Friday, May 31, 2019

New Book on the History of the Austrian School of Economics Coming

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman is set to be released on September 24, 2019.

From the blurb:

A group history of the Austrian School of Economics, from the coffeehouses of imperial Vienna to the modern-day Tea Party

The Austrian School of Economics—a movement that has had a vast impact on economics, politics, and society, especially among the American right—is poorly understood by supporters and detractors alike. Defining themselves in opposition to the mainstream, economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter built the School's international reputation with their work on business cycles and monetary theory. Their focus on individualism—and deep antipathy toward socialism—ultimately won them a devoted audience among the upper echelons of business and government.

In this collective biography, Janek Wasserman brings these figures to life, showing that in order to make sense of the Austrians and their continued influence, one must understand the backdrop against which their philosophy was formed—notably, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a half-century of war and exile.
Tyler Cowen reports these nuggets from the book:

  • Even a full decade after its release in 1871, Menger’s Principles was not achieving much attention outside of Vienna.
  • The early Austrians favored progressive taxation and fairly standard Continental approaches to government spending.
  • The Austrian school of those earlier times was in danger of disappearing, as Boehm-Bawerk was working in government and the number of “Austrian students” was drying up, circa 1905.
  • Wieser and some of the others lost status with the fall of the Dual Monarchy after WWI; Wieser for instance no longer had a House of Lords membership.  Schumpeter and Mises responded to these changes by writing more for a broader public, often through newspapers (not blogs).  Mises’s market-oriented views seemed to stem from this time.
  • Hayek in fact struggled in high school, though his grandfather had gone on Alpine hikes with Boehm-Bawerk.
  • The patron institution for Hayek’s business cycle research of 1927 to 1931 was partly sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.
  •  By the mid-1930s, Mises, Tinbergen, Koopmans, and Nurkse were all living in Geneva.  There was a Vienna drinking song saying farewell to Mises. 
-RW


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