austrian-school

"Hayek’s later monetary work constitutes some of his most creative practical policy suggestions. His ideas of competing and private currencies may come into existence during coming years for technological reasons."

"The question of the value of Hayek’s work in technical economic theory from the middle 1920s through early 1940s is one over which there is considerable dispute in the academic economic community. Some, such as contemporary Austrian economists Roger Garrison, Mark Skousen, and Gene Callahan, consider this work to be of vital, continuing relevance. Others, such as Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Ronald Coase, while they have the highest opinion of Hayek, do not consider his work in technical economic theory to be of much worth."

"For Hayek, the causes of the Depression lay in earlier central bank policies of cheap money, which resulted in large-scale misallocation of capital. Because no central authority could grasp the shifting pattern of relative scarcities and prices, only the market could determine the right allocation. Accordingly, believing that misguided investments had to be liquidated, Hayek argued in the 1930s for policies that were more contractionary than those that were actually pursued. The task of government was to get out of the way and let the process of adjustment run its course. If they had been adopted while the crash was under way, Hayek’s prescriptions would have made the Depression even worse than it proved to be – a fact he later admitted. But he never accepted Keynes’s core insight that large-scale economic discoordination could be the result of the workings of the market itself. For him it was always government intervention that accounted for market disequilibrium. More sceptical as well as more radical in his turn of mind, Keynes questioned the self-regulating powers of the market. His work on the theory of probability disclosed insuperable gaps in our knowledge of the future; all investment was a gamble, and markets could not be relied on to allocate capital rightly. There were booms and busts long before the emergence of modern central banking. Left to its own devices, the free market can easily end up in a dead end like that of the 1930s."

"In brief the Austrian theory of the business cycle was never refuted or even rejected at the London School, but simply forgotten despite the efforts of Hayek and subsequently Lachmann (as noted below) to improve the theory (Hayek, Profits, Interest, and investment [1939; reprint; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969]). With the Keynesian revolution, macroentities had replaced the action of individuals. Subjectivism and individual causation had been superseded by functional relations among objectified aggregates, which had few if any real world referents in the actions of economizing individuals. A whole tradition transplanted to British soil vanished. When Lachmann had arrived in London during the early 1930s, everybody was a Hayekian, but by the beginning of World War II the only consistent and thoroughgoing Hayekians left were Lachmann and Hayek himself."

"Very few people these days know the works of the Mises-Hayek school; unfortunately, I am old enough to have been an early follower of Professor Hayek, and even translated one of his books, and there is nothing like having to translate a book, particularly from the German language, to force you to come to grips with an argument."

"A few weeks ago, a journalist devoted a substantial part of a profile of yours truly to my failure to pay due attention to the "Austrian theory" of the business cycle—a theory that I regard as being about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire."

"Professor Mises and Dr. Hayek have advanced theories which, though they fall into the general category of monetary explanations, yet seem altogether free from those deficiencies which have marked monetary explanations in general. They explain the effects of fluctuations in the supply of money not so much in terms of fluctuations of the general price level as in terms of fluctuations of relative prices and the consequent effects on what may be called the ‘time-structure’ of production."

"Austrian business cycle theory"

"The Austrian a priori dogmatism (von Mises, especially; Hayek, to a lesser degree)."

"Free banking"

"There are two big reasons today's right loves the Austrians. One is that Austrian economists reject empirical analysis, and instead believe that you can reach conclusions about correct economic policies from a priori principles. It's philosophy dressed up as economics; with the Austrians, there is never any risk that real-world events will interfere with your ideology. The other big advantage is that the main Austrian thinkers, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, are dead, so they can't argue with your interpretation of their work. This is especially important with Hayek, who got sort of squishy later in life."

"I am not suggesting that the Austrians are uninteresting; far from it. I love to read their work, and I find their views, bizarre and outlandish they seem to my ear, to be as mind-stimulating as a good fantasy novel, or an ethnographic account of the hunter-gatherer inhabitants of some tropical island. However, in no way are they scientists that deserve to be taken seriously. Of course, when there are Marxists all over the place trying to nationalize everything in sight, the Austrian philosophy might have some popular value as a counterweight. By the way, my reading of Americans who call themselves Austrians is that they are fooling themselves---they are really standard neoclassical public sector economists that have personal values favoring the entrepreneurial spirit."

"The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present. Yet the theory has powerful emotional appeal. Usually that appeal is strongest for conservatives, who can't stand the thought that positive action by governments (let alone—horrors!—printing money) can ever be a good idea. Some libertarians extol the Austrian theory, not because they have really thought that theory through, but because they feel the need for some prestigious alternative to the perceived statist implications of Keynesianism. And some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors. But moderates and liberals are not immune to the theory's seductive charms—especially when it gives them a chance to lecture others on their failings."

"Substance aside — not that substance isn’t important — Austrian economics very much has the psychology of a cult. Its devotees believe that they have access to a truth that generations of mainstream economists have somehow failed to discern; they go wild at any suggestion that maybe they’re the ones who have an intellectual blind spot. And as with all cults, the failure of prophecy — in this case, the prophecy of soaring inflation from deficits and monetary expansion — only strengthens the determination of the faithful to uphold the faith."

"In the early 1970s, the Austrian School, then in its fourth generation, appeared to be nearing an inglorious personal and community end; after a second bout of prolonged depression (1969–1974), Hayek always carried a razor blade with which to slash his wrist (Cubitt 2006, 89). However, Mises’ death in 1973 facilitated his School’s resurrection; alive Mises had been a liability, whereas dead he could be marketed as a saint. Benjamin Rogge (1974) reported that at a Philadelphia Society meeting, David Friedman ‘first made clear to us the true fascist nature of [his father] Milton Friedman’s thinking.’ When Rothbard, Richard Ebeling, Gary North, Sudha Shenoy et al. initiated an Austrian revivalist conference in June 1974, one of the highlights was the baiting of Friedman – in person – with the accusation that his son detected ‘latent fascist tendencies’ in him (Ebeling 1974). Shenoy (2003) recalled that ‘Murray Rothbard made the whole affair fun.’ ...For a quarter of a century after World War II, the social democratic ‘middle way’ appeared to prosper. But in the 1970s, the ideological balance shifted. The regulatory wave had successfully tackled various aspects of market failure, but had actually exacerbated underlying problems when applied to the control of prices and wages. From the mid-1970s, the deregulation wave began to successfully tackle some of the welfare loses caused by regulatory capture. Schools of economics are associated with these waves: regulation with Pigouvian market failure analysis and its Keynesian macroeconomic counterpart; and deregulation with market success promotion (with Austrian, Chicago and Public Choice variants)."

"Today there are academic dogmas as well, such as those of the cultural Left, the Austrian school of economics, and the followers of Leo Strauss. Intellectuals, moreover, often flock together; in fact very few of them are truly untamable individualists in the tradition of Socrates, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Camus, and Orwell."