«Perhaps the first thing to stand out about Austrian economics is its relationship to mainstream economics. The two completely reject each other, and proudly so. (...)
Mainstream economists dismiss the Austrians as cranks. Nobel economist Paul Samuelson wrote that "I tremble for the reputation of my subject" after reading the "exaggerated claims that used to be made in economics for the power of deduction and a priori reasoning [the Austrian methods]." (1) Noted economist Mark Blaug has called Austrian methodologies "so cranky and idiosyncratic that we can only wonder that they have been taken seriously by anyone." (2)
For most of the Austrian School's history, mainstream academia has simply ignored it. Even today, none of its works are on the required reading list at Harvard.
Most introductory economics texts don't even mention the school, and its economists are absent from many encyclopedias or indexes of the century's great economists. Several of its founding figures struggled to make ends meet, rejected by universities which did not view their work as sound.
Even today, the movement's faculty boasts no more than 75 scholars worldwide. (4) By comparison, there are over 20,000 economists in the American Economics Association alone.
Their failure to rise in academia has not been for want of publicity -- on the contrary, their leaders have been publishing books for over 120 years, all the while bumping elbows with famous economists like John Maynard Keynes. And after Hayek shared a Nobel Prize in 1974 for a contribution to monetary theory, the school received a huge burst of academic attention. But it was just as quickly rejected. Their dismal showing in academia stems from the fact that they have simply failed to make their case. (...)»
Full Content
Introduction
The Scientific Method
Statistics
Methodological Subjectivism
Methodological IndividualismStarting Assumptions
The Market ProcessMonopolies
The Gold Standard and Business Cycle
The History of the Austrian School
The Politics of the Austrian School
Thursday, August 26, 2004
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1 comments:
Paul Samuelson, the guy who predicted in the 70s that the Soviet economy would overtake the U.S. by 2000 while Mises and the Austrians said the Soviet Union was doomed. Hmmmmmm
Another Samuelson gem-
In a 1989 economics textbook, he said, "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." The Berlin Wall soon fell and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later.
Yet somehow you quote him as an authority. Seems laughable at least.
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