It’s true that the claims of various schools of thought to be principled followers of the evidence is exceedingly likely to be an exaggeration, if it holds any connection to reality at all. But that doesn’t impugn the claims’ sincerity - or their function as cultural ingroup markers, which is what matters here. (Of course, there are other cultural barriers between them, but none as extreme as that between Creationists ans mainstream biologists, I think.)
“Evidence” can be rationalist as well as empiricist; if the Austrians are right that the laws of economics are discoverable by deduction, then everyone else is wrong to look to the physical world. (Recall the mathemetician’s joke about the physicist who proved all odd numbers are prime: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 - measurement error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, viola!”) I think it’s pretty silly for them to think this, of course, but.. For their part I’ve never really seen a western Marxist invoke dialectics except in some very trivial way. What Marxists, Keynesians, and neoclassicals do do (and Austrians also do, although they’d deny they’re doing it) is adopt simplifying assumptions to construct models around. Plausibility limits what one can assume, of course, but choosing the right assumptions is a sufficiently subtle task that each can just as plausibly accuse the others (and, probably more often, their intra-school rivals) of adopting whatever assumptions lead to their preferred conclusions. (My ex ante guess is that the highest proportion of good research takes place within neoclassical and to a lesser extent Keynesian, but only because its status gives it better access to talent and funding, and scrubs away any ideology-signaling effects of working within the discipline.)
It’s true that the claims of various schools of thought to be principled followers of the evidence is exceedingly likely to be an exaggeration, if it holds any connection to reality at all. But that doesn’t impugn the claims’ sincerity - or their function as cultural ingroup markers, which is what matters here. (Of course, there are other cultural barriers between them, but none as extreme as that between Creationists ans mainstream biologists, I think.)
“Evidence” can be rationalist as well as empiricist; if the Austrians are right that the laws of economics are discoverable by deduction, then everyone else is wrong to look to the physical world. (Recall the mathemetician’s joke about the physicist who proved all odd numbers are prime: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 - measurement error, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, viola!”) I think it’s pretty silly for them to think this, of course, but.. For their part I’ve never really seen a western Marxist invoke dialectics except in some very trivial way. What Marxists, Keynesians, and neoclassicals do do (and Austrians also do, although they’d deny they’re doing it) is adopt simplifying assumptions to construct models around. Plausibility limits what one can assume, of course, but choosing the right assumptions is a sufficiently subtle task that each can just as plausibly accuse the others (and, probably more often, their intra-school rivals) of adopting whatever assumptions lead to their preferred conclusions. (My ex ante guess is that the highest proportion of good research takes place within neoclassical and to a lesser extent Keynesian, but only because its status gives it better access to talent and funding, and scrubs away any ideology-signaling effects of working within the discipline.)