I've read many of the books you're talking about, and there's a reason they are "unpopular" and “discredited".
Who cares about gold? Who cares about avoiding math? Not me. I guess I am no Austrian for those reasons. I do care, however, about restraining the inflationary tendencies of governments because I believe they are an engine of wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich and powerful. And sure, I suppose I do care about avoiding mathematical naval gazing, or statistical hackery. But those are side-issues.
Where are the Austrian models that describe and predict accurately?
I can make a regression say anything, but I predict the fed continues to operate, and the status quo of wealth flow from poor to rich continues. Now it can be modified by laws, and certainly will change with time, but the dynamics are there. You can superimpose other things on top and the results will vary. You can then make a model that focuses on one thing or another, and evaluate it statistically, and again, results will vary. This is some of how we ended up with a pluralist economics today.
I wrote up some other stuff about my anecdotal experience with modeling and searching for "good governance" in grad school, and how I disagreed with methodology of the papers I was reading, before abandoning the enterprise for a return to physical engineering, but I guess this is my chief point. Methodology designs in what you want to see. Economics is not a controlled science (I mean mostly the studies can have no actual control group), and therein festers a great rub. Good fun learning the statistical analysis methods though.
The people who wrote those books that you said would support your argument certainly do.
>I’ll be happy to get my (Of course discredited) books out and recite the counter case about the Great Depression if anybody really wants me to later
>I do care, however, about restraining the inflationary tendencies of governments because I believe they are an engine of wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich and powerful.
Are you basing this belief on anything other than gut feelings and the work of Austrian economists who's books you've read? von Mises is an absolute crackpot, but he does a very good job of making you "feel" that his arguments are valid.
>And sure, I suppose I do care about avoiding mathematical naval gazing, or statistical hackery.
That's different than the Austrian position that mathematical analysis is impossible and harmful. Without accepting the basic premise of Austrian economics that "no measurement is possible" and everything can be derived from the first principle of "humans acting with purpose", the rest of their "proofs" are worthless. You can't just accept (and cite) their arguments while also acknowledging the fundamental flaws with the axioms they use to reach their conclusions.
The Austrian School on the other hand, is centred on Mises, whose magnum opus insisted that all his conclusions were logically deduced from the premise "humans act with purpose" and therefore unfalsifiable, stated that "no measurement is possible" in the field of economic activity (!) and who later described econometrics as "childish play with figures". That's a very different position from the many other mainstream and non-mainstream economists who simply think other economists' models are insufficiently connected to reality .
Mainstream economics says that monetary intervention is necessary to "stabilize" the economy, as measured by metric X Y or Z. Who benefits from that stability? I would say mostly the upper echelon status quo. And what is the social cost of the stability? Mainstream economics also measures the widening wealth gap but it's incredibly infuriating that they can't fucking put two and two together and understand that the gap is the social cost of their stability measures. Especially so since there is a clear straight line mechanism for that to be the case.
The people who lose absolutely everything they've ever worked for in the event of a sustained recession. They tend not to be rich, nor comfortable with the rival Austrian solution of waiting it out because if wages drop low enough the rich might eventually deign to act by unburying their gold and investing in capital formation and job creation again.
> it's incredibly infuriating that they can't fucking put two and two together and understand that the gap is the social cost of their stability measures
It's incredibly frustrating when the school of economics most founded by a man who stormed out of a meeting of the right wing Mont Pelerin society screaming "you're all a bunch of socialists" for discussing possible solutions to income equality masquerades as egalitarian. Other economists can and do discuss causes of and solutions to inequality, including establishing the fact "the rich get richer" was a truism when gold standards were everywhere. Austrian economics doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of "social cost", rejects the possibility of making meaningful claims about some people needing a dollar more than others and wants to set a floor on how much of the future economy the 1% control by ensuring their 'sound money' is still good for that share of future economic growth even if they impede that growth by withdrawing it from circulation.
But yes, it's very good at scapegoating the Fed as the root of all evil as its oil baron funded adherents join often successful lobbying efforts against every single policy that might make working class people's lives less uncomfortable.
Not being an Austrian helps you conclude that their arguments that economics isn't quantitative, positivism isn't useful and reducing income inequality is actually a goal a government might wish to consider wrong though. :)
So like chicago, keynes, socialism, mmt (which admittedly is niche)
Better?
Because it's not. It's the cost of fiscal policy decisions made overtly to aid “job creators” in the supposed hope that the wealth they drink in will trickle down as a golden shower for the rest of society.
"Even in the long run, it's really really hard to cut nominal wages..."
Don't get it wrong. Inflation is a tool to cut wages. It is fundamentally anti-labor.
It is difficult to paint the alternative of artificially restricting the money supply to a level where the private sector [as a whole] must reduce some employees' nominal wages or fire them every time it offers pay rises to its most in-demand staff as more pro-labour. It doesn't sound any more pro-labour when people preferring that arrangement argue that recessions are a more appropriate mechanism to hold down wages, and acknowledge the purpose of zero inflation [and acceptance of economic downturns] is to allow wealth to be preserved for years or even generations without the need for it to be used in job creation.
But it's a blunt instrument. Providing tools to aid those workers adversely affected by those market shifts, whether by declining real wages or lost jobs, is the role of fiscal, not monetary policy.