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Matt McCaffrey

Matt McCaffrey

Austrian-school economist and Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the University of Manchester's Alliance Manchester Business School; Mises Institute Fellow and Frank Fetter scholar.

Sep 22, 2026

18:17
So go, go ahead.
18:18
ahead.[chuckles] Yeah.
18:20
No, but it's, it's, it's a good point, and a lot of economists do think this way, and I think it's because of the difference between, uh, it's a confusion of sort of the methods of the natural sciences and the methods of the social sciences, and this is a theme that obviously Austrians have written about quite a lot of the, over the decades.
18:35
Uh, but just very quickly, in natural sciences, if we proceed by hypothesis testing, experimenting, and so on, then it makes more sense to think that we would constantly be making progress and discarding errors and making d- making new discoveries and so on.
18:53
But of course, things are not like this in the social sciences.
18:56
We don't have the same kind of, uh, uh...
19:00
The same kind of empirical methods, uh, are not relevant, uh, as in the national, uh, as in the natural sciences.

16 MINS LATER

35:33
Anyway, do you w- Can you give us a taste of that? I d- Like I said, I don't mean to put you on the spot.

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