Grozny
Member
Posts: 56
Joined: Mar 2009
|
Mon May 25, 09 11:40 PM
|
|
Quote
Originally posted by: Ludwig von Mises
Economics in the second German Reich, as represented by the government-appointed university professors, degenerated into an unsystematic, poorly assorted collection of various scraps of knowledge borrowed from history, geography, technology, jurisprudence, and party politics, larded with deprecatory remarks about the errors in the "abstractions" of the Classical School.
After 1866, the men who came into the academic career had only contempt for "bloodless abstractions." They published historical studies, preferably such as dealt with labor conditions of the recent past. Many of them were firmly convinced that the foremost task of economists was to aid the "people" in the war of liberation they were waging against the "exploiters."
This was the position Gustav Schmoller embraced with regard to economics. Again and again he blamed the economists for having prematurely made inferences from quantitatively insufficient material. What, in his opinion, was needed in order to substitute a realistic science of economics for the hasty generalizations of the British "armchair" economists was more statistics, more history, and more collection of "material." Out of the results of such research the economists of the future, he maintained, would one day develop new insights by "induction."
Does Gustav Schmoller remind you of anyone alive today?
Quote
Originally posted by: James Devine
The original statements by the rebellious French economics students define autistic economics in terms of its one-sided and exclusionary interest in "imaginary worlds," "uncontrolled use of mathematics" and the absence of pluralism of approaches in economics. The hard-core autistic walling off from the societal environment can be seen most strongly in the specific, highly abstract, axiomatic school that the students protested against.
If this comparison seems unimportant, recall what the German Historical School led to.
Quote
Originally posted by: Ludwig von Mises
The political significance of the work of the Historical School consisted in the fact that it rendered Germany safe for the ideas, the acceptance of which made popular with the German people all those disastrous policies that resulted in the great catastrophes. The aggressive imperialism that twice ended in war and defeat, the limitless inflation of the early 1920s, the Zwangswirtschaft and all the horrors of the Nazi regime were achievements of politicians who acted as they had been taught by the champions of the Historical School.
At this early stage of the Post-Autistic Movement, the most obvious point of comparison with the Nazis is their campaign to ban academic papers.
If you believe that book burning is wrong, join the Campaign to Ban Toxic Textbooks and paste this image in to remind them that book burning has been tried before. You will have to give them a real e-mail address, though you can use a pseudonym so you won’t be associated with these loathsome people.
|
|
