Our = who?
Just don’t ask questions and don’t point out the errors of their teachings. Professors usually have big heads, and are not intellectually honest. You can study and get a degree in economics without the professors ever really knowing your true education.
Ok, colloquial confusion
I’ve been searching the Mises web site for some posting on the subject of political repression of free-market fans, or "Austrians’, as you put it. I suppose you won’t know offhand the answer to my query, but perhaps you have the motivation to research the issue. The question refers to the following cite from von Mises:
"The fundamental dogma of all brands of socialism is that the market brings about misery, slavery, oppression, degradation and exploitation of the working men, while it enriches a class of idle and useless parasites. … the correctness of this dogma was contested only by a few economists who were very soon silenced and barred from access to the universities, the press, the leadership of political parties and, first of all, public office”
Ludwig von Mises*: Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism*
My query is for somebody to please tell me who in blazes Mises is writing about in the underscored portion. Mises had the nasty habit of talking in generalities and never citing sources. Not a good sign for a scholar with pretensions to scientific standing.
I am an economist of fairly left-wing views, à la Joseph Stiglitz, for example. I am reading Hayek and Mises critically and have difficulty checking the latter’s claims because of his vagueness. I would be interested in knowing whether von Mises is referring to any actual historical episode or if this is instead merely a figment of his fertile imagination.
I completely sympathize with you. As you can imagine, in Socialist-governed Venezuela it is even worse. Even here at this forum many of my views that are not necessarily Austrian have been widely attacked. We humans once we become more learned we feel that we must impose our views upon others. We have lost the power to listen.
I dropped out of university 3 months into a BComm.
Our perhaps our BS detectors have become so finely tuned, we can no longer tolerate listening to lies and half-truths.
LOL. Your views entail enslaving people who don’t obey government orders. So don’t play the victim when you are actually the criminal.
TequilaKid - I’m reading Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism and there are episodes in which the biographer discusses the persecution of market economists. I’m only through a bit of it though.
I’ll leave it to someone else more knowledgable to provide more specifics.
Of course, Mises had trouble finding employment upon emigration to the States, despite his impressive work. So he himself was somewhat barred from the universities.
In general though, the claim is self-evident. Academia is, and generally always has been, extremely statist. The statism is generally an attempt to curry favor with the political elite. Those who can accurately describe voluntary interaction are always the opponents of those who wish to use coercion and subvert freedom. Mises himself entered Academia a thorough interventionist due to the widespread indoctrination of his youth, but dropped the views after disowning the historical empricism of the German Historical School and empracing radical apriorism and logical deduction.
Yep.
Friend, in my experience, there is no backlash against conservatism in the scholarly world, unless it is academically unformulated or dishonest. Yes, the right has trouble expressing themselves in university; but that is only becuase the majority of them are dishonest with themselves and cant back their claims up with facts. But there are plenty who can and they do quite well in this environment. (Like, uh, Ron Paul is a doctor…). Mises found his trouble entering American academia because of his rejection of the scientific method in economics.
To put it simply; To thine own self be true
This may be what Mises was talking about?
Stones into Bread: The Keynesian Miracle (Mises, 1948)
II
A highly gifted French economist, Etienne Mantoux, has analyzed Keynes’ famous book point for point. The result of his very careful and conscientious study is devastating for Keynes the economist and statistician, as well as Keynes the statesman. The friends of Keynes are at a loss to find any substantial rejoinder. The only argument that his friend and biographer, Professor E. A. G. Robinson, could advance is that this powerful indictment of Keynes’ position came “as might have been expected, from a Frenchman.” (Economic Journal, Vol. LVII, p. 23.) As if the disastrous effects of appeasement and defeatism had not affected Great Britain also!
Etienne Mantoux, son of the famous historian, Paul Mantoux, was the most distinguished of the younger French economists. He had already made valuable contributions to economic theory—among them a keen critique of Keynes’ General Theory, published in 1937 in the Revue d’Economic Politique—before he began his The Carthaginian Peace or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1946). He did not live to see his book published. As an officer in the French forces he was killed on active service during the last days of the war. His premature death was a heavy blow to France, which is today badly in need of sound and courageous economists.
ClassicLiberal, I’m giving you the sort of advice I wish I had received before going into my economics course, feel free to disregard it, but I am hoping you will benefit from it. I’m also writing this going on the assumption that you are taking your course with the intent of learning e
First, let’s get something clear. Neither you, nor I are Austrian economists. At best, we’re laymen inclined towards Austrian economic analysis. Now, with this in mind it’s simply not wise for your own intellectual development to go into an economics degree calling yourself that. If you want to benefit from your course your best bet is to go into it with an open mind, that means forgetting your Austrianism for the time being and focusing on what the teachers are saying, giving it an even handed analysis and then deciding whether or not you wish to continue studying the mainstream neoclassical approach or continuing with your Austrian studies.
Don’t consider it “outing” yourself, university is a learning experience. You can learn a lot from your professors even if you don’t agree with it all. Don’t go in with the ambition of being trouble maker. If you wish to ask questions don’t ask them because you expect the answers to differ from the Austrian approach, ask them because you need clarification on the issue in question. A lot of what you will learn will contradict your Austrian studies, so unless you go in with an open mind you’re not going to learn much, and I’d hazard a guess to say you’re not going to do as well as you otherwise would.
As for the attitudes of your professors towards Austrian economics, they won’t be very knowledgable about it and they won’t agree with a lot of it. They’ll also treat it with some scorn in all likelihood. All this means is that they’re teaching within a certain paradigm, and they wish to further this paradigm and cultivate students who will also work towards this end. Just like if you ask an Austrian professor what they think of certain parts of mainstream economics, you’ll get the same reaction. If you wish to further a certain branch of any science you don’t do it by constantly challenging the fundamentals of that science, for economists this means that they take math as a given. It’s what they do and it’s what they’ve done for some time, as far as they’re concerned, math is necessary for economics.
Keep in mind that Austrian economics is a part of the neoclassical tradition. Both Austrian neoclassicals and mainstream neoclassicals go about economic science in the following way: they attempt to explain price formation in terms of the subjective evaluations in terms of marginal units of economic goods by individual actors. Austrians think that verbal logic gives a more fruitful representation of reality, mainstream economists disagree.
This just isn’t true, once you understand what Keynes and his disciples mean by certain things and the nature of aggregation within the Keynesian framework, the conclusions do follow. Austrians merely challenge the aggregation used in Keynesian economics for various reasons (i.e. the nature of aggregation hides the microeconomic forces that shape the macroeconomy) and disagree on certain definitons (i.e. for Austrians the interest rate determines investment, for Keynesians it equilibrates the supply for and the demand of money). In order to demonstrate what I mean by this, take the latter example. For Keynesian economics, there is no price that allows for intertemporal coordination. So the only way this could occur is, to use Garrison’s term, by “accident or design”. If you wish to construe the interest rate as the price of money, as Keynesians do, their conclusions about investment being unstable follow. Which is exactly why in the Keynesian framework “G” is necessary, because “I” (as opposed to “C”) is so unstable.
Well, that’s just not true: LSE, UCL, Oxbridge, Warwick, Tilberg, U of Toulouse, U of Amsterdam and some others are all top 50 (and in some cases top 25) economics schools.
First, I agree with what Giles said: you’re not an Austrian economist. If you’re just starting university, then you’re a student who is interested in AE. It’s good to have interests, but don’t pigeonhole yourself.
Second, I don’t see how anyone would care what an undergrad thinks. Maybe if you’re applying to grad school, then it could be an issue, but even here there are arguments against stealthism. For example, Ed Stringham was explicitly Austrian in grad school and did very well on the job market:
I had been repeatedly told by others that I would not be able to get a job if I was an Austrian, and one classical liberal institute at my university even told me I should remove libertarian articles from my C.V. I chose not to take this advice, and when I went on the job market I was explicitly libertarian and explicitly Austrian. … I ended up receiving the most interview requests in the entire history of the program at G.M.U. … I had interviews with multiple Top 50 Liberal Arts Colleges, Top 50 M.B.A. Schools, Top 50 National Universities, and First Tier Masters Level Universities according to the U.S. News rankings.
Read his interview in the Austrian Economics Newsletter.
Finally, stealthism is plainly a bad idea. If you wait until you’re tenured before you reveal your Austrianism (i.e. ~15-20 years), you’ll have long forgotten why you liked AE in the first place. Think about it: four years of undergrad; four years of grad school (if you’re lucky); six years tenure track (if you’re lucky); and throughout this time you’ll be writing a mainstream dissertation and mainstream articles, and competing against top mainstream students at their own game. By the time you’re ready to come out of the closet, you’ll be fifty years old, you’re career will be half over, and you can’t remember what the regression theorem is. Odds are you’ll abandon AE and choose to keep doing mainstream work.
I think you are just jealous that I was MVP for a while much before you…
I still enjoy my freedom, because the reaal judges (and you are not one of them) have not convicted me.
Just deal with the fact that I am back and you will no longer be able to silence me. You made me leave this forum for almost a year, you censored everything I said and acted emotionally, like a Nazi trying to execute jews.
But I AM BACK. Are you fearing that my reasonings will perhaps make some of your readers realize that you do not hold the complete truth?
Are you nuts ? You are a social democrat willing to kill people who don’t submit to what you regard as ‘legitimate government’. And the reason why your system can only work by murdering dissenters is that you do not have a reasonable and consistent position.
If reason was on your side, you would not try to rule over people. But of course, reason is not on your side, or on the side of the ‘majority’ that in your mind makes state crimes somehow justified.
So, whine about nazism all you want. You are a prime example of it anyways.
Oh, and please answer the question you never managed to answer : Where does the authority of government come from ?
Your system is even worse than mine. You have your President Cristina Kirchner travelling all around Central America and spending the money she robs from my country.
My president ?
Tu ne cede malis.
A wonderful creedo.