who are your favorite economists and why?

[nirgrahamUK]

@laminustacitus

Take it as personal opinion, I don’t think that there truly is a purely objective method for determining what method is “better”, which you seem to hint at by calling it a “myth”. Nevertheless, in my humble opinion, Mises’ approach is weaker than Hayek’s because of the fact that Mises’ is weak against the Walrasian equilbrium approach, which is then disproved by introducing knowledge into the matter qua Hayek did.

Hayek is weaker against walrasian equilib approach than mises in my opinion.

@Hoppe

In a series of recent articles in The Review of Austrian Eco-nomics, Joseph Salerno began to de-homogenize the often
conflated economic and social theories of Ludwig von Misesand Friedrich A. Hayek. In particular, he has shown that their
views on socialism are distinctly different, and he has argued ineffect that Mises’s original argument in the so-called socialist
calculation debate was correct all along and was also the finalword, whereas Hayek’s distinct contribution to the debate was
fallacious from the outset, and merely added confusion. Thefollowing note will provide additional support to Salerno’s thesis.

http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_1_13.pdf

@Salerno

Postscript: Why a Socialist Economy is “Impossible” by Joseph T. Salerno

Mises’s Thesis

In “Economic Calculation in a Socialist Commonwealth,” Ludwig von Mises demonstrates, once and forever, that, under socialist central planning, there are no means of economic calculation and that, therefore, socialist economy itself is “impossible” (“unm?glich”)–not just inefficient or less innovative or conducted without benefit of decentralized knowledge, but really and truly and literally impossible.

… extract >

(1) It is of utmost importance to recognize that, in his original article as well as all later writings on the subject, Mises unswervingly identified the unique and insoluble problem of socialism as the impossibility of calculation–not, as in the case of F.A. Hayek, as an absence of an efficient mechanism for conveying knowledge to the planners. This difference between Mises and Hayek is reflected in their respective conceptions of the social function of competition as well as in their responses to the claims of the later market and mathematical socialists. Actually, Mises anticipated and refuted both groups in his original article. Nonetheless, Mises’s position on these issues is today generally ignored or conflated with Hayek’s.

http://mises.org/Econcalc/POST.asp