You may think you understand a topic, but you really have a narrow view of it. You understand your own point of view, but not necessarily others. Or the breadth and depth of consequences to a decision. How can you expect equally valid results through a narrower lens?
I would consider anyone who studies Marxism to be in this category.
For most people, it is a blend of positive knowledge, and the political prejudice of their discipline, so one should neither reject or blindly accept the views of an "expert" in the social sciences.
My PhD is in economics, and I would love to be able to pull rank on people who talk about "buying locally" or putting people before profits. But there is no way to consistently enable such rank pulling, since there is a Professor of Marxist Economics somewhere would could accuse me of being ignorant of 100 years of Marxist thought, and give me 1000 books to read before I'm qualified to speak on the topic.
So the only way forward is to reach out to the public and convince them that one's discipline knows the truth.
Further undermining the credibility of econ degrees is an econ professor from my college stating that he believed in the free enterprise system, and the equal distribution of all income. The contradiction didn't seem to bother him in the slightest.
On your second point, perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.
Cost-push is described in Reisman's tome "Capitalism" and is shown why it is a false theory starting on pg. 907.
> perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.
I quoted his exact words, and he did not qualify them. In particular he did not say "more equal", he said "equal". I remember it to this day because I was astonished.
I couldn't understand that. One difficulty is that not only do Austrian economists use a different language to describe things, but it seems to be arguing against a traditional Keynesian viewpoint. Right now PhD programs don't teach any traditional Keynsian econ, (undergrad programs teach a bit), they skip straight to neo-Keynsianism, which only keeps a few ideas from the original Keynes (e.g. sticky prices). So I don't really understand what the article is arguing against.
I already gave a description of what I thought the sticky-prices based argument for cost-push inflation was. Can you explain in your own words how this particular argument is refuted?
Re the professor, I guess I'll just chalk that up to a bad professor.
This author intentionally conflates his expertise in "public policy" with expertise in other fields such as science, and concludes that a failure to acknowledge his authority is no different from rejecting the authority of a real scientist. Like the proof that 0 = 1 by including a step where you divide by zero, his argument relies on the fallacy that expertise is all the same regardless of what you are an expert in.
Expertise in physics, engineering, or programming is qualitatively different from expertise in astrology, theology, or "public policy," in my opinion, and skepticism of the authority of the latter is not tantamount to skepticism of the former.
Someone with a PhD in physics or EE got it by proving that he could make things that worked. I'm satisfied that there is something real in expertise that has been repeatedly validated by voltmeter.
Someone with a PhD in divinity or public policy has not proven to my satisfaction that life would be better if we just let him make our decisions for us, even if the degree is from Harvard. Sorry. It's just not the same.