Austrian economics aren't crackpot, they're just outdated. Their view of the world was the correct when human labor was the most valued thing in the world.

Austrian views on inflation have been proved several times over.

Austrian views on the value of labor are a disaster. They're entirely unable to imagine our current labor market where a substantial amount of the work is done by machines. Human Action was written in 1949. Imagine how different the world must have been back then. My iPhone can recognize the contents of pictures such that I can search them-- in 1949 that would have required an office building some storage cabinets, logistics, and a personal secretary or two. Now nobody,

not even Apple can tell you how that works.

Austrian economics is crackpot by definition because it's based on "praxeology", which explicitly rejects the scientific method.

How do you define "praxeology"? My recollection from reading Human Action is it was only defined as "The study of human action."-- which could be scientific or might not be.

More specifically, as Mises conceives it, it is the study of the UNIVERSAL aspects of human action.

As used by the Austrian school, at least, it explicitly rejects empiricism, and uses deduction instead (from premises that are essentially taken for granted).

I will accept that.

But, I don't think it proves anything.

The scientific method is not an exclusive means to seek truth. Science has only one job-- to make testable predictions. It does not inform us about anything else.

You're essentially arguing "Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus" because of an inherently illogical belief that only science can arrive at truth.

Rejecting empiricism means rejecting the very notion that one can make testable predictions, though. If that is rejected, what is the point of economics, even?

Austrian economics is essentially a deductive theology; the purpose is to work out the more detailed/complex implications of the basic axioms (both descriptive and, more importantly, prescriptive) that it assumes.

> when human labor was the most valued thing in the world

Try hiring sofware developers with skills that aren't entirely copy-pastable from Stackoverflow and getting them motivated enough to not cash out after six months, and then tell me it isn't.

I'm not talking about that of course. Smart people will always be in demand.

I'm talking about ditches that need be dug. Floors that needs to be swept. Notes that need to be taken. Automation has eaten low end jobs since the industrial age began.

Have you seen the typical "data science" job applicant these days?

Looks pretty low-end to me.

How can I get in on this? :-)

I keep hearing from the futurists that massive job losses from automation are right around the corner. Yet any unskilled profession has no workers. If the automation was coming, wouldn’t we be in massive structural unemployment rather than massive unmet labor needs?

The true morons are the Marxists and their labor theory of value, as well ask MMT idiots. Crack pots are everywhere.

Which bits of MMT do you disagree with?