Idk... He admits upfront that the standard critiques have merit, but that recent shifts to hard data are a positive upheaval(thank you, you hackers you).
The "Austrian school" isn't what you think it is. The Austrian school refers to a theoretical school of thought of a very narrow subsection of macroeconomics (which itself is a very narrow subsection of economics) called business cycle theory. That subsection doesn't even represent 1% of what professional economists worry about, yet it somehow has 100% of the attention of armchair economists and political parties.
The funny thing about the statement isn't that it is true (the Austrian school doesn't rely on empiricism) but rather that you singled out a single school of business cycle theory for that criticism. Because BCT can't rely on empiricism. It is an area of economics where controlled experiments are impossible and standard impact measurement methods used in econometrics are not applicable due to dynamic cycles. That's the reason why "see, look at this trend line...your idea didn't work" is always defended by "well it would have been worse if we didn't do it!".
The implication is that by design, none of the "schools" of BCT use empiricism and all of them rely primarily on theory. Any appearance of empiricism coming from one of those schools is highly suspect on its face and far more likely to come from a politically backed think tank than from a peer review process. And that includes the incredibly terrible claims of empiricism from Keynesian and Monetarist schools in addition to your target of scorn.
