> Scientific studies regarding the Montessori method are mostly positive,
... whatever that means.
Letting children choose their own way is good. It is, however, very difficult in the age of global surveillance, when every toy is only used to collect data about its user.
Well, I guess there’s also sandpaper, cards, glass, beads, other types of boxes/latches, but certainly nothing “collecting data”. At least not in the AMS accredited Montessori school we helped run.
I think low income family parents have to work more, sometimes multiple jobs to pay the bills so the kids end up with more screen time because maybe they have someone else watching them or they're alone depending on the age. If someone else is watching them it's easy to just give the kid a screen and they're not as concerned as the parents about the long term effects.
Also if you're a kid in a low income area where maybe it's not safe to go play outside or you need constant supervision to be safe you don't go out much and therefore screens become the default indoor play. My kids have a big backyard they can go out and ride bikes around and swingset and spaces to dig and play and get dirty in the backyard because I make enough to buy a house like that.
It's hard not to give a smartphone to a kid if you have to work or just can't spend a lot of time with the kid. Kids are demanding of time and attention. So either you have enough time or you pay someone to play with your kid or you have to endure a lot of chaos a kid without a smartphone and a lot of time without attention can do (from screaming and crying to wreaking havoc in your household). Or you give them smartphone and they keep quiet and still and you can do what you need to do.
I feel it's easier with with more kids since you can let them play together. It's hard with one kid or kids that are not of similar age, since they have nobody to play with them at home. Of course, there are some kids who can play alone with legos or dolls. I know when I was growing up me and my brother where a year apart and we could play for hours together with legos or toys, we did also watch a lot of TV, this was the early 90s.
imho we're completely missing the problem. It's not so much that kids need our attention, it's more that adults have 0 fucking free time, both parents have to work full time (or often even more) to afford what people could afford on a single salary not even 50 years ago.
Giving a phone to a 5 years old solves the symptom but it certainly doesn't fix the problem.
I don't think that's true, at least for Americans. Even in the sub-population of full time working parents, more time is spent on watching TV (1.45h mother, 1.98h father) than on child care (1.41h mother, 0.91h father, where units are hours per 24h on average): https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a7-1519.htm
Worth calling out that's for "children under 18". If you scroll down to specifically "children under 6", since people talking about "screen time" are usually more worried about 6 year olds than 16 year olds, those hours go to 2.42/1.54 childcare against 1.17/1.79 TV.
But I think I'd look at it the other way. The only category on here that's really "discretionary time" is "Leisure and sports". Across the board, parents are averaging about 12% there. The average across the population (including parents) is 22%.[0] This is also averaging everything across weekends as well. Expectedly, people have more free time on the weekends[1].
I'd also point out the footnote:
> NOTE: A primary activity refers to an individual's main activity. Other activities done simultaneously are not included.
There is nothing I do while my kid is (1) home and (2) awake that doesn't involve her taking up a large part of my time and attention.
When it's a dark evening in the middle of winter and I'm setting up a ladder in three feet of snow to climb up on the roof and run an auger down the sewer vent on the roof... I'm still spending probably a third to half of my time on her.
When I've got two pans on the fire, something in the toaster oven, and I'm trying to mind a pot I'm filling up with water to turn into supper... I guess, yeah, running back and forth to try and clean up some spilled juice and get her changed out of the wet clothes while I don't let anything burn or overflow is still technically mostly "food preparation and cleanup".
I don't even know where "planning child's birthday party" fits into this whole thing, but it's not something I'm doing _with_ my kid so it doesn't seem to be caring for household children by the general phrasing of these options. (And you might think "yeah but that only happens once a year" and you'd be right... but it's always something.)
And yeah, after she was asleep I did a bunch of "housework" and at some point I sat down for an hour and "watched TV" while I poked away at a bunch of other smaller things that needed doing. At some point I feel asleep in a chair so I'm not sure whether my primary activity was "sleep" or "watching television".
So that's a rundown of a recent evening of mine which had around 0 hours spent on childcare and an hour on TV.
Obviously "lived experience" is not "data", but that's at least _a_ perspective--yes, by the numbers I probably spend more time watching TV than caring for my kid but no, she's still the main time sink on my day outside of sleep and work (and sometimes not even sleep) and I certainly do not have a bunch of free time I could be allocating to childcare so she spent less time watching TV.
My sister is out of work 50% of the time, her husband is out of work 90% of the time. Their combined yearly earnings are well under the median wage here.
They have 5 kids + 1 foster.
All have iPads. The eldest kid does double duty as nursemaid and has done since she was 7 or so.
Poverty = Kids iPad for me too. I dunno why. Its cheaper than childcare I guess.
Before having a kid I never realized how powerful of a tool a TV or an iPad was in terms of (essentially) free babysitting.
Families where grandparents can afford to retire and / or move closer to their grandchildren are operating on an entirely different level financially. As are families where the parent or parents can work from home. As are families that can afford childcare which can easily cost as much or more than a mortgage in California at least. Even after public Kindergarten or TK becomes available these are mostly only half day coverage (again in CA) and you are completely on your own to figure out how to cover (pay for) the rest of the time if both parents work and there aren't other family members in the picture.
So in summary, I never would have realized that regardless of how much screen time you want your kid having the reality has shown itself to be that there is a direct correlation between relying on screen time and the financial standing of you and your extended family, for better or worse.
I was very lucky to have remote work when I had a kid, but my parents couldn't / can't afford to retire and that has had a huge financial impact on us. If I had an in-person job we would have had to rely a lot more on screens to fill in the gaps.
In any case no complaints I absolutely love having a kid and am glad to pay for good quality school / childcare and I don't really believe there's anything wrong with screen time anyway.
Watching 3-6 hours of TV a day after school while my parents worked and did whatever adults did in the 90's didn't seem to do as much harm to me mentally as I would have thought. It seems insane in retrospect.
It's crazy to compare my household now vs my experience as a kid in the 90s. TV was always on in the background, whether it was the news, or documentaries, sports, or cartoons, always something. As a kid I knew at what time different soap operas or TV shows would be on the program. We also had schools in shifts, and some weeks I would go to school at 2pm, so I had the whole morning without parents to do homework and watch TV, there was nothing else to do.
I do spend a lot of time online now, but the TV is almost always turned off in my house. Only occasionally will I turn on the TV and play a cartoon channel on cable (or disney) for my kid if I have something to do.
This whole post is spot on. Where I live the use of a screen as a baby sitter is a lot higher in the households where there is a single parent, or where both parents work jobs with very low flexibility, often in combination with no grandparents able to help out.
As far as I can tell, “Montessori” is just a mechanism for price discrimination, like “organic”.
We’ve gone out with multiple sets of parents who send their kids to Montessori labeled schools, and they whip out iPhones and iPads to placate at the first sign of trouble.
Not to mention that I can’t figure out what a Montessori school does differently anyway, other than charge a higher tuition, thereby selecting for a group of kids with higher socioeconomic status parents.
That’s because Montessori is something that any school or daycare can call themselves, regardless of whether they adhere to the teaching philosophy or not. You need to look at just the set of schools that are AMS or AMI accredited.
Yep, exactly this. There's been a boom in Montessori-labeled schools, but there are comparatively few real ones. Partly, it's very hard to find real Montessori teachers, so the ones that aren't accredited don't have many, if any, real Montessori-trained teachers, and it's not something you can just wing.
I ran the hiring processes for a Montessori school my wife and I helped run, and the difference in even Montessori-trained and very experienced teachers was stunning. If you want the real experience, you really have to find one that lives and breathes the principles.
I feel that the Montessori method is a lot like the Ten Commandments. You really don’t need a label or specific books or memberships to cathedrals of education to practice those principles.
I have kids in grade 1 and 2 so I’m getting to experience public school by proxy 30 years later and see what’s changed. I’m delighted to see that they employ a lot of the Montessori philosophy without once feeling the need to label it as such. Not that the label is bad. It’s just unnecessary.
Maria Montessori is one of the few people that seemed to understand intuitively how science works. For me she is in there with likes of Ludvig Von Mises and Richard Feynman. For her there is no question how to develop things and every moment is a possibility to observe and try to understand.
Montessori's main contribution is applying scientific methods for education. She is first and foremost and empiricist that led over 50 years of field study on education. The Montessori method is just an outcome of that study.
So one thing that we should take away from her is that it is our responsibility to see and observe the kids and adjust our behavior and environment so that the kids can fulfill their potential.
"The first Right of Man, the Fundamental Right, should recognise the right of the child to be helped to overcome those obstacles which may hinder, repress or deflect his constructive energies thereby denying him the certainty of becoming an efficient, well-balanced adult." - Maria Montessori
Praxeology goes far beyond rejecting specific empirical studies, it rejects the very concept of learning human behaviour from past data. Or, to quote Mises himself [1]:
> The subject matter of all historical sciences is the past. They cannot teach us anything which would be valid for all human actions, that is, for the future too. The study of history makes a man wise and judicious. But it does not by itself provide any knowledge and skill which could be utilized for handling concrete tasks.
He does make a difference between natural science and history, claiming that natural science carefully isolates elements in order to enable inference. That point would be thoroughly debunked by current AI systems, considering that by his definition these systems would be in the field of history.
Mises makes this distinction between natural science and history, because he can then claim that:
> The experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is always an experience of complex phenomena. No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action.
And since praxeology isn't simple enough to be criticized by natural science and
that historical sciences have no say about current affairs, he rejects criticism from either field. This line of reasoning may have been tricky to attack in 1920, but it's completely obsolete in 2025.
Mises' exact words were that praxeology is "not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts." He did not believe the scientific method was fit for the study of human actions.
I have ended up with different understanding from Von Mises text. The point is that economics need to progress from axioms that are true.
This means that we start with axioms like humans have ideas how to improve their situation. Humans act with the goal of attaining to ideas they have. These are something that we can't or don't need to prove. With these two axioms we can start creating a complete set of reasonings that will explain market phenomena that happens in the real world.
And the reason why this is needed and is so important is that there are no constants in the realm of human action. That is the criticism of positivism in economics.
Positivist methods can help greatly with building theories in "natural sciences" as there are mechanistic actions and constants that are revealed by comparing rations. (this is the way we got to understand how atoms bind to molecules and how strong the gravity is). We haven't found similar constants in market phenomena and Von Mises thought we never will.
But we have found laws like the law of supply and demand or comparative advantage. And that we have reached with using only reasoning.
I do think conflate praxeology (the study of human action) and Von Mises's preferred methods of studying it. Von Mises didn't hold any views on economics that wouldn't be acceptable in the mainstream and didn't really have any objections on mainstream economics during his lifetime.
I do really like they way von Mises broke down the human action and it is related studies. It is different to study what person should strive for (ethics), why people strive for something (psychology) and how people can attain the goals they have chosen (economics).
The understanding that economics is not science that can and should not do value judgement is a great contribution. Scholars are free to offer they ideas about ethics, but it is a different discipline.
On this background you should look with his criticism against socialism. He doesn't say that goals of socialism are bad. He just points out that tools and processes advocated cannot achieve the stated goals. And he had fairly great concrete criticism about socialism in his 1920 book "Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis". This predated the great Soviet Union and Chinese socialism experiments, which haven't proved him wrong.
Von Mises was not so advocating about creating theories that don't stand the test of real world. His aim was always to understand real world phenomenon. His rejection was about using tools that don't work with humans. Physics and chemistry are governed by constants like gravity, electromagnerical force, weak and strong nuclear forces that allow you to use advanced mathematics to study them and isolate these constants. Economics do have laws as strong as laws of motion, but you cannot find these the same way as human action is variable.
I do get same feeling about Richard Feynman. For him it seems that you needed to have a mental model first about a problem, before trying to model it with mathematics. [1]
You cannot progress without insight and you cannot have insight without interaction with real world. Theories only have value if they can affect actions in the real world. And there is a lot of ways outside of p-values how to allow that feedback from the real world to affect you. And this is something I feel that all of those people intuitively understood. :)
> The experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is always an experience of complex phenomena. No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action. [...] Neither experimental verification nor experimental falsification of a general proposition is possible in its field.
> Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic [...] science. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. [...] Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts.
Basically, Mises claimed that Praxeology brings prerequisite tools necesary to understand human action, and that these tools are axioms, not subject to being tested themselves. Praxeology is, to him, an algebra that must be true in order to be able to understand complex events such as economics.
I don't want to say how Mises would have reacted, but had he faced modern economics (for instance RCTs in the context of development economics) or machine learning, he would have been confronted with the fatal flaws of his theory, just like a time-traveling medieval doctor could not reasonably defend the theory of humours today.
I cannot treat Mises rejecting all verification. Of course this might be due to reading his works long after seeing how world has developed. This way it is easy to downplay the faults and see the things that had insight.
To take a concrete example of supply and demand. We can logically understand that raising supply cannot raise prices. Similarly increasing demand cannot lower prices. We can reach this conclusions by just starting with axioms that humans have a priori ideas how their situation can be improved and human acts with a goal to reach ideas. This is shown by Murray Rothbard in his book Man, Economy and State.
We cannot reach the same conclusion by just calculating ratios from historical data, due these being complex phenomena that have many confounding variables. We need to have a priori ideas to be able to start unconfound variables in such historical data.
I don't really get from his writing that he mistook the perfect algebra as representation of the real world. It just that to gain actionable insight with the real world you need to process with series of logical steps to the conclusion. The real point is not that can you make up a logical chain of statements. You always can add an ad hoc proposition to save a theory (and this was his outgoing criticism against the German Historic School). The point is to tease the statements and reasoning chains so that only things that are true remain. This is the way (Von Mises saw) to get the universal laws of human actions that he hold would be as universal as the laws of motion.
I don't think that RCT in modern economics are trying to answer same questions. You need a priori theories to devise the trials and then you need to use the same a priori theories to make sense of the results. The results might force you to change your a priori before devising a next trial. And for that process you need to use the reasoning that Von Mises advocated.
Most likely he wouldn't think that Development Economics is Economics proper. It doesn't mean that it shouldn't be studied, but it is a different realm from the laws of human action that he studied. He also didn't think that a good economist shouldn't understand other sciences and shouldn't take inspiration from them.
If you look how much insight and a priori knowledge and reasoning people like Kenneth Arrow or Milton Friedman had and used, I don't see the concrete gulf between them and Von Mises so large. They have major differences and had opposite views, but I feel that it is more a difference in degree not in kind. I think that economists have a bad habit of overstating their differences and downplaying how much they agree.
But I would believe that Von Mises would have rather drank hemlock like Socrates than admit faults on his views. But this is an characteristic of many great economists :D
>Montessori's main contribution is applying scientific methods for education. She is first and foremost and empiricist that led over 50 years of field study on education. The Montessori method is just an outcome of that study.
I don’t see how this can be true considering the inability to create falsifiable hypotheses and myriad confounding variables. See the replication crisis.
But falsiable hypotheses she created :D All of his writing and lectures are full of situations where her a priori held ideas didn't survive the actions of real children in the classroom.
She thought that toy and play would great rewards, when she started with the first casa di bambini in Rome in 1907. She had prepared toys and doll house for the children to play with, when they did an exercise she had prepared. Contrary her hypothesis the kids were not interested in the toys, but continued to do the exercises. She removed the toys as kids didn't play with them, not because she didn't like them.
This is something that she did through out her career. When she was managing and teaching disabled kids she noticed a girl that had hard time of using scissors. She then created exercises that helped the girl to master the sub movements that lead to the dexterity that allowed her to use scissors.
The material she developed is so full of the details that you can only see if stop and observe fully. Even though she didn't ran randomized controlled trials she was able to separate many confounding variables.
My point is not to say that Montessori method is the only or even the best method of education, but Maria Montessori has been one of the greatest empiricists of our time. She was a fully trained doctor and kept up with other people's papers and studies during her lifetime. And all things were tested on the children in her schools.
"My intention was to keep in touch with the research of other, but to preserve my independence. The only thing that I considered to be essential was Wundt's maxim that “all methods of experimental psychology can be reduced to one, namely, to carefully recorded observation." -- Maria Montessori
This is also the same feeling that I get from Richard Feynman's writings. He just got it where you can develop mental models and theories and when you need to expose them to real world.
Let me add some additional context here (source: twins in a private Montessori in a central EU country)
a) Montessori Schools vary usually - not only from country to country, also not only from state to state, but also within Cities
b) There are networks per each conutry, but you may join as school if you do offer different things than other schools in the same network
c) Within Montessori, there are a lot of "custom" approaches which are, at least in this country, usually discussed with the local government/educational gov
d) the comments with selection according to higher socio economical levels is a hard fact, at least in this country, since Montessori schools always demand some type of payment, depending on the income of the parents (on top of that they get usually partial funding from the local municipal/gov per school-people). At my kids school, 98% of parents are in a "good six digit range" (while the average salary in this country is mid. five figures, like ~49000)
e) my kids school is great, so i can only speak for this locatoin with their specific Montessori implementation: It is a school i wished i could have attended when i was young. Its great: Their building is quite fresh (note: there are some "parental hours" per year where YOU have to take care of the building for YOUR kids on YOUR OWN with the OTHER parents, this is 40h per parent-person in this location), they have a "everything-is-working-facility", not only rest rooms but also working IT equipment etc. (for which i have a special eye as HN user ;-) ), last years the built an additonal level on top of the building to install a free-range-roof-top and tennis area
Also i want to add to digg a little bit deeper about the myth about the person herself:
While her teaching & educational approach is (in my opinion) superior to others, she for herself was also highly critized for some "specific behaviours/traits": the German Wikipedia article is telling more about these:
48 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread... whatever that means.
Letting children choose their own way is good. It is, however, very difficult in the age of global surveillance, when every toy is only used to collect data about its user.
Also, they are often in the wealthy, upper class so can enforce that kind on environment.
Also if you're a kid in a low income area where maybe it's not safe to go play outside or you need constant supervision to be safe you don't go out much and therefore screens become the default indoor play. My kids have a big backyard they can go out and ride bikes around and swingset and spaces to dig and play and get dirty in the backyard because I make enough to buy a house like that.
Giving a phone to a 5 years old solves the symptom but it certainly doesn't fix the problem.
But I think I'd look at it the other way. The only category on here that's really "discretionary time" is "Leisure and sports". Across the board, parents are averaging about 12% there. The average across the population (including parents) is 22%.[0] This is also averaging everything across weekends as well. Expectedly, people have more free time on the weekends[1].
I'd also point out the footnote:
> NOTE: A primary activity refers to an individual's main activity. Other activities done simultaneously are not included.
There is nothing I do while my kid is (1) home and (2) awake that doesn't involve her taking up a large part of my time and attention.
When it's a dark evening in the middle of winter and I'm setting up a ladder in three feet of snow to climb up on the roof and run an auger down the sewer vent on the roof... I'm still spending probably a third to half of my time on her.
When I've got two pans on the fire, something in the toaster oven, and I'm trying to mind a pot I'm filling up with water to turn into supper... I guess, yeah, running back and forth to try and clean up some spilled juice and get her changed out of the wet clothes while I don't let anything burn or overflow is still technically mostly "food preparation and cleanup".
I don't even know where "planning child's birthday party" fits into this whole thing, but it's not something I'm doing _with_ my kid so it doesn't seem to be caring for household children by the general phrasing of these options. (And you might think "yeah but that only happens once a year" and you'd be right... but it's always something.)
And yeah, after she was asleep I did a bunch of "housework" and at some point I sat down for an hour and "watched TV" while I poked away at a bunch of other smaller things that needed doing. At some point I feel asleep in a chair so I'm not sure whether my primary activity was "sleep" or "watching television".
So that's a rundown of a recent evening of mine which had around 0 hours spent on childcare and an hour on TV.
Obviously "lived experience" is not "data", but that's at least _a_ perspective--yes, by the numbers I probably spend more time watching TV than caring for my kid but no, she's still the main time sink on my day outside of sleep and work (and sometimes not even sleep) and I certainly do not have a bunch of free time I could be allocating to childcare so she spent less time watching TV.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a1-2023.pdf [1] https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a2-2023.pdf
They have 5 kids + 1 foster.
All have iPads. The eldest kid does double duty as nursemaid and has done since she was 7 or so.
Poverty = Kids iPad for me too. I dunno why. Its cheaper than childcare I guess.
Families where grandparents can afford to retire and / or move closer to their grandchildren are operating on an entirely different level financially. As are families where the parent or parents can work from home. As are families that can afford childcare which can easily cost as much or more than a mortgage in California at least. Even after public Kindergarten or TK becomes available these are mostly only half day coverage (again in CA) and you are completely on your own to figure out how to cover (pay for) the rest of the time if both parents work and there aren't other family members in the picture.
So in summary, I never would have realized that regardless of how much screen time you want your kid having the reality has shown itself to be that there is a direct correlation between relying on screen time and the financial standing of you and your extended family, for better or worse.
I was very lucky to have remote work when I had a kid, but my parents couldn't / can't afford to retire and that has had a huge financial impact on us. If I had an in-person job we would have had to rely a lot more on screens to fill in the gaps.
In any case no complaints I absolutely love having a kid and am glad to pay for good quality school / childcare and I don't really believe there's anything wrong with screen time anyway.
Watching 3-6 hours of TV a day after school while my parents worked and did whatever adults did in the 90's didn't seem to do as much harm to me mentally as I would have thought. It seems insane in retrospect.
We’ve gone out with multiple sets of parents who send their kids to Montessori labeled schools, and they whip out iPhones and iPads to placate at the first sign of trouble.
Not to mention that I can’t figure out what a Montessori school does differently anyway, other than charge a higher tuition, thereby selecting for a group of kids with higher socioeconomic status parents.
Prior Montessori HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622295
I ran the hiring processes for a Montessori school my wife and I helped run, and the difference in even Montessori-trained and very experienced teachers was stunning. If you want the real experience, you really have to find one that lives and breathes the principles.
I have kids in grade 1 and 2 so I’m getting to experience public school by proxy 30 years later and see what’s changed. I’m delighted to see that they employ a lot of the Montessori philosophy without once feeling the need to label it as such. Not that the label is bad. It’s just unnecessary.
I’m a fan of the sudbury model myself
some suck less
Montessori's main contribution is applying scientific methods for education. She is first and foremost and empiricist that led over 50 years of field study on education. The Montessori method is just an outcome of that study.
So one thing that we should take away from her is that it is our responsibility to see and observe the kids and adjust our behavior and environment so that the kids can fulfill their potential.
"The first Right of Man, the Fundamental Right, should recognise the right of the child to be helped to overcome those obstacles which may hinder, repress or deflect his constructive energies thereby denying him the certainty of becoming an efficient, well-balanced adult." - Maria Montessori
Not sure I would conflate praxeology and science, considering that praxeology is built on the rejection on empirical studies.
> The subject matter of all historical sciences is the past. They cannot teach us anything which would be valid for all human actions, that is, for the future too. The study of history makes a man wise and judicious. But it does not by itself provide any knowledge and skill which could be utilized for handling concrete tasks.
He does make a difference between natural science and history, claiming that natural science carefully isolates elements in order to enable inference. That point would be thoroughly debunked by current AI systems, considering that by his definition these systems would be in the field of history.
Mises makes this distinction between natural science and history, because he can then claim that:
> The experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is always an experience of complex phenomena. No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action.
And since praxeology isn't simple enough to be criticized by natural science and that historical sciences have no say about current affairs, he rejects criticism from either field. This line of reasoning may have been tricky to attack in 1920, but it's completely obsolete in 2025.
[1]: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/greaves-human-action-a-tr...
None of these quotes suggest that literally 100% of the set is rejected.
More detailed quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977051
It’s literally right there.
If he said “on any possible ground whatsoever including all currently unimagineable ones” then that would imply what you think it’s supposed to imply.
Even if you think my comment had zero substance, posting a reply with also zero substance seems bizarre.
This means that we start with axioms like humans have ideas how to improve their situation. Humans act with the goal of attaining to ideas they have. These are something that we can't or don't need to prove. With these two axioms we can start creating a complete set of reasonings that will explain market phenomena that happens in the real world.
And the reason why this is needed and is so important is that there are no constants in the realm of human action. That is the criticism of positivism in economics.
Positivist methods can help greatly with building theories in "natural sciences" as there are mechanistic actions and constants that are revealed by comparing rations. (this is the way we got to understand how atoms bind to molecules and how strong the gravity is). We haven't found similar constants in market phenomena and Von Mises thought we never will.
But we have found laws like the law of supply and demand or comparative advantage. And that we have reached with using only reasoning.
I do really like they way von Mises broke down the human action and it is related studies. It is different to study what person should strive for (ethics), why people strive for something (psychology) and how people can attain the goals they have chosen (economics).
The understanding that economics is not science that can and should not do value judgement is a great contribution. Scholars are free to offer they ideas about ethics, but it is a different discipline.
On this background you should look with his criticism against socialism. He doesn't say that goals of socialism are bad. He just points out that tools and processes advocated cannot achieve the stated goals. And he had fairly great concrete criticism about socialism in his 1920 book "Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis". This predated the great Soviet Union and Chinese socialism experiments, which haven't proved him wrong.
Von Mises was not so advocating about creating theories that don't stand the test of real world. His aim was always to understand real world phenomenon. His rejection was about using tools that don't work with humans. Physics and chemistry are governed by constants like gravity, electromagnerical force, weak and strong nuclear forces that allow you to use advanced mathematics to study them and isolate these constants. Economics do have laws as strong as laws of motion, but you cannot find these the same way as human action is variable.
I do get same feeling about Richard Feynman. For him it seems that you needed to have a mental model first about a problem, before trying to model it with mathematics. [1]
You cannot progress without insight and you cannot have insight without interaction with real world. Theories only have value if they can affect actions in the real world. And there is a lot of ways outside of p-values how to allow that feedback from the real world to affect you. And this is something I feel that all of those people intuitively understood. :)
[1] https://thinkjarcollective.com/articles/richard-feynman-spin...
> The experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is always an experience of complex phenomena. No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action. [...] Neither experimental verification nor experimental falsification of a general proposition is possible in its field.
> Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic [...] science. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. [...] Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts.
Basically, Mises claimed that Praxeology brings prerequisite tools necesary to understand human action, and that these tools are axioms, not subject to being tested themselves. Praxeology is, to him, an algebra that must be true in order to be able to understand complex events such as economics.
I don't want to say how Mises would have reacted, but had he faced modern economics (for instance RCTs in the context of development economics) or machine learning, he would have been confronted with the fatal flaws of his theory, just like a time-traveling medieval doctor could not reasonably defend the theory of humours today.
[1]: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/greaves-human-action-a-tr...
I cannot treat Mises rejecting all verification. Of course this might be due to reading his works long after seeing how world has developed. This way it is easy to downplay the faults and see the things that had insight.
To take a concrete example of supply and demand. We can logically understand that raising supply cannot raise prices. Similarly increasing demand cannot lower prices. We can reach this conclusions by just starting with axioms that humans have a priori ideas how their situation can be improved and human acts with a goal to reach ideas. This is shown by Murray Rothbard in his book Man, Economy and State.
We cannot reach the same conclusion by just calculating ratios from historical data, due these being complex phenomena that have many confounding variables. We need to have a priori ideas to be able to start unconfound variables in such historical data.
I don't really get from his writing that he mistook the perfect algebra as representation of the real world. It just that to gain actionable insight with the real world you need to process with series of logical steps to the conclusion. The real point is not that can you make up a logical chain of statements. You always can add an ad hoc proposition to save a theory (and this was his outgoing criticism against the German Historic School). The point is to tease the statements and reasoning chains so that only things that are true remain. This is the way (Von Mises saw) to get the universal laws of human actions that he hold would be as universal as the laws of motion.
I don't think that RCT in modern economics are trying to answer same questions. You need a priori theories to devise the trials and then you need to use the same a priori theories to make sense of the results. The results might force you to change your a priori before devising a next trial. And for that process you need to use the reasoning that Von Mises advocated.
Most likely he wouldn't think that Development Economics is Economics proper. It doesn't mean that it shouldn't be studied, but it is a different realm from the laws of human action that he studied. He also didn't think that a good economist shouldn't understand other sciences and shouldn't take inspiration from them.
If you look how much insight and a priori knowledge and reasoning people like Kenneth Arrow or Milton Friedman had and used, I don't see the concrete gulf between them and Von Mises so large. They have major differences and had opposite views, but I feel that it is more a difference in degree not in kind. I think that economists have a bad habit of overstating their differences and downplaying how much they agree.
But I would believe that Von Mises would have rather drank hemlock like Socrates than admit faults on his views. But this is an characteristic of many great economists :D
I don’t see how this can be true considering the inability to create falsifiable hypotheses and myriad confounding variables. See the replication crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
https://xkcd.com/435/
She thought that toy and play would great rewards, when she started with the first casa di bambini in Rome in 1907. She had prepared toys and doll house for the children to play with, when they did an exercise she had prepared. Contrary her hypothesis the kids were not interested in the toys, but continued to do the exercises. She removed the toys as kids didn't play with them, not because she didn't like them.
This is something that she did through out her career. When she was managing and teaching disabled kids she noticed a girl that had hard time of using scissors. She then created exercises that helped the girl to master the sub movements that lead to the dexterity that allowed her to use scissors.
The material she developed is so full of the details that you can only see if stop and observe fully. Even though she didn't ran randomized controlled trials she was able to separate many confounding variables.
My point is not to say that Montessori method is the only or even the best method of education, but Maria Montessori has been one of the greatest empiricists of our time. She was a fully trained doctor and kept up with other people's papers and studies during her lifetime. And all things were tested on the children in her schools.
"My intention was to keep in touch with the research of other, but to preserve my independence. The only thing that I considered to be essential was Wundt's maxim that “all methods of experimental psychology can be reduced to one, namely, to carefully recorded observation." -- Maria Montessori
This is also the same feeling that I get from Richard Feynman's writings. He just got it where you can develop mental models and theories and when you need to expose them to real world.
a) Montessori Schools vary usually - not only from country to country, also not only from state to state, but also within Cities
b) There are networks per each conutry, but you may join as school if you do offer different things than other schools in the same network
c) Within Montessori, there are a lot of "custom" approaches which are, at least in this country, usually discussed with the local government/educational gov
d) the comments with selection according to higher socio economical levels is a hard fact, at least in this country, since Montessori schools always demand some type of payment, depending on the income of the parents (on top of that they get usually partial funding from the local municipal/gov per school-people). At my kids school, 98% of parents are in a "good six digit range" (while the average salary in this country is mid. five figures, like ~49000)
e) my kids school is great, so i can only speak for this locatoin with their specific Montessori implementation: It is a school i wished i could have attended when i was young. Its great: Their building is quite fresh (note: there are some "parental hours" per year where YOU have to take care of the building for YOUR kids on YOUR OWN with the OTHER parents, this is 40h per parent-person in this location), they have a "everything-is-working-facility", not only rest rooms but also working IT equipment etc. (for which i have a special eye as HN user ;-) ), last years the built an additonal level on top of the building to install a free-range-roof-top and tennis area
Maybe this helps (-:
While her teaching & educational approach is (in my opinion) superior to others, she for herself was also highly critized for some "specific behaviours/traits": the German Wikipedia article is telling more about these:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Montessori#Kritik
(interesting, that the english version does not mention any of these, or did i miss it when skimming the EN-version of the article?)
Nontheless: My kids like it and i perceive them as very happy, esp. there is no homework and they also have very good kitchen/cantine for the kids.
probably because the critics all seem to be german.
it is also worth noting that the criticism is contradicted in the article itself with counter arguments and shown to be one sided or even baseless.