Austrian Economics Overview

The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, is the major educator, publisher, supporter, and promoter of Austrian School economics and libertarian ideas in the world today. The ideas we encourage and promote do not exist in a vacuum, however: they are constantly bolstered by government failures and freedom's successes. To explain why, the Institute publishes journals, supports students, holds conference, and maintains a website that draws more traffic than the UN. Our influence with students, and now even faculty, makes us competitive with the American Economic Association or any government bureaucracy you can name.

Ludwig von Mises was a great economist and teacher, writes William Peterson, but there is one more thing for which to credit Mises: a role model for each of us--whoever you are--for his standing up to the power elite of mainstream politics and economics, for valor in the face of all manner of fire, for never giving up. And to do so with verve and wit.

The importance of the Austrian school of economics is nowhere better demonstrated than in the area of monetary theory. It is in this realm that the simplifying assumptions of mainstream economic theory wreak the most havoc. In contrast, the commonsensical, "verbal logic" of the Austrians is entirely adequate to understand the nature of money and its valuation by human actors.

Economics explains how society works. In place of clear reasoning in English, however, mainstream economics tends to use equations and calculus with dubious assumptions that made what they are doing seem to not have much relevance to the real world. Mainstream economists also seem to spend much of their time trying to find exceptions to the clear teachings of economics.

A broader understanding of "Say's Law" would assist those who continued to be puzzled by macroeconomic questions, but even better would be to understand the context in which this Law was formulated. Say not only built a case for the essential stability of a free market (in contrast to the instability of the present mixed economy) but also made the case for the free society against every alternative.

Böhm-Bawerk's critique of the naïve productivity theory of interest was a brilliant leap forward for subjectivist economics, and remains the dominant Austrian view.  Unfortunately, its lessons are as little understood yet just as relevant today as they were in the 1880s. Robert Murphy explains why.

Rumors of Bastiat's lack of interest in monetary theory have not only been exaggerated, they are patently untrue. Indeed, Bastiat places the role of money at the center of the economy and portrays ignorance of its nature as one of its greatest dangers. Not only does he explain the nature of money, but he also very cogently explains the inevitable results of a failure to understand that nature.

Several times recently, Gene Callahan has found himself engaged, directly or indirectly, in discussions about exactly what implications follow from the existence of human action, the foundation of economic science. The effort to draw out those implications is called praxeology.

Why did Hayek see the economy's capital structure as being so central to our understanding of industrial fluctuations? Just how did his ideas line up against those being developed by John Maynard Keynes? And why did Hayek eventually all but abandon the research program that had so energized him in those early years? Roger Garrison explains.

Morgan Reynolds, most recently the chief economist for the Department of Labor, talks to the Austrian Economics Newsletter about his experience, the mistakes of the Bush administration, the business cycle, the status of labor unions in America, his intellectual formation in the Austrian tradition, and his predictions for the future.