In one of the streams, he mentioned to an interlocutor that economic schools are irrelevant and that everything best from those schools has been integrated into the mainstream. Do you agree? Has he gotten too fat?

P.S. It’s a pity the site crashed. I hope all is well with you. I haven’t figured out crypto yet, but I’ll donate somehow.

Some Kazakh

Thank you for the explication from Vatoadmin, because I would have been too lazy to sift through his streams in search of specific quotes. As for the thickness, he is still far from Kakha Bendukidze; let him keep trying.

Now, to the main part of the question.

Economic mainstream today, indeed, has long ceased to be some kind of cohesive theory. It is simply a set of views on economics, none of which are perceived by economists as complete nonsense. At the same time, taken together, they can be internally contradictory—to this, an economist will say that each economic tool has its own area of application, and that is perfectly normal—and the task of economics is precisely to study when a wise regulator should apply what.

The Austrian school is indeed part of the mainstream. It primarily describes exactly how economic agents behave in a free market, and also shows with disdainful curiosity what distortions are introduced by this or that form of coercion. The mainstream also describes how economic agents behave in a free market (and often does so using an apparatus that grew out of the Austrian school), and then asserts that the market can and should be regulated, that it is done in such-and-such a way, for such-and-such goals, and produces such-and-such results. Or it doesn’t, in which case one must study what went wrong and make corrections to economic policy next time.

Regarding the Austrians’ dislike of using mathematical apparatus to describe complex phenomena, I would explain it roughly like this. A mainstreamer will imperturbably calculate how many human bodies and how many horse bodies a White Walker needs to lay out a pattern in the snow, how much time he will spend on it, and by how much the temperature in the forest will drop as a result of performing this ritual. An Austrian simply postulates that White Walkers are an evil that has no place in the forest, and he will not require mathematical models for this.

Now tell me, how can a decent economist not despise such primness?