This is the abstract of a seminar announcement (in business economics) that appeared recently at my school. I don’t know the author or his/her work, and I omit his/her name here. All I will say is that he/she is on the faculty of a top five university. My intention is not to attack him/her, but, rather, to highlight the nature of what passes for state-of-the-art economics these days.
Read the abstract. Even if you can understand what it means, and I confess I cannot understand all of it, you will search in vain for any reference to the actions of real-world human beings. Of course they are there by implication, but there is no hypothesis containing the necessary actions that will lead to the posited aggregate outcomes that are the subject of this paper. And if humans are brought in at all in the paper it is in the form of a ‘representative’ actor, meaning not a real human, facing real uncertainty, having real expectations, etc. This typical approach violates what Austrian economists understand as methodological individualism, and think, whatever this is, it is not economics.
Notice also the buzzwords – the coined words, phrases and expressions that refer to a developing esoteric literature. Whatever the intention the effect is to narrow the scope of the discussion, the range of minds that can be joined in wrestling with ideas. It also reduces the amount of competition that the participants in the specialized group face.
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