[jacques_chester]

Austrians argue that predictions can't, as a matter of epistemology, be made.

Of course, humans do that all the time. What's missing from the original Austrian concept in Mises is allowing for imprecision -- making accurate predictions with error bars for variability below the threshold of detection.

What von Mises didn't like about this and what Rothbard hated about it is that such predictions are statistical and probablistic in nature. They aren't deontological, they can't be nutted out a priori from first principles.

They have a real bee in their bonnet about it. It's a shadow (ha!) of Platonist/Aristotelian bunfights.

Out here in that's-nice-but-I-have-shit-to-do land, grownups accept that models are wrong. But even if the map is not the territory, most of the time it's still good to have a map.

[vwfwerwetqwerqw]

Non-predictive analysis can't be used to make decisions, and therefore can't have any effect on the real world unless it is being used incorrectly. By their own argument, Austrian economics is a waste of time.

A dislike of stochastic models (however understandable in historical context) should not be taken seriously in the modern world. Complex chaotic systems are modelled through intensive probabilistic simulation all the time.

[jacques_chester]

I think it's a side-effect of the socialist calculation debate that's broken free of its roots.

Austrians make predictions all the time, however. Every new round of monetary expansion is going to end the world.