Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?

Chapter dzǵ: Tacit Preachments are the Worst Kind ȁȃȈ

the same thing as issuing methodological injunctions and taboos. Rather,
it resembles the bottom-level, nuts-and-bolts methodology acceptable to
McCloskey.
Now, what are some types of fallacy—and, to broaden our target, types
of irrelevance—found in economic discourse?

• Standard fallacies that textbooks warn against, such as the fallacy of
  composition (and reverse fallacies of composition).


• Ļe Ricardian Vice (so called by SchumpeterȀȈȄȃ, pp.ȅȅȇ,ȀȀȆȀ): “the
  habit of establishing simple relations between aggregates that then
  acquire a spurious halo of causal importance, whereas all the really
  important (and, unfortunately, complicated) things are being bundled
  away in or behind these aggregates,” in other words, “the habit of pil-
  ing a heavy load of practical conclusions upon a tenuous groundwork,
  which was unequal to it yet seemed in its simplicity not only attractive
  but also convincing.”


• “Austrian-style disquisitions on the foundations of human knowl-
  edge and conduct and the like,” an irrelevancy characteristic of Frank
  Knight’s writings, according to LeRoy and Singell (ȀȈȇȆ, p.ȃǿȁ).


• Similarly, nonsubstantive brooding over the meanings of concepts, as
  over the essence of entrepreneurship.


• Assuming constancy of magnitudes that simply cannot remain con-
  stant in the face of changes in other magnitudes considered (Buchanan
  ȀȈȄȇ).


• Failure to distinguish between individual and overall points of view
  or, relatedly, failure to make, when relevant, Patinkin’s distinction
  between individual experiments and market experiments (ȀȈȅȄ, chap.Ȁ
  and appendix).


• Failures to distinguish when necessary between actual and desired
  changes in holdings of money, between an excess demand for or sup-
  ply of home money on the foreign-exchange market and an excess
  demand for or supply of domestic cash balances, and between demand
  for assets denominated in a particular currency and the demand for
  holdings of that currency as a medium of exchange.


• Ļe real-bills fallacy, which keeps turning up in new disguises.