|
I wrote
this in response to Sarah’s comments about Austrian economics and Catallaxy.
It was my original intention to post it as a comment but I then decided to
rewrite it as a post. Sarah wrote that the Catallaxy people are “trying to
give the impression that they are the only ones in Australia who have read
the Austrians”.
Well,
she is spot on. The Catallaxy crowd have been trying for years to pass
themselves off as experts on Austrian economics. Yet any genuine Austrian who
read them would know they are faking it. When it comes to Austrian capital
theory, for instance, Sinclair Davidson doesn’t know what he is talking
about. He just regurgitates Roger Garrison. He also knows nothing about
Austrian trade cycle theory or Austrian monetary theory. In addition, he is
also ignorant of economic history and the classical economists. For heaven’s
sake, the man is still preaching the gross historical error that Australia left the
gold standard in 1931! His casual approach
to the crash of 1937-38 is just as bad. He even thinks ‘Ricardo’s theory’ of
economic rent “has its origin in the
labour theory of value”. No one who had
read the classical economists could make such an egregious error.
Now Steve Kates
was over the moon because the US Bureau of Economic Analysis is going to
start producing a gross output figure for the American economy, what the
Austrian economist Mark Skousen calls gross domestic expenditure. This is
just total spending, including spending on intermediate goods. It’s a funny
thing but I don’t recall Kates ever writing about this concept until now. With
him, it has always been value added. Now he is treating the aggregate
spending approach as a new discovery.
If
Kates had really read the Austrians he would have known that Hayek, for
example, was writing in the thirties about how dangerous it was to ignore
total spending. This to me is further proof that they haven’t read the
Austrians, let alone the classical economists. Moreover, Kates is
clueless about what this means for his own fallacious trade cycle theory,
which Davidson also supports. (This pair actually believes that economic
“bubbles” are a bit like spontaneous combustion: once the right economic
elements mysteriously combine you get a boom).
It is
sheer dishonesty to convey the impression that no one in Australia had ever
written about gross spending. I for one started writing about it nearly 20
years ago. In doing so I emphasised the vital role it plays in Austrian trade
cycle theory. Sinclair Davidson’s response to my attempts to draw attention
to Austrian economics was to warn Catallaxy readers not put any “store in
Jackson”. In other words, don’t debate the man, just insinuate he is not
trustworthy.
They
are not the only ones conveying a false impression. Reading Rafe Champion
leaves one with the distinct and misleading impression that there is nothing
resembling Austrian thought in Australia outside of Catallaxy’s little bubble
and that Catallaxy is the only place where one can find real Austrian
economics. The facts are otherwise. If you want to know about genuine
Austrian thinking, then stay away from Catallaxy. To make matters worse,
Champion is peddling the laughable tale that Catallaxy has given birth to a
new school of economics founded by Sinclair Davidson and Steve Kates, which
they modestly christened the Australian School.
This
fiction is, so we are told, based on the thinking of the classical school.
This is remarkable considering that neither Davidson nor Kates seem to have read the classical economists.
Kates’ theory of the trade cycle, which he falsely claims is based on the
classical theory, is more evidence of that. It is, in fact, nothing but the old
Tooke-Mill error that still infects a great deal of so-called economic
thinking.
Note: Strictly speaking one should speak
not of the classical theory of the trade cycle but of the dominant theory,
which was a monetary one, and which was also called the currency school
theory. (The reason why this theory fell out of favour is a very interesting
story in itself).
That
this theory was generally considered as being correct was confirmed by George
Warde Norman, a director of the Bank of England. In a letter he wrote in 1841
to Charles Wood MP, who chaired the Parliamentary Committee on the Note
Issue, Norman bemoaned the fact that public opinion had accepted the monetary
theory of the trade cycle. The same point was made by Karl Marx (Das Kapital,
Vol. I). On the other hand, R. J. McCulloch appears to have stood astride the
monetary camp and the Took-Mill camp, which Marx followed. This may have been
due to his adherence to the Ricardian view of the money supply.
Unfortunately, this very important subject will never be honestly debated by
Catallaxy or the Institute of Public Affairs.
Sinclair
Davidson is Professor of Institutional Economics in the School of Economics,
Finance and Marketing at RMIT. Steve Kates is an Associate Professor of
Economics in the same institution. Both Davidson and Kates are Fellows at the
Institute of Public Affairs.
|
