I have a lot of respect for economists, I know several.
They are among the most rational people you shall ever meet. And they are very aware of how incomplete their tools are. But they do a lot with such tools that is worth knowing.
It's only a debate if you reject the very principals of science. I realize we're getting there for a lot of people, but merely disbelieving in science is not a refutal of it.
This ignores so called Austrian economists however, who are just flat out lying to either themselves or everyone else depending on the person.
Is there a fundamental repudiation to Austrian economics?
All I know about them is that they don't like funny money, which to me as a systems thinker is perfectly reasonable. At worst you would expect it to be harmful, at best to obscure what is really going on.
Contrary to serious economists Austrians try very hard to avoid specific forecasts, but we all can nonetheless look at their writings and compare what actually happened during every crisis in the last 50 years - and nothing Austrians are postulating proved correct. Or just look at the very last, covid caused one: If you'd been doing prognoses with textbook keynesianism regarding inflation, demand, stimulus effects and so on, you'd been pretty spot on. Just read the old blog posts from krugman from 2020 onwards as an example. The Austrians, by comparison, predicted 5 of the last 0 hyperinflation scenarios correctly.
Austrian economics is openly an ideological movement and not a system of empirical predictive theory, and thus is inherently unfalsifiable in the broad sense.
Individual Austrian-school economists sometimes make falsifiable predictions, and they are often (either knowably at the time or determined later) false, but that's a different issue, because, again, those predictions are not grounded (in the predictive sense; while they are in an emotive sense) in the fundamentals of the school in a way which would make falsifying them a “repudiation” for anyone at risk of adhering to the school in the first place.
Where mainstream economics is imprecise and frequently inaccurate, and credited with predictive powers it simply doesn't possess, it is at least an attempt to study economic reality.
'Austrian' economics is more akin to a religion, with associated dogma and moral tenets.
if you go down the austrian rabbithole weird stuff around praxis starts showing up. which is like logically true but probably unuseful (IMO) and used by the community to shut down any ideas from outside Austrianism.
i think focusing on M0 is also incorrect. the debt money multiplier is a real phenomenon, and at least the psyche of a user of the banking system must be accounted for.
I think the problem might be that it's difficult to perform experiments in economics due to the size of the thing being measured and the fact that the people making up the economy generally aren't going to be alright with you performing experiments on them.
Economics experiments are actually a thing. You can have natural experiments, or you can uncover patterns in data, or you can try controlled experiments (in microeconomics), though that sometimes just feels like applied psychology. I dunno, I've never formally studied it.
But I have read NBER papers, and can confirm that there is real research. It's not a hard science, but among the social sciences it's pretty rigorous, and often very quantitative. I know how this crowd likes it quantitative.
I would like to note that there are many other fields in science which have even more trouble performing experiments, but nobody says that e.g. astrophysics or astronomy is not a science.
