Handbook on Contemporary Austrian Economics

36 <strong>Handbook</strong> on contemporary Austrian economics
can still be spurious. It is possible that higher literacy does not lead to
more prosperity and that more prosperity does not lead to higher literacy,
even though the two are correlated. A third, yet to be determined, variable
might explain both. Although sophisticated statistical techniques have
been developed to mitigate this danger, it can never be fully overcome.
And, ultimately, recourse to a theoretical proposition that points to and
argues for a particular causal relationship and interpreting his quantitative
findings in the context of other relevant (quantitative and qualitative)
information is unavoidable if the social scientist is to make sense of his
results.
Specifically, then, it is not the use of quantitative methods that is worrisome
to Austrian economists; to be sure, qualitative methods have their
own pitfalls. Instead, they are particularly concerned about the privileging
of quantitative over qualitative methods because they believe that the
privileging of quantitative empirical methods over qualitative methods
distorts empirical research in the social sciences. As Rizzo writes (1978,
p. 53), "not all issues of interest are quantifiable. If we try to explain
complex phenomena only by reference to quantifiable variables, then
we are likely to be throwing away some information that we do, indeed,
have." Privileging quantitative over qualitative approaches encourages
social scientists to pursue certain questions and to disregard others. It
also limits them to offering cert~in kinds of answers when they attempt to
answer a question. And, in the worst cases, it pushes the social scientist to
assign quantitative measures to phenomena that might not be measurable.
Hayek ([ 1952] 1979, p. 89) has argued that this tendency to privilege quantitative
over qualitative approaches in the social sciences:
is probably responsible for the worst aberrations and absurdities produced by
scient ism in the social sciences. It not only leads frequently to the selection for
study of the most irrelevant aspects of the phenomena because they happen to
be measurable, but also to 'measurements' and assignments of numerical values
which are absolutely meaningless.
If one approach had to be privileged over the other, it is likely that, for a
science that recognizes people's thoughts and beliefs as the essential data,
privileging qualitative over quantitative methods of apprehending history
is more appropriate. Again, an empirical approach that hoped to illustrate
and complement a social science that aims at recovering the meanings
that individuals attach to their actions and environments must necessarily
resemble ethnography and emphasize thick descriptions. Mises ([1957]
1985, p. 280) has argued that "thymological analysis," which tries to discover
how and why people at specific times valued and acted in different
circumstances, "is essential for the study of history." Similarly, Hayek