It’s good that Austrian Economics comes out of the closet and shadow of the Mises Institute and into society in general and at main stream universities in particular. Austrian Economics is a to important to be seen as something only kooks, Tea Partiers and purist anarcho-capitalists geeks does.
From the excellent blog Coordination Problem, formerly known as Austrian Economics
This semester I [ Chris Coyne] have the pleasure of teaching the first course in the Austrian field at GMU. The syllabus is posted here. The main texts are Human Action, Man, Economy and State, Individualism and Economic Order, and Competition and Entrepreneurship. These texts will be supplemented by a variety of journal articles.
Peter Klein is teaching a PhD course on Austrian economics at the University of Missouri. Btw, I was under the impression that GMU already offered courses on Austrian economics.
I tried to open the links on the syllabus, it said I need to change the settings on the “Trust Manager”, does anyone know what this is and what I need to do?
The syllabus refers to “Market Process Economics”. Has anyone else heard of Austrian Economics being referred to as “Market Process Economics”? Does the Mises Institute use this terminology, or it this distinctive of GMU?
I have heard Kirzner recall how he heard Mises opine ‘the market is a process’, and that the implications of this informed his conception of economics.
I am familiar with Kirzner’s remarks (in fact, I’ve included them in the link in my signature line for some time now). But, I’ve never heard the term “Market Process Economics” used a substitution for the term “Austrian Economics”, as it appears to be at GMU.
Perhaps the term more directly describes the school of thought, rather than the term “Austrian”, which contains no meaning unless one is familiar with the history of AE. It doesn’t really matter, I’m just saying I haven’t seen the term used at the LvMI.
wow thats alot of reading for one class. Its like 10 journal articles to read for each class plus reading those four very thick economic treatises. Wouldn’t want to be those students.
I’m not sure if they are used as synonyms as such. If you look at the readings starting week 7 or so; they expand ‘Austrian Economics’ to constitutional thinking, sociology, etc. It’s really just a name. We also gave a course called ‘introduction to economics’ because ‘introduction to austrian economics’ just doesn’t do the trick.
I’m not sure if GMU have. They have a lot of Austrians on staff Boettke et al. but a regular courses?
What’s the Academic status of Peter Klein and University of Missouri? GMU has become a top Economics program. (No disrespect to UM. What I mean is that GMU has tremendous academic clout.)
The third one is by default irrelevant, because they are based on ‘research contribution’, which isn’t really what a grad program is about.
The second one is (imo) irrelevant, because I would say it’s clear that the list doesn’t include all universities, e.g. the universities mentioned from my country are a big laugh and are clearly way worse than GMU. I wish it weren’t so, but there is a reason I’m trying to get the hell away from them. (So I’m really putting my money where my mouth is in this one, if that counts for something.)
More generally; failure to mention doesn’t mean that they are automatically below the ones mentioned.
Obviously; however, we have a different benchmark to begin with. 54 doesn’t sound to bad. Value is subjective, right?
Research is precisely what economic departments are about, perhaps there are also teaching functions, but once we start getting into teaching undergraduates rankings become a lot more difficult and somewhat arbitrary. So, yes, it makes complete sense to rank departments based on their research contributions (all the more so when even the guys over at CP will admit that grad school is about creating researchers).
As far as I can tell, your argument goes somewhere along the lines of "there are some bad PhD programmes above GMU, therefore the rankings are wrong). Well, there rankings are done according to various objective criteria, so the fact of the matter is that GMU falls below the departments you mentioned means it does worse according to these criteria. Perhaps you wish to challenge these criteria, but most rankings come up with pretty similar lists, which means there must be something to it; no smoke without a fire.
As for 54 (joint 54th at that) being pretty good, I have to disagree. Once one goes below 50, the gains from doing a PhD programme are a lot more limited, jobs become harder to find (and inevitable, GMU hires its own graduates; Coyne, Boettke, Leeson etc.) and the quality of the programme is just generally seen as worse. Keep in mind, the public choice and experimental people there might well bring up the rankings more than the Austrians do.
In any case, my original point was simply that when he said “GMU has serious academic clout” he was wrong. Out of a random sample of three rankings, GMU was well outside 100 in two of them and outside the top 50 in another. There’s a lot of hype surrounding GMU and a lot of it isn’t deserved, seriously, I’ve seen people saying that Leeson will get a position at Chicago and will win a JBC, I doubt either of those will materialize, and even if they do he’s seriously at the right end of their distribution.
So you’re basically saying: the lists are worthless. Oke, got it.
You’re forgetting people like Diana Weinert Thomas and Dan D’Amico. And I’m sure there are others.
Nobody is arguing that, given the economics profession and the way the rankings are made, as it is today, GMU doesn’t rank to good. Doesn’t follow though that the program is bad - especially because they have a different take on the whole.
It’s like saying: ‘well, obviously this team doesn’t rank to high in the soccer league.’ Well; that’s maybe because they are a basketball team! The analogy doesn’t add up completely, but the point is clear. Stated in another way: the fact that we aren’t comparing apples to apples, should be discounted for.
Before you create any strawman: I’m not saying that GMU can stand the test compared to, say, MIT or Chicago. If we however take into account what GMU tries to do, I’m relatively sure they should get a higher reference than the one they have. Doesn’t mean they are better compared to what the ‘mainstream’ is doing now a days and I’m glad for it.
“MU was well outside 100 in two” <= No, it’s not. GMU isn’t mentioned. Unless you can proof that the universities who didn’t got mentioned are, by the definition of those lists, outside the top 100. I know some universities on the list and man; economics phd’s from that one are worth shite.
Oh, and by the way: value is subjective. I know ‘the mainstream’ has some problem with that, but you might want to keep that in mind when you’re in a place that tries to discuss humans, not utility maximizing creatures who are all part of the borg - and thus have the same value scale.
I give you 30 to one odds on Leeson and the JBC: if Leeson wins the JBC, you give me a hundred dollars. If he doesn’t, I’ll give you 10. He’s about 30, so we still have some options.
I also give you 10 to one odds on Leeson going to Chicago within the next 5 years. How about it?
I was simply responding to another poster who stated that GMU has become a “top” programme and has signficant academic clout, I dispute those two related claims. The fact is that GMU was outside the top 50 on one ranking and did not appear on two other rankings (that went to over 100 each), perhaps the authors chose to omit GMU for some bizarre reason, but,since other heterodox schools were included in both lists and the authors didn’t make a note of excluding any department, I can’t see why GMU would be excluded as opposed to simply not ranked high enough. If I compile a list of the richest 50 countries and exclude Sierra Leone, nobody would rush to the conclusion that I omitted Sierra Leone for other reasons, they’d presume that Sierre Leone is just a poor country.
Yes, value is subjective. But there are a number of things people look for in a grad school, these factors differ between people and can include things like how nice the campus is, what the pre school in the area are like and so on and so forth. Nonetheless, there is also a degree of constancy across these measures, such as how well a grad school places, support from and interaction with faculty etc. And we can rank grad schools based on how they do according to some of these measures. We can never come up with a definative, objective ranking, but we can get an idea of how “good” or “bad” a grad school is, as is manifest in the consistency of these rankings; MIT and Harvard generally do best and other school such as Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale are all at the top end.
But yes, if heterodox economics is your interest, by all means look at heterodox places on the left such as Amherst and New School or Austrian places such as GMU and WVU.
