Economics is taught in colleges as if it were a subdivision of mathematics. It’s not. It has only a limited amount to do with mathematics. Rather, it’s a division of philosophy. It’s a moral study that looks at how people relate to one another in the material world.
Anything by Murray Rothbard, Thomas Sowell, or Walter Block is on the list. They’re all sound, clear, and cogent writers. I think you’ll find stuff by Larry Summers, Paul Krugman, or Joseph Stiglitz unhelpful in understanding how the world works. They’re only celebrities.
by Doug Casey
International Man: The average person doesn’t care about economics. But to the extent that he does, he only reads mainstream publications like The Economist and editorials in The New York Times.
In these publications, the average person will find so-called economists advocating upside-down and destructive concepts like negative interest rates, banning cash, debt-fueled consumption, government spending, and rampant money printing as the cures to economic ailments.
And if those methods don’t work—or inflict damage—the establishment economists’ response is to simply call for more money printing, more debt, and even lower interest rates.
What’s your take on conventional economic thinking and methods?
Doug Casey: Frankly, most “economists” today are only political apologists masquerading as economists.
An economist is somebody that describes the way the world works—how people go about producing, consuming, buying, selling, and living their lives. That’s not, however, what most of today’s PhD economists do. Instead, they prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.
As a result, legitimate economics barely exists today. What passes for economics has a very bad reputation, and it’s well deserved. Economics has become degraded. It’s not quite a laughingstock like gender studies, but it’s on a level with political science—which isn’t a science at all.
Every individual has vastly differing likes and dislikes and wants and needs. But these so-called economists like to treat people as if they were standardized atoms. They think they can manipulate people as if they were chemicals and treat the economy as something they can heat up or cool down. And they’re the ones who decide what the masses need.
Economics has become an excuse for central planning, and economists have become social engineers.
Economics is taught in colleges as if it were a subdivision of mathematics. It’s not. It has only a limited amount to do with mathematics. Rather, it’s a division of philosophy. It’s a moral study that looks at how people relate to one another in the material world.
Economics has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give a scientistic justification for things that the government—which naturally seeks more power for itself—wants to do.
In fact, every person should be his own economist. That’s because you owe it to yourself to understand the way the world works and to understand human action, to use Mises’ phrase.
International Man: Mainstream economists are obsessed with complicated models and charts as they try to maximize GDP.
By contrast, free-market Austrian economics is not focused on how to centrally plan the economy but rather on human action in the face of scarcity.
Austrians aren’t concerned with complicated models because they believe it is impossible to quantify the actions and preferences of billions of individuals.
Which do you think is more useful and why?
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 