Many think cancel culture is an odd particularity of the Anglosphere. Unfortunately, it raised its ugly head at this year's Austrian Economics Meeting Europe held in Lithuania.
Mainstream academic economists believe that we advance economics by "testing" theories. Austrian economists believe economics is about understanding human action and does not have to be subjected to constant tests.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Berkeley's David Card, MIT's Josh Angrist, and Stanford's Guido Imbens for their work on "natural experiments," a currently fashionable approach to estimating the causal impact of one economic variable on another.
Anticapitalism's origins are not found with the workers. Rather, it came from the aristocrats and middle-class intellectuals who harbored resentment and fear of the rising entrepreneurial and industrial classes.
Key methodological differences between Austrians were highlighted in Milton Friedman's "The Methodology of Positive Economics." A key piece of conflict: Friedman's focus on prediction rather than explanation.
The impossibility theorem, developed by Nobel-winning economist Robert Mundell, paints a false tradeoff between the free movement of capital, fixed exchange rates, and effective monetary policy. Under a gold standard, all three are a possibility.
