Methodological Subjectivism
AC: "Austrians claim that attempting to understand individual actions through statistics ... is mistaken ... By comparison, mainstream economists find it useful to know that unemployment has risen from 6 to 12 percent ... There are several problems with subjectivism, both new and old. Even granting the premise that humans are endowed with free will, there is no denying that even impersonal forces affect human actions..."
Really: This entire clip can be easily summarized: AC has no idea what he's talking about. To understand what ASE actually has to say on this, I suggest reading Mises[1].
Methodological Individualism[2]
AC here demonstrates yet again that he's never even seen a book by Mises. This one quote basically demolishes the entire premise of his video.
It is uncontested that in the sphere of human action social entities have real existence. Nobody ventures to deny that nations, states, municipalities, parties, religious communities, are real factors determining the course of human events. Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation. And it chooses the only method fitted to solve this problem satisfactorily.~Ludwig von Mises - Human Action Chapter II Section 4 [1]
Unsurprisingly, the methodological sections were quite horrible. After all, you'd have to actually understand Austrian methodology to be able to criticize it. And that would require reading some of the major works.
To be continued...
[1] Human Action
[2] Critique of Austrian Economics: Methodological Individualism
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