Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum of Acting-Man blog,
Throwing Down the Gauntlet
Nicholas Taleb is making waves again – and in a good way, as we will explain below. It began with an altercation between him and a few mainstream economists on Twitter (what is apparently called a 'Twitter brawl'). Here is a post from Taleb's Facebook page that he put up in the wake of said brawl – Taleb announced that he will go with a fine comb through the papers of one Karl Whelan, one of the countless 'monetary economists' who are writing papers for the Fed and are thereby providing justifications for its meddling with the markets. Here is his post:
“We Can Start Exposing Economists:
I just finished a very rough draft of
*Fat Tails & (Anti)Fragility* (~100 pages).
PART I provides a mathematical toolkit to detect anything that is bullshit in economic modeling (particularly macroeconomics), figure out which papers are flawed from a scientific standpoint, etc. When I mean flawed, it is on the basis that the math used impresses nonmathematicians but does not support the stated policy conclusions.
So I start by putting one Karl Whelan "scientific" work under severe mathematical scrutiny. I select him to start as he worked with central banks, the perfect profile of the person supported by the taxpayer against the taxpayer's own interests. I also had a disgraceful encounter with him and his macro peers on twitter. Mr Whelan's papers can be found here: http://ideas.repec.org/e/pwh23.html We can progressively expose mathematized social science that way, as I am refining the text, adding words and examples.”
Mr. Taleb of course needs to continually market himself, since he is a book author and economic and financial pundit on television and various financial media. Courting controversy is a good way of staying in the limelight. In this case though, we think he has picked an excellent fight. We will explain below why that is so and why we wish him success.
Maverick economist Nicholas Taleb – challenging the establishment
Modern-Day Macro-Economists – Who Needs Them?
We are certainly not against people trying to advance economic science. We are also vehemently disagreeing with those who assert that 'there are no economic laws' or that economics is somehow not a science. What these people fail to grasp is that economics – a branch of the larger science of praxeology (the science of human action) – is a social science, not a natural science. It therefore requires a methodological approach that is different from that employed in the natural sciences. It therefore is also different in terms of what we can and what we cannot know. We will return to this point further below.
Economic science advanced in great strides with the independent discovery of the principle of marginal utility by Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons and Leon Walras in the 1870s. The Austrian subjectivist school which Carl Menger founded, advanced value theory, price theory, capital theory and monetary theory enormously. However, as many of the most important works were originally published in German language and not translated into English in a timely fashion, it never gained the influence in the English-speaking world it would actually have deserved (ironically, today the Austrian School enjoys far greater support and popularity in the US than in the German-speaking world).
One 'problem' is of course that the Austrians advocate the adoption of an unhampered free market economy. This is not based on 'right wing ideology', but on a value-free assessment of economic laws. It is a 'problem' only because there would be fairly little, if anything, to do for macro-economists in a truly free market economy. Only exceptional men of great intellect could hope to get enough support to be able to pursue their scientific interest in economics as their main job. In today's era of unbridled statism, a great mass of people are by contrast employed by the State in one form or another, and their output is therefore, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out, as a rule both mediocre and “viciously statist”. To quote him more fully:
“Intellectuals are now typically public employees, even if they work for nominally private institutions or foundations. Almost completely protected from the vagaries of consumer demand ("tenured"), their number has dramatically increased and their compensation is on average far above their genuine market value. At the same time the quality of their intellectual output has constantly fallen.
What you will discover is mostly irrelevance and incomprehensibility. Worse, insofar as today's intellectual output is at all relevant and comprehensible, it is viciously statist. There are exceptions, but if practically all intellectuals are employed in the multiple branches of the state, then it should hardly come as a surprise that most of their ever-more voluminous output will, either by commission or omission, be statist propaganda.”