Wednesday, July 14, 2010

An Unbalanced and Misleading Book From Mark Skousen

Vienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes? A Tale of Two Schools of Free-Market Economics by Mark Skousen

Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

In the post-World War II era, two of the leading voices for a return to a competitive free-market economy have been the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Both schools have influenced many people about how markets work and how government affects economic affairs.

To many, the Austrian and Chicago economists seem to be saying the same thing: markets are an efficient way of using scarce resources to best serve consumers; individuals know their own interests and circumstances better than government regulators and planners; political controls tend to distort supply and demand and the price system through which markets are kept in balance. In addition, members of both schools of thought have long warned that inflation and its negative consequences stem from government monetary mismanagement.

As a result, on the surface there seems not to be much difference between the two schools. Yet anyone fairly familiar with the Austrian and Chicago approaches knows that in fact they not only look at the world through significantly different conceptual lenses, they often are extremely critical of each other.

In his recent book, Vienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes?, Mark Skousen tries to explain the history of the Austrian and Chicago approaches, and critically evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. Skousen explains the beginnings of the Austrian school in the last decades of the nineteenth century, during which Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser developed the theory of marginal utility and opportunity cost; formulated a theory of capital, investment, and interest; and undermined the foundations of Marxian economics. He then traces the contributions of such leading twentieth-century Austrians as Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek in the areas of monetary and business-cycle theory, their insightful criticisms on socialist central planning, and their conception of the market as a dynamic competitive process.

The Chicago school developed later, in the 1920s and 1930s, out of the writings of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Simons, who were early critics of some aspects of Keynesian economics and of government planning. But the Chicago school only really flowered in the postwar era out of the contributions of Milton Friedman and George Stigler, who challenged, respectively, some of the rationales for macroeconomic and regulatory management of market activities.

For the remainder of the book, Skousen contrasts the two schools on a variety of topics, including methodology; inflation, business cycles and the monetary system; and government regulation and intervention. Somewhat irritatingly, Skousen concludes each section by declaring which school “wins the debate,” using the language of tennis: “advantage” Vienna or Chicago. While seeming to be a cute way to evaluate the two schools, it comes across as rather sophomoric. Also, it often seems that Skousen’s decision reflects his judgment about which school has been more influential among economists or in the policy arena. But the correctness of an idea is not measured, per se, by the number of its adherents. Alchemy and astrology have had wide followings, after all.

The core of the differences between the Austrian and Chicago schools is the question of how one tries to understand the world, including the market. Imagine that two objects are observed moving toward each other at a certain velocity. What can we predict about what will happen? Well, we can attempt to estimate their respective speeds and calculate when they are likely to collide, given the measured space between them.

There is nothing wrong with doing this. But if the two objects happen to be human beings, limiting the “facts” or “evidence” to these quantitative dimensions will leave out crucial features of the situation. For example, do these individuals view each other as friend or foe? The answer to that question alone will greatly influence what we predict as the likely sequence of events as they come closer to each other. (If foe, one of them might suddenly stop dead in his tracks and run in the oppose direction from fear.)

To analyze this situation requires the social scientist or economist to look beneath the quantitative surface to try to determine how the actors define the situation, including the meanings they see in their own actions and those of others with whom they may interact. A voluntary exchange and a coerced transfer may look the same to an observer. But they are certainly not the same when understood from the perspectives of the actors.

Unlike the Chicago-school economists, the Austrians have always insisted on emphasizing this “subjectivist” approach. This is partly due to the Chicagoans’ continuing belief (a subjective state of mind, for sure!) that “science” should be defined narrowly as the quantitatively measurable and predictable.

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

  1. Good god. Am I wrong to distrust and dislike everything Skousen does? He seems like such a social climbing sycophant. I remember this idiot trying to get the insane totalitarian, Rudy Guiliani, to speak at FEE about freedom. There was also some retarded mini-interview he did with David Rockefeller where Rockefeller "came out" as an austrian economist. Whatever. It bothers me this man could get a book published.

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