QJAE: A Brief Note on Indifference

Authors including Robert Nozick (1977) and Bryan Caplan (1999) have levied criticism against the treatment of indifference within the Austrian tradition of economic theory. Their attempts to dismiss the Austrian position on this matter as unrealistic and contradictory are unsatisfactory as they fail to properly portray the core differences between the Austrian and neoclassical concepts of goods, utility, and preference, thus rendering their analysis inaccurate.

Slobodian Contra Rothbard

Crack-Up Capitalism will be of interest to many readers of The Austrian because of what it says about Murray Rothbard; and for the most part, I shall limit my review to discussing this. The main point of the book is easy to grasp. In recent decades, the notion of a centralized state has come under fire in various ways, including attempts to secede, to create “enterprise zones” within states, and to establish societies without a state at all. Quinn Slobodian, a professor of the history of ideas at Wesleyan University, does not approve of these developments.

Deneen’s Common Good Statism

It’s likely that many readers of The Austrian support the free market and also support “traditional” social values, but in Patrick Deneen’s opinion, this is an unstable amalgam. Deneen, a political theorist who teaches at Notre Dame, thinks that the market undermines tradition and that those of us who resist the “woke” Left and want to preserve tradition ought to abandon what he sees as an uncritical devotion to the market.