Why Austrian Economics Matters

Today, Austrian economics is on the upswing. Mises’s works are read and discussed all over Western and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as Latin America and North Asia. But the new interest in America, where the insights of the Austrian School are even more sorely needed, is especially encouraging.

The success of the Ludwig von Mises Institute is testimony to this new interest. The primary purpose of the Institute is to ensure that the Austrian School is a major force in the economic debate. To this end, we have cultivated and organized hundreds of professional economists, provided scholarly and popular outlets for their work, educated thousands of graduate students in Austrian theory, distributed millions of publications, and formed intellectual communities, most notably at Auburn University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where these ideas thrive.

Every year we hold a summer instructional seminar on the Austrian School called the Mises University, with a faculty of more than 25, and top-flight students from around the country. We also hold academic conferences on theoretical and historical subjects, and the Institute’s scholars are frequent participants at major professional meetings.

Transaction Publishers co-sponsors the Institute’s scholarly Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, the only quarterly journal in the English-speaking world devoted exclusively to the Austrian School. Transaction also publishes some of our books. The Austrian Economics Newsletter is written and edited by and for Austrian School graduate students. The Free Market applies Austrian ideas to issues of government policy.

The Mises Institute assists students and faculty at hundreds of colleges and universities. We have a program for visiting fellows to complete dissertations, and for visiting scholars to pursue new research, as well as our major center for graduate students. At Auburn, the Institute’s Austrian Economics Workshop explores new areas of history, theory, and policy, and the weekly colloquium brings students and faculty together to apply Austrian thought within an interdisciplinary context.

New books on the Austrian School appear every few months, and Austrians are writing for all the major scholarly journals. Misesian insights are presented in hundreds of economics classrooms all over the country (whereas just 20 years ago, no more than a dozen classrooms presented them). Austrians are the rising stars in the profession, the economists with the new ideas that attract students, the ones on the cutting edge with a pro-market and anti-statist orientation.

Most of these scholars have been cultivated through the Mises Institute’s academic conferences, publications, and teaching programs. With the Institute backing the Austrian School, tradition and constructive radicalism combine to create an attractive and intellectually vibrant alternative to conventional thought.

The future of Austrian economics is bright, which bodes well for the future of liberty itself. For if we are to reverse the trends of statism in this century, and reestablish a free market, the intellectual foundation must be the Austrian School. That is why Austrian economics matters.