this point powerfully.
Some positive comments - von Mises never objected to the use of mathematics, just the abuse, this is the rejoinder to people who like to say that Austrians "reject maths". People at George Mason have used mathematics, at least once for an interesting formal proof of something (can't recall what) and in regression models. Of course these are subject to use and abuse as well. Dani Rodrik has a nice paper on the limitations of regression models. http://www.international.ucla.edu/cms/files/rodrik.pdf
See also Roger Koppl on big players.
Finally the criticism. Pete commended von Mises on his rejection of the natural science approach to developing and testing theories and policies. I am not sure if this amounts to accepting the strong (justificationist) form of apriorism that Rothbard and Hoppe have taken from von Mises, or whether it just means recognizing that plans and intentions have to enter into theories in the human sciences in a way that they don't in the naural sciences.
Taking up the issue of justification first. If the strong form is given up and we fall back to the fallibillistic apriorism of Barry Smith (which is identical to Popperism) then we can simply evaluate theories on their explanatory power, their truth, capacity to inspire effective policies, generate productive research programs, resist various forms of criticism etc. That means focussing on the strengths and weakness of rival theories instead of getting bogged down in debate over rival theories of epistemological justification (none of which work).
Insisting on strong apriorism practically guarantees that other schools of thought will not take Austrian economics seriously.
Moving on to the major difference between the natural and human sciences. It can be argued that the logic of the hypothetico-deductive method is not affected by the specific content of theories or the particular methods of investigation that are used in different fields. Sure, the contents of the theories are different, but the same applies to different disciplines in the natural sciences as well (and of course in the different fields of human sciences). I appreciate that there is supposed to be some special form of understandig that applies to human activities but natural scientists have to use the faculty of understanding as well and some would claim to be so involved in their subeject matter that they develop feelings of "empathy" or intuitive understanding of the behaviour of bosuns and black holes or the leaves of plants.
Pete Boettke on Austrian Economics
Chris Coyne Pete Boettke was recently interviewed by The Browser on Austrian Economics. You can read the interview here.
Mises, Hayek, Lavoie, is this conference being held in a retirement centre? What about the new kids on the block? You know, Buchanan, Coase, Tullock, Vernon Smith...
Liberty Fund Conference on "Markets, Socialism and Liberty"
|Peter Boettke| Tomorrow I head off to a conference organized by co-blogger Steve Horwitz on "Markets, Socialism and Liberty." The readings include heavy doses of Mises, Hayek, and Lavoie. Should be a good discussion as the participant list is very strong. Not looking forward to the flight, b...
The eternal problem of the vote-buying motive as the Achilles heel of democracy, flagged by Hutt based on his studies of the rise of trade unions as a political force in the nineteenth century.
The exasperating thing about the heterodox economists, judging from the Newsletter, is the way they share all the Austrian concerns about the defects of the mainstream while at the same time they are so not interested in the mainline (Austrian) solutions.
A few years ago there was something about the Austrians in the newsletter but you could probably scan it for years without knowing the Austrians even exist.
What Remains of the Consensus in Macroeconomics?
|Peter Boettke| I am currently browsing Daron Acemoglu's Introduction to Modern Economic Growth (Princeton, 2009), which appears to me to be a comprehensive and clearly presented overview of the material. There are two things in particular I very much appreciate about the book. First, Acemoglu...
A massive reading list, but what about a bit of Bauer, also Hutt on the rise of the trade union movement and the strike threat system (highly relevant to Australia at present) and Stanislav Andreski's books on Africa and South America.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2012/01/01/stanislav-andreski-andrzejewski-1919-2007/
A Course Worth Taking
|Peter Boettke| Mark Koyama is teaching what promises to be an outstanding seminar this spring semester on social science as analytical history. The Analytical Narrative approach is the natural empirical program for Austrian economists and constittional political economists.
I think Ben Powell and his colleagues found that the Somalis did better without a central government.
Costs, Benefits, and the Analysis of Predation in Political Economy
|Peter Boettke| At a recent discussion of Ed Stringham's Anarchy, State and Public Choice with graduate students led by Nick Snow, the question was put to Pete Leeson and myself as to why in the early 1970s the public choice analysis of anarchism did not talk more about the positive political ec...
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