A Stitch in Haste

Frederic Sautet has a theory:

I believe indeed that methodology and epistemology are the main reasons why Austrians are not invited and perhaps the reasons why they won't be invited for a long time.
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Kauder explained that economic laws are ontological and that to be an economist is also to be a metaphysician. Austrians are not alone in claiming that economic laws (as well the laws of mathematics, geometry, etc) are apodictically certain.

I have an alternative explanation: People ignore Austrian economists because they tend to use words like "ontological," "metaphysician" and "apodictically."

Compare and contrast (via Marginal Revolution) this piece from my old graduate adviser from Cornell, Robert Frank (I don't particularly like his economics anymore, but he's 100% correct this time):

The specific assignment is "to use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed."

"Your space limit is 500 words," the assignment continues. "Many excellent papers are significantly shorter than that. Please do not lard your essay with complex terminology. Imagine yourself talking to a relative who has never had a course in economics. The best papers are ones that would be clearly intelligible to such a person, and typically these papers do not use any algebra or graphs."

This is comparable to what I call "pitcher and pie" instruction: if I can't explain an economic, financial or legal concept to you over a pitcher of beer and a pizza pie, then I've failed as a teacher. (In one instance, I literally used a pizza pie to explain the concept of EBITDA to a non-Wall-Street friend of a friend. It worked.)

Economists should teach based more on the world and less on the graph, and certainly not on multisyllabic wordplay. Legal instructors get this, I think, far better than economics instructors -- perhaps it's just a by-product of the case method (one exception, however, is all the legal Latin; other than "ceteris paribus" economists tend to speak something resembling English).

Bottom line: There are no bad students...