On praxeology being neither an empirical nor quantative science

Here is my rant against AE, feel free to demolish my points

I generally agree with the principles of Austrian Economics, and with the analysis that austrian economists offer for various economic problems, as well as their typical policy prescriptions. I think I share most of the general moral and ideological values as the main austrian economists, although I am definitely more of a paleo-conservative mindset than a libertarian persuasion.

But I really dislike the obscure philosophical mumbo jumbo that Austrians use to dismiss attempts to use rigorous formalisms, statistical data and quantatitive methods in economics.

That is the big mistake I think Mises made. He correctly understood that statistics and mathematical formalisms can be abused to produce an impression of a “physics-grade” science in which quantitive laws were empirically verified and established, when they were not, and from that insight he concluded that no data and no rigorous formalism for dealing with quantitative information should be used. I don’t think that conclusion is warranted – we can and we should try to make attempts to establish things that can be measured and expressed quantitatively as such, with caveats that any such rendition is subject to circumstances that may not be that persistent.

Moreover, he seems to argue that economics is an “apriori science” that has to be deduced from “self-evident” axioms of “praxeology”, as an exercise of “pure reason”. That makes absolutely no sense.

We do observe economic phenomena happening in reality, and then we create abstract schemes to represent the things that we observe. Then we may try to deduce things that we haven’t directly observed from these schemes, and judge if they make sense based on whether they explain what is happens under proper conditions.

That is not only true for economics, it is true for any kind of science, philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics or any field of knowledge that wants to say something that is not entirely pointless. An a priori science is an oxymoron. Even abstract math is not an “a priori” science. We create numbers and other mathematical objects in terms of axioms and abstract symbolic rules because we see that things in reality can be represented like that. And now these abstract mathematical entities become themselves things that can be further played with, generalized etc. But it makes no sense to come up with a completely useless formalisms that don’t represent nothing at all and start to investigate their problems and “generalize” them into even more abstract useless things.

2+2=4 because it we discovered that things in reality can be counted with symbols that are defined according to what was later called peano arithmetics. If we hadn’t discovered that application we wouldn’t discover that 2+2=4 from an a priori self-evident line of reasoning. Pure mathematics doesn’t occur by some a priori exoteric imperative of reason itself that is unthethered to real world things, it occurs because some applied mathematics led people to formulate problems of a more abstract nature, and then eventually the link to the original applied problems becomes obscure. But if it is forgivable to mistakenly ignore this issue in mathematics, which can definitely become highly abstract and disconnected in some disciplines, it is clearly not forgivable to pretend that economics operates like that.