Dr. Paul F. Cwik is a Fellow of the Mises Institute and Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Mount Olive. He earned a BA from Hillsdale College, an MA from Tulane University, and a PhD from Auburn University, where he was a Mises Research Fellow. Dr. Cwik’s book, Austrian Business Cycle Theory: An Introduction, was released in 2024.
How did you first discover the Mises Institute?
I was originally a political science major at Hillsdale College. In my freshman year, I took a political economy class and fell in love with economics, and I quickly switched to a political economy major. At Hillsdale, I had Professor Richard Ebeling, who was the Ludwig von Mises Chair at Hillsdale College.
Instantly, I was an Austrian.
At the end of my sophomore year, I decided to apply for and attend Mises University, and they accepted me. I flew out to Stanford, and it was an incredibly wonderful time.
So it was a pretty natural discovery, since I was going to Hillsdale and it was a predominantly Austrian program.
You attended Mises U in 1990 and 1991. As a student, what experiences stood out to you?
Well, of course, Murray Rothbard’s lectures were fantastic. Some of them were recorded and are on YouTube. And in one of them they scan the room and you can see the back of my head, so that’s pretty cool.
Murray Rothbard, Joe Salerno, Jeffrey Herbener, David Gordon, Yuri Maltsev, Roger Garrison, all of these people were just names on books and names in articles, so meeting them in person and seeing the passion and the energy that they had when it came to their topics was an incredible experience. It enlivens the subject when you have someone who’s excited and passionate about their subject matter. And to actually talk with them and ask them questions was just absolutely invaluable. To talk to Rothbard and to all of these professors, it was great.
What impact did Mises University have on your career?
It had a huge impact. I met Lew and Mardi Rockwell and the people at the Mises Institute. I always figured I might go into graduate school, but I wasn’t quite sure when I was a sophomore. Seeing the scholarships and the opportunities that the Institute had for advancement in graduate work was encouraging to me.
After I graduated from Hillsdale, I went to Tulane, and it was thoroughly a terrible program. It was completely mainstream. It was a disaster. So I left there and I knew that I had to come to Auburn University, where the Mises Institute was, where Roger Garrison, Leland Yeager, Mark Thornton, and other fellow travelers with the Austrian School were. With the Mises Institute being there and by becoming a Mises Fellow myself, I could deepen my study of the things that I was interested in.
At that point, I was firmly convinced that I was going down the road of academia.
This your first time as a faculty member at Mises University. What did that mean to you?
Oh, it’s tremendous. It’s really hard to put into words how excited I was. It’s like I finally made it, you know? I do love to hear the sound of my own voice. It’s a bit of a joke. But I do love to talk about Austrian economics, and I remember how passionate all of those guys were back in 1990 and ’91. Not just the passion, but also the clarity of what they were talking about. If I can be as passionate and as clear when I’m discussing these issues, these topics that I’ve studied so long, and can communicate that to the next generation, to these upcoming students, that’s the whole point of all of this. That’s the whole point of being an academic.
Then it’s special to get students that are not just interested in economics, but are also interested in things that are uniquely Austrian, like the structure of production and business cycles through the manipulation of interest rates from credit expansion.
All of these things really invigorate and excite me to want to do more.
Your lecture on Austrian business cycle theory really stood out for students. In it, you brought back the Roger Garrison–inspired visualization. Why did you feel that was important to bring out when teaching that topic?
Well, I’ve always been Garrisonian. He was my dissertation chair, and so I personally have never walked away from that approach, where we draw these graphs. There was a lot of pushback when Garrison first came out with his book over 20 years ago. Critics were saying, “Well, we know the structure of production doesn’t really look like this.”
That is a fair criticism, but it is more of a graduate-level and professional-level criticism, right? What we’re trying to do is communicate the Austrian business cycle theory to principles-level students by putting it into a format that they’re used to, the graphs, the curves, the interconnectedness of it all. This method also works for the intermediate undergraduate students because they can also follow the graphs. The graphs allow us to tell them this story.
But once you have that basic story there, and this is what I’ve done in my book, Austrian Business Cycle Theory: An Introduction, you then start to add complexities to it.
For example, suppose you have a machine that digs out iron ore that then is used to make steel that becomes a machine that digs out iron ore. There are these recursive loops and all these other complexities, right? Well, of course, in the real world, it’s not just this linear, triangular production structure. What we have are degrees of compatibility, of complementarity. And that’s what we’re really trying to talk about. It is how capital is not just one big homogeneous blob of perfectly substitutable elements, but that there are elements that are necessarily complementary, and if a certain portion goes missing, the whole system breaks down.
With the recent experience of covid, we saw supply chains breaking down, so I think that people are now familiar with, or at least more familiar with, what we’re trying to express. So I think the visual approach is very useful to get people on board with this initial understanding of our theory.
What advice did you give to students interested in Austrian economics as they try to navigate their careers?
Austrian economics is still a bit of a niche, so it’s always going to be an uphill battle. The way that you overcome these odds is that you just have to be really, really good at what you’re doing. So how do you become really, really good at what you’re doing?
Well, you have to take the time to study Austrian economics—plus study all the regular stuff at the same time. So that means you’re just going to have to work a little bit harder.
How do we do that? Well, you need a support network, and this is one of the things that I really like about the Mises Institute, is that it has created this support network for students.
We have book clubs that meet online. And I’m leading a book club on my campus.
We have the ability to email and talk to all the other Institute professors. They list their contact information on all the articles they put out. We have a strong faculty network, so if you’re a junior faculty member and you’re trying to publish stuff and you need help, there’s other faculty at the Mises Institute that are willing to coauthor research.
It is this support network that has emerged through the Mises Institute that’s really, really important to help lift everyone up, because we can always get a little discouraged. We feel like we’re all alone, but having that support network is great because it tells you that you’re not alone, that there are other people doing the same thing, and that we’re rooting for you.
