Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics

This paper addresses the key shortcoming in the world of macro modeling, from a history-of-thought perspective.

How did Hitler do it? There is no shortage of theories or writings related to the rise of the Third Reich and the subsequent Holocaust. Halbrook, however, offers a compelling and important account of the role of gun control in aiding Hitler’s goals of exterminating the Jews and other “enemies of the state.”

There is trouble lurking in each of the book’s four chapters. The text gets off on a wrong foot as Bernanke overviews the origins and purposes of the Fed.

Welfare and Old Age in Europe and North America is a fascinating account of the rise of the welfare state in continental Europe and the U.K. The inclusion of North America in its title is misleading because it certainly does not discuss the mutual-aid-to-welfare-state transitions of Canada or Mexico but only offers a theory in one contribution as to why mandatory health insurance failed to be enacted in the U.S. early in the twentieth century.

An expert in environmental economics, Dolan attempts to assess the Austrian contribution to this field. He finds it wanting. I must make the same assessment of Dolan. His misunderstanding of Austrian economics is only matched by his mischaracterization of free market environmentalism.

Some scholarship in the Austrian tradition today opens itself to the charge that it is textual exegesis — what did Mises really mean?

In the introduction to the proceedings of the South Royalton conference, I suggested that Austrian economics had the potential not just to survive but also to achieve what Thomas Kuhn (1962) calls a scientific revolution. Such a revolution would fundamentally change the way practitioners of a field saw the world as a new paradigm came to replace the dominant one. What can we say of the success of Austrian economics in that regard?

This paper identifies merger waves as parts of Austrian-type business cycles. According to Austrian business cycle theory, when loan rates are reduced below their natural level through bank credit expansion, this falsifies the monetary calculation of capitalist-entrepreneurs, and investments are initiated that calculation showed were not profitable before the interest rate reduction.

August 9, 2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing into law of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) of 1989 by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. FIRREA was enacted to clean up the savings and loan (S&L) financial debacle of the 1980s. In articles, books, symposia, and papers written in the wake of the debacle, popular media and mainstream financial economists each provided explanations of the debacle. This paper analyzes and rejects these explanations in favor of an alternative based on Ludwig von Mises’s observation that market interventions create unintended consequences that usually lead to more interventions that in turn create new waves of unintended and worsening consequences until no more interventions are possible.

Theorists of the Austrian School have long maintained that every realized price is market-clearing, in sharp contrast to the adherents of the neoclassical mainstream, who view realized prices as constituting a state of disequilibrium with a mismatch between demand and supply. The heart of these theoretical differences lies in the equilibrium constructs used by the members of the two schools of thought in their analysis of price formation.