Confusing constants and variables in Political Economics

[fare]

If many top notch computer programmers, in a field where people are largely selected for their ability to understand causes and consequences, fail to understand the difference between a constant and a variable with respect to a given choice, how can you expect people from professions that don't thus select their members to fathom the difference?

Comments

[randallsquared]

Given that there are a bunch of non-statist economists who are not Austrian economists (Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, David D Friedman, etc), I'm not sure we can completely blame the marginalization of Austrian econ on statist economists. If I understand correctly, Austrian economics asserts truth by axiom, rather than being open to falsification. Is that not right after all?

[fare]

Maybe I have a broader definition of Austrian Economics than those guys who claim they aren't. The axioms of Austrian Economics are those of coherence with human action - e.g. propositions that cannot be denied without a performative contradiction.

What if

[hodja]

all those people are not stupid and/or evil, but merely rational?

I don't believe in conspiracies. I don't think that there is some evil, scheming cardinal gris or some cabal that misleads people into believing statist ideology and furthering its evil goals. That is not how the world operates

Re: What if

[fare]

You're right of course.

See Patri's recent article
Beyond Folk Activism,
responses to it,
and Patri's
follow-up

Re: What if

[hodja]

Thanks for the interesting reading! I really enjoyed it

Speaking of Bulgakov

[hodja]

Here's a full translation by a person far more qualified than myself.
And blessed be the lack of copyright enforcement in Russia. :-) Download it while you can.

Question

[sloonz]

I’m pretty confused with that; I’m currently reading Man, Economy and State, and I thought that opportunity cost is the utility (marginal value) of the forgone action, not the psychic gain of the forgone action. For example, in chapter 2, part 4:

"We now see that for any specific exchange to occur, the
marginal utility of the goods received must also be greater than
the marginal utility forgone-that which could have been
received in another type of exchange."

Then, for what I did understood of Rothbard economics, the opportunity cost of the example in the marginal revolution blog is the marginal value of "seeing a bob dylan concert", $50 (pushing aside the debate on wether or not the value of the maximum buying price of a good equals to the value of the good). Did I miss something important ?

Re: Question

[fare]

You missed the $40 price tag on the Dylan concert, worth $50 to you -- so you'd win $10 of subjective value by going there. If instead you're going to see Clapton, you're saying that Clapton is worth more than $10 to you, and such is the opportunity cost of going to see Clapton. (All that assumes that you have a scalar preference ordering expressible in dollars, and that such are the stakes, for the sake of the exercise.)