Friday, January 10, 2014

A Disturbing Trend Among Young Austrians

Peter Klein writes:
I attended this year’s ASSA conference in Philadelphia [...] It is a huge conference with several thousand participants and hundreds of sessions, panels, receptions, and other events. As you can imagine, with that much activity, the activities included the good, the bad, and the ugly. For most attendees the highlights were probably the speeches by Bernanke and current AEA president Claudia Goldin and lively give-and-take between Larry Summers and John Taylor. (My sympathies lie with Taylor.) I presented a paper on university business incubators, showing that their contributions to innovation and entrepreneurship may be more modest than advertised. Many Austrian economists attend the conference but the Austrian school is not, unfortunately, well represented on the program[...]

I met several young Austrian economists who are looking for jobs, or have recently secured them and are moving their way along the tenure track. This is all to the good, of course. However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in recent years, in which young Austrians seem less interested in the substance of their work than in how it will be received; their emphasis is on “playing the game” rather than seeking the truth. You also hear this said of the movement as a whole; unless Austrians get better at playing the game, our movement is in trouble. I’m reminded of Joe Salerno’s distinction between “professional” and “vocational” economists. Of course, Austrians seeking careers in academia need jobs and should be encouraged to follow the appropriate professional steps to market and distribute their work, to improve their teaching, and to maximize their chances at professional success. But we do not measure the health of our movement solely by PhDs granted, positions secured, or articles published.
Selling out to gain advancement is a very dangerous temptation for many. It is foolish, however, to think the only way to advancement is by being a sellout. Walter Block should be a role model for young Austrians. He has had a successful academic career without altering his Austrian and libertarian views one bit.

In fact, I am going to ask him to write a piece, "How I Maintained My Austrian and Libertarian Principles While Climbing the Academic Career Ladder."

Israel Kirzner, Joe Salerno, Richard Ebeling, Dominick Armentano, Peter Klein, Thomas DiLorenzo, George Reisman and Roger Garrison are other examples of current day Austrians, who have had successful academic careers without selling out. It can be done.

17 comments:

  1. RW, there are just too many worthless cowards out there who will sell their soul for 30 pieces of silver. This is why our movement will get nowhere in the long run.

    And people wonder why I think government should be completely abolished? The temptation for weak minded idiots is just too great and its evils are just too prolific to tolerate.

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    1. Abolishing government is too hard to do in one step, it has to be done in smaller steps. The first step should be abolishing democracy through progressively restricting the franchise.

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    2. Yet we must preach as radicals, expecting that the result will likely be gradual.

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  2. What about De Soto?

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    1. Good one.
      RW has a pic of the high end car he goes to work in.
      He needs to bring it out from his archives.

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  3. Although not an economist, Jack Hunter sold out the Southern Nationalist movement in the same manner.

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  4. How can you teach Austrian economics at the University level? It's like a 1 unit course. You start with the conclusion that govt caused the problem and work backwards to fill in the details

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    1. An intro to Austro-econ degree would likely start with a course in methodology including a primer for epistemology. You wouldn't get into why the use of force in the market for voluntary transactions distorts the price-structure for allocating scarce resources until much later.

      How someone gets a doctorate in Keynesianism is what I don't understand. Start from the conclusion that government printing money will fix the problem and work backwards to fill in the details. Talk about a 1 unit course...

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    2. Obvious troll is obvious.

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    3. Sort of like how animal spirits caused the problem? LOL.

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    4. sounds like you have read the great Austrian treatises.


      Troll harder next time.

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    5. Clearly Mises's Human Action is a 1 credit course. Not to mention Man, Economy and the State. You can teach that in a week. /sarc

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    6. Wolfgang, your preferred school of economics can be taught in one sentence..... "print money."


      Class dismissed, here is your diploma.

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    7. Basic Austrian concepts are indeed self evident and easy to understand. Thus, it takes a special effort for someone like you to go to such extremes to avoid understanding them, just like all the other Keynesians in the galaxy. Keynesianism and statism in general are clearly evidence of severe emotional dysfunction as evidenced by the total refusal of the Keynesians to engage and rebut Austrian analysis.

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  5. Mr Krugman
    Stop calling yourself Jerry Wolfgang. It's getting old.

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  6. Out in the real world of academia, people have to contend with hordes of folks like Ian Haney-López. Ian Haney-López is a law professor. Haney López's current research emphasizes the connection between racial divisions in society and growing wealth inequality in the United States. His most recent book, "Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class", lays bare how conservative politicians exploit racial pandering to convince many voters to support policies that ultimately favor the very rich and hurt everyone else.

    http://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/faculty/facultyProfile.php?facID=301

    He writes brilliant stuff like this at Salon.com:

    Liberty, welfare and integration

    We can explain shifting perceptions of welfare in the twentieth century through three conceptions of liberty. The first is “liberty from government.” This libertarian version stresses freedom from state coercion, and, more generally, negative freedom from external constraints. During the robber baron era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the so-called “malefactors of great wealth” easily manipulated this conception of liberty to support their own agenda. These plutocrats, many having made their fortunes through government contracts and state-backed monopolies, cynically celebrated “rugged individualism” for the little guy, preaching that the freest man was the one solely responsible for himself. These sorts of arguments were mobilized to oppose unions, workplace safety rules, minimum wage laws, and financial support for the unemployed, the injured or disabled, and the elderly. Despite the rhetoric, however, there was little liberty in penury. During the Great Depression it became brutally apparent that genuine freedom depended on security in the face of market vicissitudes. The “rugged individual” shriveled up and blew away in the fierce winds of the Dust Bowl.


    http://www.salon.com/2014/01/11/the_racism_at_the_heart_of_the_reagan_presidency/?source=newsletter

    It's obviously too much to ask such a brilliant scholar to at least familiarize himself with a general outline of the Austrian critique of that tired and long refuted analysis. Mises' ideas were taken as gospel EVERYWHERE by EVERYBODY for centuries until finally dis-proven by the Depression, right?

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