______
Xiong Yue:
Nicolai Foss [in a meme]:
Peter Boettke:
Roger Koppl:
Xiong Yue:
Three convictions from Nicolai Foss:______
“... in order for the Austrian critique of mainstream economics to have true bite and relevance, Austrians should be aware of and relate to the latest advances in mainstream economics.” (2000)
"... there are many research traditions in modern economics that Austrians ought to relate to, and perhaps join forces with, ..." (2000)
"... the Austrian tradition is not best preserved and furthered by being hostile to mainstream economics." (2015)
Nicolai Foss [in a meme]:
Am I wrong?Xiong Yue:
Nicolai Foss You are awesome! Thank you for your workings, from “Austrian School and Modern Economics” to “Austrian Economics and Game Theory”.______
Nicolai Foss They are my convictions now.
Peter Boettke:
Who within research community of Austrian economists do not follow all the most recent advances in theory? Seems strange to raise this as if anyone practicing econ since 2000 doesn’t actually follow and work in relationship to the scientific literature in economics if they are working in economics and publishing in economic journals.Xiong Yue:
Peter Boettke Well, you and most US Austrians are of course good role modes, but in China and Spain, there are a lot of "Austrians" failed to understand them.Mario Rizzo:
Peter Boettke Those whose names we dare not speak.
Peter Boettke:
______Xiong Yue i don’t think Foss is directing his criticism in that direction. I am curious though who he thinks isn’t engaging out of those working in research and graduate education jobs.Xiong Yue:
Peter Boettke Well, my intention is in that direction. Prof. Foss meant Prof. Kirzner and you neglect game theory and continue your criticisms at GE in his 2000 RAE paper.Peter Boettke:
Yup, but he isn’t correct. See my advanced micro courses syllabus available online, and the fact that I regularly participated in Roy Radnar’s seminar at NYU and Paul Milgrom’s at Stanford. So he is just factually in accurate, and on Kirzner that is a generational issue. JEL had me review Stiglitz Whither Socialism as well, how did that happen? So being critical of various strands of research in one’s discipline — and I teach PhD students in economics, he does NOT — is not the same as being ignorant of those developments. Ask Roger Koppl as well about these technical issues.Xiong Yue:
Peter Boettke Thank you for the clarification. I believe that, in the academic environment of America, economists are forced to know. I raised those reminders for myself and young Austrians in China, Spain, Korea, Vietnam, where certain misunderstandings exist.Nicolai Foss:
Peter Boettke I am not sure where you think I am "just factually in accurate". Two of the above quotations are from a paper written almost a quarter of a century ago (which I think you accepted ;-)). The quoted sentences are simply general advice to those who want to work on Austrian themes. However, of course they reflect that at that time various Austrians seemed hostile to mainstream economics in a not very productive way. That seems to have changed.Peter Boettke:
Nicolai Foss of course I accepted, i believe in discussion and engagement with contrary ideas. On factually incorrect is your assessment that Austrian economists don’t stay up to date with developments in modern economic science, including technical contributions. That is what I was reacting to. Those of the Austrian community who teach PhD students have to stay so engaged. And those students entering into economics profession, especially those teaching Phd themselves have to be engaged as well. And their publications reflect that. But if you say that has changed in your assessment, then ok we just disagree about a slice in time.
Roger Koppl:
What Peter Boettke said. There are plenty of other names he might also have mentioned, including my friend and co-author Abigail Devereaux. Lots of cites I could give too. Here are two working papers that engage mainstream economics, use (one of them) game theory, and so on.
Xiong Yue:
Roger Koppl Thank you for the supplement. What Foss (2000) referred to was the situation of 90s. While he may be incorrect when criticized Prof. Boettke for ignoring game theory, but he was correct on saying that Austrians should treat game theory and other developments seriously.______
Nguyễn Việt Hải Triều:
I used to naively think that mainstream people are just a bunch of dogmatists. They aren't. The pace that mainstream journals are moving is just insane to catch up with, and insightful research are everywhere. I think it is indeed some of us who are trapped in conceiving the mainstream as if they are still in the 70s.
Xiong Yue:
Nguyễn Việt Hải Triều Me too. Most Austrian enthusiasts in China simply believe that Mises already has arrived a perfect system but those mainstream bad guys simply didn't listen.Peter Boettke:
Xiong Yue that misreads Mises own messageXiong Yue:
Peter Boettke Yes. It was like more than ten years ago, when the Sino-Austrian movement began. I gradually realized that’s not true.______
Roger Koppl:
As far as I can tell, Xiong, you are right to say that Austrians in many countries outside a relatively few places like US & UK have outdated models of the economics literature. I don’t think Austrians are unique in that regard. It can be hard to keep up when you are far from the center. But Nicolai’s model of American Austrians of the 1990s neglects a lot of people. Stephen Littlechild was co-authoring with the prominent game theorist Guillermo Owen already in the 1970s. They have a game-theoretic model of Kirznerian entrepreneurship that was published in the early 1980s. I was in the Austrian program at NYU in the early 80s and we were all following current developments. We students, Rizzo, Kirzner, everyone. My 1994 article on ideal types engaged game theory directly. Indeed, if my memory is not too far wrong, my argument was not so different from Foss (2000).
Xiong Yue:
Roger Koppl Thanks for the clarification!Nicolai Foss:
Roger Koppl Littlechild is British, not American. He was not originally an Austrian. He did two "Austrian" articles with Owen that uses simple coop game theory. I think it is fair to say that in his Austrian phase, he was more influenced by Brit economists such as Shackle and Wiseman. So, Littlechild was an outlier. I don't think I "neglect a lot of people." There was almost nothing published in the Austrian littt that uses game until relatively recently (when e.g., Marek Hudik has published a number of impressive papers).Peter G. Klein:
Just as an aside, Littlechild was not himself a game theorist, but teamed up with Guillermo Owen who is accomplished in that area. Nicolai's point is about the overall level of engagement between the best-known Austrians of that time (and now) and the mainstream literature, not the occasional piece that uses a mathematical model or a more modern econometric technique.Peter G. Klein:
BTW I don't necessarily agree with Nicolai on the normative point, but I think his description is accurate.Marek Hudik:
Nicolai Foss Thanks for your kind words!Xiong Yue:
Marek Hudik I am reading your 2015 “mathematization” article.
Peter Boettke:
Peter G. Klein but you are also wrong, factually. I have recent PhD students in J of Law and Econ, EJ, European Econ Hist Review, etc., etc. Go back to the generation before them and former students in AER, JPE, Econometrica. Their papers have varying degrees of ‘Austrian’ elements, but none have zero traceable Austrian elements in them. Folks publish in mainstream journals, they hold appointments at R1 universities, and have held visiting positions at some of the most prestigious universities in US, UK and Europe. I have other examples of folks having impact pursuing much more traditional approach to AE with verbal reasoning and narrative empirics, but again finding publication with top field journals, and general interest journals and top academic presses. So how does Nicolai or you know about engagement with profession of folks you don’t know? Look at preface or acknowledgments of say works by Acemoglu or Weingast or Besley, or even Mankiw and you might find names. So your ‘observations’ are yours, but Jeff Sachs just had Chris Coyne on his podcast about Chris’s new book. That’s engagement. Would I like to see even more? Of course. But its not absent from the experience of contemporary Austrian economists.Peter Boettke:
Nicolai Foss well you rule out Leeson by some strange definition. I guess you would view Buchanan, Tullock and Smith out as well. And I guess by that selection criteria pretty much anyone who presents their work in a certain form and publishes that work in journals that present work in that form don’t count.Peter Boettke:
Nicolai Foss i was on Marek Hudik’s dissertation committee and sponsored him as visitor at GMU, so I agree, he is doing great work.Xiong Yue:
Roger Koppl I read your 1994 article in the Elgar Companion, which admitted that "Austrian economists generally make relatively little use of the mathematical theory of games, and yet this theory was addressed initially to precisely the most characteristically 'Austrian' problems in economic theory." Its position is indeed the same as Foss (2000).Peter Boettke:
Xiong Yue but the next question is why? Its not out of ignorance. Again, there are substantive issues that should be discussed. Not just sociology of science issues. Methodological and analytical issues. But unawareness and inability are not the reasons.Roger Koppl:
Xiong Yue "Admitted"? As Pete says, you must ask why. In that article I went on to explain that classical noncooperative game theory uses high anonymity ideal types in a low-anonymity context. I was not criticizing Austrian economists; I was criticizing -- but *engaging* -- classical game theory. That's the context for my 2002 result with Rosser. Barkley and I did a kind of internal critique. We chose to neglect the whole "understanding" tradition in which Dilthey, Weber, Mises, and Schutz (and Robbins BTW) participated. We chose to stick with "formal" methods. And we showed that you *still* have a problem, namely, computability. And that issue, computability, sends you right back to Morgenstern's original (pre-Neumann) analysis of the Holmes-Moriarty problem. Classical game theory did not solve the problem Morgenstern had addressed back in Vienna.Xiong Yue:
Now, game theory classical or otherwise, is a tool, so fine and dandy if you can make good use of it. Sure! And since that article we have all learned to do evolutionary game theory. Recently, Abigail Devereaux has been developing multiple game analysis. So, you know, the landscape is always changing and no one is prohibiting others from using game theory. But it makes sense for an Austrian to say point out that this Schutzian issue of anonymity is a constaint of the utility of game theory.
IMHO, complexity theory is a more natural tool for "Austrian" economics. But perhaps that's a different conversation.
Roger Koppl Got you!Xiong Yue:
Roger Koppl Younger generation is working on complexity. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecaf.12509 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11138-021-00565-6Xiong Yue:
Roger Koppl Again, thank you so much for those detailed reply.Marek Hudik:
This is Hayek's footnote from Economics and Knowledge on this topic (he later deleted this footnote): "It has long been a subject of wonder to me why there should, to my know no systematic attempts in sociology to analyse social relations in terms of correspondence and non-correspondence, or compatibility and non-compatibility, of individual aims and desires. It seems that the mathematical technique of analysis situs (topology) and particularly such concepts developed by it as that of homeomorphism might prove very useful in this connection although it may appear doubtful whether even this technique, at any rate in the present state of its development, is adequate to the complexity of the structures with which we have to deal. A first attempt made recently in this direction by an eminent mathematician (Karl Menger, Moral, Wille und Weltgestaltung, Vienna, 1934) has so far not yet led to very illuminating results. But we may look forward with interest to the treatise on exact sociological theory which Professor Menger has promised for the near future. (Cf.," Einige neuere Fortschritte in der exakten Behandlung sozialwissenschaftlicher Probleme," in Neuere Fortschritte in den exakten Wissenscbaften, Vienna, I936, p.132.)"Peter Boettke:
Marek Hudik yup. But I do also wonder in science what we might say of dead ends and unfulfilled promise. Look around us in econ. Theory has declined, empirical techniques have proliferated … yet, theory rears its head in benchmark ways or as if ways. The sort of conundrums in theory raised by Arrow, Dixit and Fisher and pointed to by Kirzner don’t fascinate the minds of younger economists YET the theory is employeed as if those conundrums didn’t exist.Roger Koppl:
Xiong Yue Yes! I am happy to see the young Austrian complexoids out there. (I think Abby is responsible for the jocular term "Austrian complexoid," which I have merrily adopted.) I have not yet met Vicente Moreno Casas, but hope to soon. We should also mention Abby Devereaux, Cameron Harwick, Jim Caton, Mikayla Novak, and others. Among the not-as-young we should include Richard Wagner who has been an important influence on so many of us. It's been great to see the recent growth in the ranks of the Austrian complexoids.Peter G. Klein:
Peter Boettke your students have an impressive list of accomplishments, as you so often remind us. But this has little to do with the issue at hand, which is whether contemporary Austrian economics has proceeded primarily in dialogue with mainstream work at the theoretical and methodological frontier (which in 2023 is not game theory but the empirical turn in applied microeconomics, DSGE models, field experiments, etc.). While of course Austrian writers have always engaged the mainstream literature of the time, from Menger's day to the present, it has often been with a lag, particularly since the Austrian revival of the 1970s. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this but it seems silly to pretend otherwise.Roger Koppl:
Peter G. Klein I dunno, Peter, I'm not seeing it. I am most surprised, perhaps, that you put DSGE on the list. For heaven's sake, you've got Larry White, William Luther, Nicolas Cachanosky, and others getting good journal hits that are most decidedly "in dialogue" with mainstream macro. I like to think my Hobart Paper counts too (https://www.iea.org.uk/.../files/Koppl-Interactive-PDF.pdf). All of the names just listed are engaging the mainstream and not just, you know, preaching to the choir or railing against the Keynesian Cross or something. I would also like to see you count complexity economics as part of the mainstream. The folks listed in my last comment have been engaging that literature. Our mutual friend Per Bylund just had a nice hit in the Southern. And. So. On. I guess it depends on who you're thinking of when you say "Austrian economics," but I just see plenty of successful "Austrian" scholars engaging the profession at large.
Marek Hudik:
Peter Boettke The decline in interest in theory is frustrating. I believe part of the reason is that the academic environment pushes people in a certain direction, and if people want to get published and land decent jobs, they have to play by the rules. When I go to big conferences, it strikes me how similar all the presentations (and people) are (as also pointed out by Branko Milanovic http://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/06/non-exemplary-lives.html). However, it's difficult to succeed by being "different." I'm glad that some people (including your students) "dared to be different" and succeeded.Roger Koppl:
Marek Hudik Figure out how to make that an opportunity. Be a one-eyed theorist in the land of the theory-blind.Peter Boettke:
Peter G. Klein i am not humble bragging, i am instead trying to provide counter examples. And what Roger Koppl says about the publications. And yes, theory is less where it is at and instead empirical strategies. Look at Ben using synthetic control to address immigration debate.Peter G. Klein:
Pete, as usual, you define Austrian economics to mean "stuff my students and others in my circles do." Ben's paper is great but not an example of what most people would consider Austrian economics. (See Nicolai's concept from his 2017 review of the "Boettke melange.")Xiong Yue:
Peter G. Klein that's 2016 and I just read it a couple of days ago.Peter G. Klein:
Right, 2016! https://mises.org/.../review-living-economics-yesterday...______
Roger Koppl:
Nicolai: Heh. Yes, Littlechild is British. But when I met him in the 1980s, he was part of the “Austrian revival” group as was Wiseman. I don’t know whether to say Shackle was “in,” but certainly Lachmann touted him and a lot of us were reading him seriously. I guess I should have put “American” in scare quotes or something. The OP was not specific to the 1990s and it was about stuff like “relat[ing]” to the mainstream. Xiong pointed out that your article of 2000 that he cited addressed the 1990s, and he rightly lumped game theory in with “other developments.” You have ruled Littlechild out of court as an “outlier.” And now the goals posts are fixed at *checks notes* whether there is much of anything “published in the Austrian littt that uses game until relatively recently.” I’d like to play along, here, but I don’t know what counts as “using” game theory. In 2002, the late Barkley Rosser and I published a paper in Metroeconomica proving that in certain zero-sum games best-reply strategies are not computable. Is that “using” game theory? In my 2002 book on Big Players I use a couple of very simple reduced form games to show that we can have coordination even without “shared mental models.” Is that “using” game theory? And I think lots of Austrians, including Pete have been using simple game theory for decades. But maybe the game theory at issue was too mathematically light to count for you? And perhaps my Goedelian proof with Barkley is not “using” but “criticizing” game theory? Okay, sure, whatever.Peter Boettke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOaMolRN1qA
What is the substantive claim now? That AE should be exclusively absorbed into mainstream methodology? That certain Austrians who were critical shouldn’t be because modern advances have rendered criticisms obsolete? That Austrian economists should be more involved professionally with elite institutions? Btw, I published this paper last year… https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270489Peter Boettke:
Is that Austrian? Is that engagement? Does that not count?
______
讨论逐渐冷却，但从以上讨论可以看出，争论集中在奥派经济学家有没有做到Foss的三条原则，而不是在这三条原则本身是否成立。
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