Everybody who’s interested in the insights of the “Austrian School” of economic thought should be gratified that those insights are being put to work enriching our knowledge of economic processes and advancing the science of economics. A good place to start is with the group at George Mason University. Donald Boudreaux, the chairman of the economics department, works to further develop the insights of Menger, Mises, Hayek, Kirzner, and others through his own work and by encouraging research by graduate students. (Don blogs regularly at Cafe Hayek.) The Review of Austrian Economics, edited by Professor Peter Boettke, is located there. (Boettke is currently the Hayek Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics, where he will give the Hayek Memorial Lecture on October 19.. The Law School at George Mason University has a very sophisticated law and economics program, as well, which incorporates many “Austrian” insights into the study of law. And GMU is also the home of the Institute for Humane Studies, the Center for Study of Public Choice, and the Mercatus Center. All are worth a visit and all have much to offer to those who are interested in the pursuit of knowledge (rather than the perpetuation of a cult).
Do you know who co-sponsors that Hayek Memorial Lecture, chuckles?
So what are we to think of Boettke, indeed of the LSE and of you for calling it to our attention, as a moth around this flame?
Any thoughts on George Reisman and his contributions to promoting the insights of the Austrian School? I found his book Capitalism invaluable and am always surprised his name does not come up more often in free-market/libertarian circles.
Thanks for the references, Mr. Palmer. I’m sure all your readers who are professional economists appreciate this advice from someone with no formal training or peer-reviewed publications in economics. What a coincidence that all the good work in Austrian economics is done by people at George Mason University, all of whom are personal friends of Tom Palmer!
I haven’t read Reisman’s book. I know others who have and I’ve gotten mixed reviews from them. Since I’ve not read it myself, I can’t comment.
To the rakish commentator who addresses me as “Chuckles,” I’ll go for the bait. I just looked on the LSE web site and there’s no mention of any other sponsor. Not a word that I could find. On a hunch, I went to the Ludwig von Mises Institute site and found a listing of the lecture with the note: “In cooperation with the Mises Institute, the London School of Economics is the host of the Hayek Memorial Lecture and lecture series.” The LSE may have been unaware of the sponsorship, but, hey, maybe they were just jealous of the greater prestige of the Mises Institute of Auburn, Alabama.
But in any case, what of it? The Mises Institute also brings serious scholars, such as Robert Higgs and Richard Vedder, to speak, and republishes books by Ludwig von Mises. I have no problem with the works of Mises (which offer helpful insights into many problems) or with the work of scholars such as Higgs or Vedder. My problem is that such good people and good works end up being associated, to their potential detriment, with the likes of the anti-Semitic and racist Joseph Sobran (who speaks at meetings of holocaust denial groups), the advocate of stoning heretics Gary North, and the, shall we say, dogmatic, kooky, and bizarre rantings of Hans Hermann Hoppe.
George F. has intrerpreted my remarks (“A good place to start is with the group at George Mason University.”) to mean “all the good work in Austrian economics is done by people at George Mason University.” That would merit an “F” for reading and comprehension skills. Sorry, George F.
“A good place to start” certainly leaves open the possibility of many other sources of insight. I could have mentioned New York University, the University of Aix-en-Provence, and a number of scholars at universities around the world, but I wanted to offer “a good place to start,” rather than “an exhaustive list.”
How about some good places to start (besides Cafe Hayek, which you’ve mentioned already) for those who want to know the basics/know the basics but aren’t quite ready for The Review of Austrian economics/probably won’t be going to university?
For L.F. Brown and others with similar interests, I’d strongly recommend the Foundation for Economic Education (www.fee.org) and the journal “The Freeman,” which FEE publishes. There are also many useful books available; I remember very fondly reading many years ago Faustino Ballve’s “Essentials of Economics,” the works of Frederic Bastiat, and the various books of Henry Hazlitt, all of which are well suited for people interested in sophisticated insights into matters economic but not that interested in the more technical details of various theories (interest and time-preference, equilibrium constructs, etc.). I hope that that helps.
I second Tom’s recommendation of FEE and its magazine The Freeman. In addition, I recommend these books as superb, non-technical sources of economic insight:
– The Choice, by Russell Roberts
– The Invisible Heart, by Russell Roberts
– The State Against Blacks, by Walter Williams
– The Armchair Economist, by Steven Landsburg
– Fair Play, by Steven Landsburg
– Learning Economics, by Arnold Kling
An exhaustive list of Austrian and Austrian-leaning programs by Walter Block was last updated in February 2004. Available here:
http://www.mises.org/classroom/gradschool.pdf
Gentlemen,
Thanks for the assorted links and book titles.
I’ve seen the occasional article from The Freeman/Ideas on Liberty and will now bookmark it along with FEE’s site.
It seems, like the Mises Institute and The Library of Economics and Liberty (http://www.econlib.org/ – where some free versions of Bastiat’s works, amongst others, are available online), to have enough free content to aid the beginner or intermediate layman student (as opposed to university scholar).
Mr. Palmer, you are right, and I apologize for reading your remarks hastily. The reason for my snide tone (aside from your own snide references to “cultists”) is that you don’t seem very well informed on schools of thought in economics. Of all the individuals and organizations you mentioned, only Pete Boettke and his Review of Austrian Economics are in any way “Austrian.” I have the utmost respect for Don Boudreaux, the GMU economics department, the GMU law school, IHS, Mercatus, and the Public Choice Center. They are fine, neoclassical, free-market-oriented scholars and institutions. But they are not doing “Austrian economics,” whether done well or poorly.
To be clear, I say this not to denigrate the work of non-Austrians, but to ask that you be more precise when lecturing your readers on an area outside your own academic specialty.
George F.’s gracious apology is accepted. No damage done, anyway. That said, I simply don’t agree that people doing work in public choice aren’t putting “Austrian” insights “to work enriching our knowledge of economic processes and advancing the science of economics,” as I wrote above. If by “Austrian” you mean someone who “only” reads and comments on other Austrians, then Pete Boettke certainly doesn’t qualify, either. (And what serious scholar would want to qualify?) “Mises himself” (to paraphrase how some would put it) wrote a helpful book in public choice economics (“Bureaucracy,” as well as his “Omnipotent Government,” which is full of interesting insights). I think I might know a bit more than George F. suggests about various sub-disciplines of economics, although I am not a professional economist. The work of Vernon Smith in experimental economics is, I think, quite compatible with the insights of the Austrian school about market processes, entrepreneurial discovery, and the role of prices in coordinating purposive behavior. Law and economics also puts to work many insights that either originated with or were developed further by central “Austrian” economists. (Indeed, early work in the field done by Bruno Leoni was quite influenced by Hayek’s insights, and vice versa.) And the same goes for the study of public choice. (I think that the insight that Mises had that interventionism is a process is especially relevant to political science and public choice and, when put to work, improves and deepens our understanding of matters political.)
I think that we have a disagreement about the role of ideas and insights in science. I don’t think that there is a discipline called “Austrian economics” (or “pure Misesian economics,” God forbid) or, if there is, it has a status similar to that of phrenology or the divination of the future by reading the entrails of sacrificed animals or the flights of birds. There is a discipline of economics and that discipline can put to use a number of insights that we could call of Austrian provenance. Some of those ideas are incompatible with other ideas prominent in the discipline. There is a contest among them, and we can hope that the better ideas, viz., those that generate more understanding of the world in which we find ourselves, will displace those that are less generative of understanding. I’m not interested in the study of ideas per se (except in so far as I’m interested in intellectual history). I’m interested in using ideas to study and understand the world. If “Austrian economics” is about the study of “Austrian ideas,” then it is useless and uninteresting, except in so far as it is an example of intellectual history. (And I don’t denigrate intellectual history. I just don’t confuse it with economics.)
Actually, I don’t think we disagree on the role of ideas and insights in science. I fully agree that the disciplines you mention incorporate some “Austrian insights.” And of course no decent economist, Austrian or otherwise, ignores work coming from other intellectual traditions. Your definition of “Austrian” or “Austrian-inspired” is a bit too elastic for my tastes, however (what free-market economists does it exclude?).
My comment was more directed at truth in advertising. I agree that Vernon Smith has been influenced, in some ways, by the Austrian school (see his 1999 paper on Mises in the Cato Journal, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj19n2/cj19n2-1.pdf). But when a layperson tells me he wants to learn more about the Austrian school, I don’t direct him to Vernon Smith. Using “Austrian economics” as simply another label for non-mathematically-oriented free-market economics unfairly denigrates the uniqueness of the Austrian tradition, in my view.
The best way to see what’s going on in Austrian economics is to read the articles in the Review of Austrian Economics, the Quarterly Journal of Austrian economics, and various working paper series (including the Mises Institute’s) and to attend the annual meeting of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics and the Austrian Scholars Conference.
I imagine I’ll get flamed by both sides for this, but as someone with great respect for Tom and for the Cato Institute, but also with great respect for the Mises Institute, here’s my take on these issues:
http://praxeology.net/unblog10-04.htm#05
Roderick, I was impressed by your blogpost. I think you have the clearest head about all of this.
the LSE lecture is bankrolled by Toby Baxendale who writes for Mises/Rockwell right?
Other useful work by broadly Austrian economists can be found by perusing the webpages of members of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics:
http://it.stlawu.edu/sdae/memlinks.htm
That includes my own homepage at:
http://it.stlawu.edu/shor
Tom–
Thanks for the plug!
Sheldon Richman
Editor, The Freeman
Steven Landsburg’s book is sharp, insightful and very funny, butI wouldn’t say that it is in the slightest bit Austrian. I see him as an orthodox Chicago free marketeer; although as Tom says, all this categorising is not hugely useful.
Tom,are you going to respond to Roderick’s mediatory piece?
Thanks to Rod, Julius, and everyone else for the interesting remarks. I hope that people are encouraged to explore the contributions to economics of Mises, Hayek, Menger, Boehm-Bawerk, Kirzner, et al. I also hope that those same people are at least made wary of becoming involved in a cult and of thinking that “doing economics” is a matter of consulting the sacred texts of the Sybil.
I’ve read Rod’s thoughts and I, too, respect him both as a thinker and as an all round good person.
I still don’t see any symmetry. First, he’s mentioned wide groups, when he really seems to mean only me on my private blog. Where is the nasty criticism of the Mises Institute to be found? Other people hold their tongues, which I do on most occasions, until every seven years I am prompted by utterly wacky and over-the-top attacks from someone of the very low caliber of Hoppe. Honestly, what kind of “scholarship” is it to write or publish a book filled with this kind of argumentation?
“They were initially drawn to libertarianism as juveniles because of its ‘antiauthoritarianism’ (trust no authority) and seeming ‘tolerance,’ in particular toward ‘alternative’ — non-bourgeois lifestyles. As adults, they have been arrested in this phase of mental development.”
That’s a rather mild taste of Hoppean “scholarship.” I’ve been an editor at a number of publications and organizations and would never, ever let such a thing appear in a publication. It’s a grotesque insult to intellectual and scholarly standards. Quite simply, I don’t understand people who think that that’s an example of scholarship, or that the writer or publisher of such rebuttals to other viewpoints deserves to be taken seriously.
I also disagree that it is somehow morally equivalent to invite to events A) Rep. Bob Barr (to speak on the dangers of the USA Patriot Act) or (then private citizen) Dick Cheney (to speak on eliminating trade embargoes), and B) Gary North and Joseph Sobran. The former are policy makers whose input can actually help to diminish unjust state power and increase liberty. The latter are marginalized crackpots whose views are both despicable and unlikely in any way to advance liberty. Some views are, quite simply, beyond the pale, and if any views would qualify as beyond the pale, certainly calling for smashing in the heads of homosexuals and heretics with stones or slyly suggesting that blacks are morally inferior and that race relations were once just great (and speaking at meetings of authentic Hitler apologists such as the Institute for Historical Review) would qualify.
I see the difference as between people who want to know that as a result of their actions the members of the human race are freer and that there is less injustice, and people who don’t care about securing greater freedom or justice, but who very much like to see themselves as big fish in a pond kept smaller by their own actions.