[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

It's ok though. I wouldn't expect you to read all the through the abstract.

[/ QUOTE ]

Be honest with me... did you read the paper in its entirety?

[/ QUOTE ]

No, of course not. There was no need to. The abstract is completely in line with what Austrians say about revealed preferences.

[ QUOTE ]
We argue that incorrect beliefs in decisionmaking are no more difficult to study using the tools of economics than standard questions, and do not imply a need to abandon the powerful revealed-preference method. Under minimal assumptions—often amounting to little more than supposing in some form that a person likes money—“bets” on an event reveal beliefs about that event, and hence can be used to identify mistaken beliefs. These revealed mistakes can then be incorporated into a generally applicable theory of preferences and mistakes that explains the betting and other behavior, and that ties welfare to behavior. Hence, preferences are revealed in behavior, even if they are not implemented by behavior. We illustrate our approach using the gambler’s fallacy, naivete about self-control problems, and projection bias.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's pretty clear that you actually haven't the foggiest idea what Austrians actually believe about terms like "action" and "preference" and "rational". In fact, reading your crazy rant is hilarious now that I am not pissed off about being attacked out of left field.

Austrians use these terms in very precise, very circumscribed ways, and make it eminently clear in what ways they DO NOT mean them. Nor do they claim that these terms cannot be meaningfully used in other ways, in other disciplines. They just have very particular meanings in the science of praxeology, the study of purposeful action as such, which is what Austrian economics is all about. So you can blather on about "action not always being purposeful", and that's fine; it's just that those aren't the kinds of actions that Austrian economics is interested in or applies to. Similarly you can claim that actions don't reveal preferences, and that's great. That's just not the sort of preference Austrian economics applies to; Austrian economics applies to the kind of preference that is revealed by purposeful action.

So you can say that the drug addict would really "prefer" not to shoot up, because he knows that its bad for him and his kids and whatnot but then still does, and that's fine. But that isn't the kind of preference that Austrians are talking about. Austrians talk about preferences revealed by actions; at the moment he took the action, he prefered taking that action to the available alternatives. How he formed that preference scale is not relevent to the study of purposeful action as such. That is not to say that it is not interesting, or cannot be the subject of scientific inquiry. It is both. But just like quantum mechanics is interesting and scientific but is not structural engineering, so too is the study of how and why preferences form interesting and scientific but not praxeology (Mises actually had a name for a science like that, thymology, but it never caught on).

Similarly, what "rational" means to an Austrian is not "logical", or "perfect", or "infallible", or "dispationate", or "far thinking", or "sane", or "profit maximizing" or any of that. It simply means purposeful. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. You could be completely insane and think that shaving your head and painting your ass green will bring world peace. But you still shave your head and paint your ass green purposefully in the belief that it will help you achieve some desired end, and that is the only sense in which an Austrian ever claims that man is a "rational actor". It doesn't mean they won't regret their action either, regardless of whether the action achieved or failed to achieve the intended goal. Austrians would simply say that if they experience regret, they have revealed a mistake, either of choice of ends or means or lack of information or what have you, and for their trouble reaped a psychic loss rather than a psychic profit.

Austrian economics makes no value judgements about which ends are good or bad. Your end could be to destroy civilization, and a proper understanding of Austrian economics could help you achieve that end. It is truly value neutral (unlike a lot of mainstream economics which sneak in normative bits through the back door, imo, but that's another thread).

But what Austrian economics can do is tell you, via the logic of purposeful action as such, is whether the means you choose to achieve your ends are good or bad, in terms of achieving your stated ends. Your end can be to help the poor, and you might choose the means of a minimum wage, and economic analysis can show you that this is a poor choice of means because it has the opposite effect. Your end could be to help the poor get access to good quality affordable housing, and you might choose the means of rent controls, and economic analysis can show you that this is a poor choice of means because it has the opposite effect.

You have fundamentally [censored] up preconceived notions about what my beliefs are, and your tirade makes that clear.