Yearning for Beauty in the Truth of Economic Thinking
Yearning for Beauty in the Truth of Economic Thinking
We as a human race have a natural desire for beauty, and we as academics have a tendency to get lost in the weeds and forget this. Mises Institute president Jeff Deist has articulated this better than perhaps anyone before him in a speech (“We Need Truth and Beauty”) where he stated:
We know Austrian economics is fundamentally true; in fact, truth is its most important and fundamental responsibility. Yet we cannot afford to ignore the corollary to truth, namely, beauty. Without beauty, divorced of any higher human longings, economics devolves from a beautiful theoretical edifice into a bastard cousin of accounting and finance, a business discipline. Or even worse, it becomes nothing more than an intellectual veneer for so-called public policy, which is really just a sanitized euphemism for politics.
This is the state of economics today. We are at best this bastard cousin of business disciplines and at worst—and more commonly—a worthless backup for politics, which certainly has no beauty these days. Henry Hazlitt even spoke on this lack of beauty in economics in his novel Time Will Run Back. Hazlitt writes of a world where communism has overtaken life as we know it, and the leaders of this nation—through Socratic dialogue—must reinvent capitalism, alm
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