Ah yeah, thanks for the response and discussion. Your final sentence, yeah, conjecture & hypothesizing w/o data can only get you so far. I was honestly on that rationalist train for a while and it still bleeds through with fantastical imaginary models. Need to touch grass every so often (i.e. deal with real world data).
I’m always super astonished though how some people, like Popper, Hayek, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx/Engels; managed to have such elaborate and interesting models and conceptions without the kind of like data available now. I put in Hayek and Popper, they really were off the mark on some spots I think (I’m trying to go through their work to see what libs/neocons like about it, whatever they self-report on what they like is really not helpful and a bit incomprehensible to me) and it really seems, as a consequence of their material conditions & environment, what these economists/thinkers thought actually did make sense from their POV. It really wracks my brain.
Most neocons and libs haven’t actually read Popper, Jevons or Hayek. And even if theu did, most of them are pretty reductive modelers, Popper intentionally so. Ultimately, they are just intellectual veneers for arguing for the continuation of things, Hayek and Jevons in particular the maximization of the creation of Money in the Money-Commodity-Money cycle, even going so far as a M-M cycle, because in their mind money is commodity value, even though we know that money that cannot translate into commodities is useless, power lies in the ability to marshall productive labor and control commodity production, which currency is pretty good at, but you can absolutely bypass it. Which is why no current national economic model actually follows Austrian economics, even if certain companies do.
Yeah that’s fair. I was looking at it because I am working on a genealogy of economic & sociological thought. It’s necessary to drudge through the mud and see what I can get. Hayek really didn’t like the over-reliance on statistics or comprehensive models… imaginary stuff seemed to be the best for him.
Ah yeah, thanks for the response and discussion. Your final sentence, yeah, conjecture & hypothesizing w/o data can only get you so far. I was honestly on that rationalist train for a while and it still bleeds through with fantastical imaginary models. Need to touch grass every so often (i.e. deal with real world data).
I’m always super astonished though how some people, like Popper, Hayek, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx/Engels; managed to have such elaborate and interesting models and conceptions without the kind of like data available now. I put in Hayek and Popper, they really were off the mark on some spots I think (I’m trying to go through their work to see what libs/neocons like about it, whatever they self-report on what they like is really not helpful and a bit incomprehensible to me) and it really seems, as a consequence of their material conditions & environment, what these economists/thinkers thought actually did make sense from their POV. It really wracks my brain.
Most neocons and libs haven’t actually read Popper, Jevons or Hayek. And even if theu did, most of them are pretty reductive modelers, Popper intentionally so. Ultimately, they are just intellectual veneers for arguing for the continuation of things, Hayek and Jevons in particular the maximization of the creation of Money in the Money-Commodity-Money cycle, even going so far as a M-M cycle, because in their mind money is commodity value, even though we know that money that cannot translate into commodities is useless, power lies in the ability to marshall productive labor and control commodity production, which currency is pretty good at, but you can absolutely bypass it. Which is why no current national economic model actually follows Austrian economics, even if certain companies do.
Yeah that’s fair. I was looking at it because I am working on a genealogy of economic & sociological thought. It’s necessary to drudge through the mud and see what I can get. Hayek really didn’t like the over-reliance on statistics or comprehensive models… imaginary stuff seemed to be the best for him.