A lot of people who think Austrian Economics is stupid believe that because they aren’t good enough at abstract thinking to understand AE.

First, I must launch preemptive strikes against some objections.

Yes, this post is probably going to end up on r/iamverysmart. I don’t particularly care. I think that my argument is important for people to see, so repost away.

No, I am not saying that everyone who disagrees with AE is unintelligent. If you think I am saying that, reread the title.

Yes, it is true that people who are otherwise capable of understanding ideas as complex as praxeology will sometimes not understand AE because of preexisting mental biases, not because of a lack of mental ability.

No, when I say a lot I don’t necessarily mean the majority. I mean a large number people.

Anyway:

The primary purpose of this post is to hopefully help some AE proponents understand why they are getting so much pushback on very “obvious” (hint, its more complicated then you realize) points, like money printing causing inflation.

I had a lot of frustration with people over stuff like that, and I hope to help others avoid some similar frustrations.

First off, some basics of AE for anyone who does not understand it because they may not have encountered it before, or may only have a base level

The Austrian school of economics, also known as the Causal Realist tradition, is the study of the economic side of praxeology.

Praxeology is the study of human action. Human Action is purposeful behavior, as opposed to reflex. Implied in the concept of purposeful behavior is the idea that humans rationally use their means to achieve given ends. Praxeology does not concern itself with why people have ends or beliefs (this is more the domain of psychology than praxeology), it simply accepts that they do, and tries to understand how they act in response to those ends.

Also, many people misunderstand the term rational, and think it means perfectly correct/not fallacious.

For the purposes of praxeology, rational means that people only take actions they believe will work. For instance, someone who was hallucinating and thought that they had to cut off their legs or they would die would be acting rationally if they cut off their legs to try and survive.

Irrationality, in this instance, would mean something along the lines of someone not hallucinating who knew that cutting off their legs was pointless and would kill them, cutting off their legs anyway to try and survive.

Yes, I agree, we should find a new word for that. But that is a different conversation.

I hope that anyone who has read this far has started to realize the problem. All of that was very abstract, and application of those principles is very intense abstraction.

Reasoning along these lines is hard. For instance, I am sure most people who have gone through (and understood) the chain of reasoning for the Subjective Theory of Value before find it incredibly intuitive and obvious. But nobody understood it until the ~1860s.

(Just because something takes a genius to come up with doesn’t mean it takes a genius to understand it., but it does indicate that it is not an easy thing to come up with)

In my experience, most people who are good at abstract thought project that ability onto others. Being good at abstract thought, while not a rare talent, isn’t universal.

So next time you are trying to explain to someone that their boss isn’t the stealing surplus value of their labor, and they just don’t get that their labor doesn’t have some inherent objective value, don’t immediately go after them for being duplicitous, even though it might seem like they are purposefully not getting it. There is a very good chance that they are just not mentally capable of following your chain of reasoning.

When you say something like “minimum wage laws will reduce incentives for employers to hire new employees” or “the Fed pushing down interest rates will cause a boom-bust cycle” or “calculation is impossible under socialism” you will look to many people like you think you have some gnostic source of knowledge, even when you explain yourself, because a lot of people just can’t follow advanced abstract reasoning.