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Per Bylund

@PerBylund

4 Dec

Needs do not matter. History is full of thinkers falling into the trap of referring to needs as were they something real and distinct. But by referring to what people "need," you're really using rhetoric without substance. You are creating the illusion that your claims are

objective, whereas they are not. To put it differently, it sounds smart but isn't. Economists recognized this fact in the early 1870s, which caused a revolution in the study of economics. Until then, they had, like everybody else, been trapped by thinking of people's needs in the

objective meaning that the term seems to imply. But there is nothing objective about it, and even if there were--it would still be irrelevant. So referring to "need" in your argument is akin to the trade of stage magicians: what you're doing looks impressive, but it's not. When

Read 25 tweets

Per Bylund

@PerBylund

18 Nov

Let's clear up some misconceptions about #AustrianEconomics. If people want to dismiss this school of thought, which many seem inclined to do for political (not theoretical) reasons, at least they should do so based on facts and knowledge, not on falsehoods. Here are corrections:

"Austrian economics is not empirical."
False.
Empirical studies ("history") are important in AE and have larger scope than in mainstream economics. Mises worked with applied research in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research,

for which he appointed Hayek as the first director. This is where Hayek did much of the business cycle research that later won him the Nobel Prize. What critics fail to understand is Austrians' narrower definition of theory, which is not a collection of hypotheses but true,

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Per Bylund

@PerBylund

16 Nov

This is the type of nonsense we get with the blind adherence to the consumption-spending fallacy ("Keynesianism"): "remote workers are 'contributing less to the infrastructure of the economy whilst still receiving its benefits'." Producing at lower cost = cnb.cx/35mNe7x

@DeutscheBank

bad for the economy? 🤦‍♂️To these "analysts," people wasting less resources when producing (supposedly at the same level) need to be burdened with an extra tax to "make up for" (?) using less resources. Did anybody at @DeutscheBank think this through? If the problem is that they're

not spending enough to produce, i.e. that there is a higher output-input ratio (horror!), then they should, for the sake of consistency (and, from their POV, to stifle such economy-killing lower-cost production), also propose extra taxes for #innovation, #entrepreneurship, and

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Per Bylund

@PerBylund

29 Oct

Yuck. I'm not looking forward to teaching my #entrepreneurship students this nonsense. Cost-based pricing exists, but it is really stupid to use it in a startup with new product.

I wrote about this here (although the essay was given a strange title): mises.org/wire/how-gover…

https://twitter.com/Lord_Keynes2/status/1321768555935801344?s=20

As expected, this nutter feels compelled to flaunt his complete lack of theoretical understanding. In this case, of course, he wasn't even able to read the tweet he comments on. What does this Keynesian idiot think "in a startup with new product" mean?

https://twitter.com/Lord_Keynes2/status/1321768555935801344?s=20

Read 5 tweets

Per Bylund

@PerBylund

19 Oct

What's a telltale sign of economic illiteracy? I'm starting to believe the worst is the claim that market leads to monopoly and the accumulation of wealth in a few hands. Why? Because it makes no sense at all on the face of it, and has no logical explanation, so it is indicative

of fundamental confusion and misunderstanding. Granted, many great thinkers have been deluded by this, including Joseph Schumpeter (the old pessimist, not the young optimist). It is nevertheless a fundamental error. This error lies not in the fact that some or even many business-

men strive for empire, that businesses and businessmen would like and may wish for monopoly, or that they seek as much profit as possible, but in mistaking the aim of individual actors for the mechanism that they collectively comprise. This is like figuring the function of money

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Per Bylund

@PerBylund

12 Oct

Much of the so-called theoretical advances in the social sciences appear to be limited to inventions of pithy terms for old (reinvented) ideas. Ignorance of the history of ideas drives this. I do not doubt many of these scholars believe they have discovered something new. In some

sense they have, because they are unaware of their ignorance that others have expressed similar, sometimes even the same, ideas before them. For example, Stinchcombe (1965) is credited with the "liability of newness" idea, which is very similar to Schumpeter's ([1911] 1934)

discussion (pp. 86-87) on people's "resistance" to the new and, thus, the necessity that the entrepreneur takes on a leadership role. The issue here is not the claim of novelty, but that scholars should in fact be knowledgeable about the history of the field and its theoretical

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