Off the top of my head…
-The disproportionately high costs of the EU.
-Friendly societies and pre-state welfare systems.
-Healthcare, including European systems.
-Surviving crashes and profiting from them. I’d like to see some Austrian attention to the likes of Kiyosaki and also more Austrian analysis undertaken of Schiff and Mish (who are both self-proclaimed libertarians.)
-The Eastern economies.
-I’d like to see more on game theory, seeing as it was developed by an Austrian. Also, more on parsing Austrian econ in formal logic and how it can fruitfully employ mathematical techniques for purposes of economic research would be useful, as this is compatible with the school’s overarching epistemological stance.
-Updates in methodological debates on mainstream econ and beyond. I think Austrianism would benefit from surveying recent work on logic, metaphysics etc. and critiquing it/learning from whatever good insights it has.
-Finance theory from an Austrian PoV.
-Environmentalism/pollution.
-Further research on libertarian justifcations of property rights and a headway to formalising how we deal with “thorny” issues, like standards of appropriation (I still think these will necessarily be conventional in nature, unlike the right to property itself), children’s rights, animal rights etc. I think both the Hoppean/de Jasay approach and the neo-Aristotelian approach (Rasmussen/den Uyl) can be further elaborated. Attention to Jeremy Waldron’s arguments on Lockean property rights (discussed today by David Gordon; I am familiar with the author beforehand) and attempts at justifying the state and elaboration into a fuller line of attack against such views.
-More could be written on the concept of psychological harm (and manipulation) and harm in general. This is an area that inherently suffers from vagueness, but more conceptual precision can never hurt.
-Related to this, work on libertarian styles of parenting and how to avoid child abuse.
-Also related to it, research on advertising and delineating cases of it where it is fraudulent/highly manipulative and “legitimate”/informative etc.
-A critique of the media.
-Russia/Eastern Europe after de-socialising.
-Austrian sociological theory.
-More political analysis.
-A lot more work on crony capitalism.
-Thymological application of the socialist calculation problem to modern world economies/goverments and their atrocious attempts at solving “social problems”.
-Some in-depth work on inflationist vs deflationist strains of Austrianism and on the divergent ways booms can end up.
-A survey of modern economic works on MW laws (some still insist on arguing they “work”).
-This is very important - I’d like to see an Austrian perspective away from labour-intensive societies to ones where ownership of firms becomes the predominant means of earning income. I think as automation increases, this shift will come about provided the gov’t gets out of the way.
-I do think some attention needs to be given to David Graeber’s work on the origins of money. Whether he is right or wrong, it’s something Austrians would benefit from examining.
-A LOT more on financial “deregulation”. There is so much over-regulation that this claim that markets are “deregulated” needs to be blown into outer space.
-The internet. It owes a lot less to the government than is commonly assumed, so more research needs to be done here.
-Science with the state out of the way.
-The moral and economic implications of upcoming technologies like life extension, genetic modification and increasing integration of machines and humans.
There’s already some great papers on these topics, but more can be said as always. Some of these topics come up often by statists as “proof” that libertarianism fails blah blah, and there are very good responses to them but they would benefit from a more systematic treatment. Marxian/Keynesian economics as always require on-going attention until they are fully laid to death, but I’d say more attention should also be paid to the likes of Sraffa, even if his works only tangentially touch on Austrian themes.
