The Austrian Anthropology

Austrian economics does not reduce people to mechanisms like most other forms of economics do. While the Austrian perspective is still to approach economics as a positive rather than a normative science, it avoids numerous pitfalls by simply not making simplifying assumptions about people internally and the way they make choices. Rather than boxing people into predictable utility-maximizing decision units, Austrian economics lets people value things subjectively and recognizes that the price of anything arises from how it fits into people’s goals. It does not attempt to understand the nature of human striving and leaves room for it rather than trying to compress it for the sake of predictability. The human is assumed to have actual agency: something almost unheard of in the social sciences. Humans, rather than external forces, are understood to be the foundation of social order, and this shifts the focus from central control to the allowance of emergent coordination.

The Austrian school typically holds that human wants are subjective, and this lets each person be uniquely their own and incomparable. While other systems of economics would hypothetically allow for comparisons about the utility of different people, Austrian economics recognizes that each person‘s aims and utility are fundamentally unable to be compared to the aims of any other. This belief makes central planning, not only practically but morally difficult as it denies the building blocks needed to justify societal utility maximization. This is not to say that an Austrian economist cannot argue that one person’s subjective evaluations are better than others, but it lets that be a discussion for a different discipline. The Austrian school merely creates a baseline that is robust to whatever people believe about human action, recognizing that to do anything else would be to enter a metaphysical realm that economics is not fully suited for. Other forms of economics lose credibility and gain the power needed to coerce people into action when they form very specific beliefs about a human person masked as science.…