I proposed how to save Austrian Economics.

Get rid of Praxeology that is absurd.
Praxeology makes “purposeful action” so broad that it becomes almost empty.
If every human action is called purposeful by definition, then the theory is protected from evidence by language, not supported by evidence.
Here is the core argument.
Praxeology begins with the axiom: humans act purposefully. But much of modern psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics shows that human behavior is often automatic, habitual, unconscious, impulsive, socially primed, emotionally driven, or rationalized after the fact.
That does not mean behavior is random. It means behavior is often caused without being consciously intended in the strong rational sense assumed by Austrian economics.
Libet’s famous experiments found that brain activity preparing a voluntary movement begins before the subject reports conscious awareness of the intention to act. Libet concluded that cerebral initiation of a voluntary act can begin unconsciously before conscious intention appears.
Later work by Soon, Brass, Heinze, and Haynes found that patterns in prefrontal and parietal brain activity could predict the outcome of a simple decision up to several seconds before the subject became consciously aware of deciding. The relevance to complex choices is debated, but the result directly challenges the idea that conscious purpose is always the initiating cause of action.
Nisbett and Wilson’s classic paper, Telling More Than We Can Know, reviewed evidence that people often lack direct introspective access to the real causes of their choices. Subjects may be unaware of the stimulus that influenced them, unaware of their own response, or unaware of the link between stimulus and response. In other words, people often give reasons for actions after the fact rather than reporting the true causal process.
This matters because praxeology treats human action as if it begins from conscious ends, chosen means, and subjective preference. But many actions are better described as outputs of automatic systems: habits, conditioning, reflexes, emotional reactions, social imitation, status competition, addiction, fear, panic, boredom, fatigue, and unconscious bias.
Behavioral economics also undermines the clean rational-action picture. Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory showed that decisions under risk systematically violate expected utility theory: people overweight some probabilities, underweight others, respond asymmetrically to gains and losses, and are strongly affected by framing.
Austrian economists can reply: “But even irrational action is still purposeful, because the person preferred that action at that moment.”
But this is exactly the problem. If “purposeful” simply means “the organism did something,” then the axiom becomes trivial. A sneeze, a panic sell, a compulsive purchase, a reflexive insult, a herd-driven bubble, or a conditioned habit can all be redescribed as “purposeful” after the fact. The concept stops doing scientific work.
A scientific theory should distinguish between different mechanisms:
conscious planning
habitual behavior
automatic reaction
emotional impulse
social imitation
unconscious bias
neural preparation before awareness
post-hoc rationalization
Praxeology collapses all of these into the same category: “action.”
That is not insight. It is compression by definition.
The deeper criticism is this: Mises wanted economics to be deduced from an a priori axiom about action.
But human beings are biological, neurological, social animals. Their behavior must be studied empirically because the mechanisms are not self-evident from introspection. Observation, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and data all show that human behavior is not reducible to conscious rational purpose.
Praxeology begins by declaring all human action purposeful. But modern science shows that much human behavior is unconscious, automatic, habitual, emotional, socially induced, or rationalized after the fact.
If Mises still calls all of that “purposeful,” then the claim is no longer an empirical insight. It is a tautology.
And tautologies do not explain markets, bubbles, panics, adoption curves, or human behavior.