In 10 Austrian Vices and How to Avoid Them, Peter Leeson offers advice such as
1. Stop block quoting Mises and Hayek … 4. No more discussions about the calculation debate. … 5. Get over the “subjectivism stuff.” … 8. Do not engage (i.e., make the focus of your research) work that is more than 25 years old. … 9. Don’t tell us what Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, etc. “really meant.” 10. Stick a fork in the “philosophy talk.”
Other helpful advice, in the comments to this thread, include:
It is time for Austrians to follow Prof Leesons advice – stop prattling on about subjectivism & capital theory, natural law, natural rights, thymology, praxeology, & similar nonsense that the average player in the economics profession does not know about & would not care about (|& think kooky) if they did know about it.
Also of interest is Joe Salerno’s contribution to this debate (also posted as a comment on a related thread):
I have to agree with Pete Leeson and Dan Klein in this discussion. Pete Boettke does not adequately meet their objections. If one’s goal is a successful career at a top, or even mid-tier, government-funded research university, then the habits and inclinations they enumerate are indeed “vices to be avoided.” I would add a twelth vice to be avoided at all costs: characterizing oneself as an Austrian economist. The contemporary modal mainstream economist neither knows nor cares what an “Austrian economist” is. You do yourself no favors by self-reference in terms of any school of thought; it will only muddy the waters, mark you as an eccentric, and not improve your chances at landing a job at a top forty research university. I gently chide Pete Leeson who seems to have lapsed into precisely this vice by referring to his “young Austrian students” in his post on “10 Vices to Be Avoided by Austrians.”
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Is “other helpful advice” meant to be sarcastic…?
Strange, my neoclassical economics professor told me that socialist calculation is possible in government firms by just making up capital values, and Mr. Leeson is saying that people like me shouldn’t point out that her errors were soundly refuted over 80 years ago.
Is it no less a vice for non-Austrians to engage us in these issues? Or, by virtue of being [insert derogatory term to describe Austrians here] that it is a vice for us to mention it?
Shouldn’t the original post be titled: 10 Things You Should Do If You Want To Work At A State-Funded University In The State With The Lowest Educational Scores In The Country While Still Pretending To Be An Austrian And Trying To Gain Some Modal Economist Street Cred At The Same Time?
This holier than thou attitude is exactly why so few students enter into advance studies in Austrian economics as Dan D’Amico noted. Not only do students have to contend with the methodological differences with the mainstream, but also with the petty cat fights that Boettke, Horwitz and their disciples throw toward Auburn, Grove City, Prague, Angers etc.
Let’s all forget about the teachings of Menger, Mises, and Rothbard and get government jobs like Leeson would like us to do. Brilliant!
I think in the parlance of our times, Leeson just got owned by Dr. Salerno.
It looks like Leeson is getting slapped from a couple sides of the Austrian debate.
Dr. Lawrence H. White asks:
As the editor of the new UChi Press edition of Hayek’s Pure Theory of Capital (mentioned above), I feel moved to react to Pete Leeson’s Vice #2: “No more attempts at rewriting ‘capital theory’.†My reaction is: who’s been trying? Nobody I could find, except perhaps Roger Garrison, and what Roger has done to integrate the essentials of Austrian capital theory (as found in Prices and Production, avoiding the additional complexities of the Pure Theory of Capital) is extremely useful. If there is an army of grad students trying to make sense of The Pure Theory of Capital, I hope my editors’ introduction and footnotes to the new edition will help them. But I agree with Pete Leeson that the expected return to additional work in that direction is low.
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/03/austrian_vices_.html#comment-64935238
And, Dr. Joe Salerno reacts to Peter Leeson’s response to his previous post:
Pete L., with all due respect, I have one minor objection to your response, which may be a result of my own confusion. Why is an Austrian one who believes “the questions [he is] asking are inspired by this tradition.” It seems to me that all “mundane” economists (to use Peter Klein’s felicitous term) interested in how the real economy works ask and try to answer the very same questions, but depending on their doctrinal orientation, their answers are different. Boehm-Bawerk inspired by Marx asked what determines the value of a good. Does that make Boehm-Bawerk a Marxian or Marx a proto- Austrian? Keynes, Rothbard, Friedman/Schwartz and sundry others all asked: “What caused the Great Depression?” and came away with radically different answers. What unified tradition were they part of? Hayek and Knight questioned whether capital was automatically and perpetually self-renewing and the former argued that the latter’s answer was pure “mythology’? Galileo as well as his ecclesiastical critics queried whether it was the earth or the sun that moved. Were they all part of the same scientific tradition? Looking back over intellectual history, doesn’t it seem that it is the answers given and not the questions asked that defined one as a member of one school or another? Can you come up with any significant question that Austrians ask that non-Austrian economists are not at least interested in?
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/03/on_beating_dead.html#comments
It can’t bode well when you are being held to task by folks with glorious cv’s from two different sides of the debate.
The items addressed in Professor Leeson’s paper seems pertinent only to those familiar with the Austrian approach to economic theorizing. These sorts of discussions can only occur in places like GMU today or NYU 20 years ago. But for the “uninitiated”, subjectivism is indeed a radically novel concept. The Austrian concept of capital theory is equally revolutionary to those (professors included) reared in schools like the one I attend (Washinton University). These ideas and concepts are responsible for converting me to the discipline of Austrian economics. It is imperative that we NOT dispense with these ideas for the sake of academic expediency.
I don’t get it. Maybe it is because I read very little from GMU professors, but I hope they don’t think they are the only game in town. What a joke.
I agree with Dr. Salerno and I think (in context) I agree with Leeson, but why the holier-than-thou attitude (note ‘xyz’)? Before anyone makes anymore “vice lists”, there needs to be a lot more work done teaching sound, basic economic theory, especially to the many millions of students who actually take economics courses and yet they don’t get a damn thing from them. Fooling around with what’s proper and popular amongst grad students, Ph.D’s, and all their journals should be #1 on everyone’s “vice list”.
Ah but don’t you know professors aren’t paid to teach? They’re paid to fill journals with stuff.
Top Ten Vices? Ugh. It’s writing like this that reminds me why I was absolutely correct in deciding to do something with my life other than academia.
As the old saying goes, the fighting wouldn’t be so bitter if the stakes weren’t so low.
You’re not going to write anything ground-breaking? Really? You’re not? Dr. Leeson should keep telling himself that, and it’s bound to come true!
Also fun to watch is the rank credentialism among people who are supposed to be the inheritors of the Scholastics and philosophers of yore — which top journals have you published in, huh??? To everyone outside of this tiny little fishbowl world of theirs, this is amusing stuff.
I’m starting to think that some of the next great advances in economics are going to come from someone outside the hallowed halls of academe. Kind of like what Einstein did with physics.
George -
I couldn’t agree more. I can’t add anything ground-breaking to your comment so I’ll just stop there!
I have a really low opinion of journals. It’s not that I find them unreadable, because I have been “schooled” to understand what is going on as far as the math and econometrics. Though, identifying precisely what symbols mean, etc. is sometimes only possible if you are intimately familiar with the particular “specialty”.
The problem with the journals is that they are full of useless crap. The models built, ‘research’ conducted, etc. is almost universally not helping anyone but the author (who gets “published”) and the authors he/she cites (big kudos for “citations”).
The number of readers of economics journals would fit into a Wal-Mart in Manhattan. That is to say, no one reads them. What some do check are the number of citations and publications a particular author has. This is a monopolistic barrier to entry akin to the licenses granted to florists in various states.
Of course, some do read a few papers available elsewhere, but only the florists with the license already. Those who post on this website have more influence on the dissemination of ideas than any professor teaching less than a hundred students a year ever will have. Most “students” don’t care and only want a grade and a piece of paper with the signature of the Dean after four years. The game has changed and to try to subvert austrian economics in order to be more amenable to academia is to go against the whole tradition and the insights that have been recognized by those elders we all hold in such great esteem. The point is not to gain cozy tenured posts for some, but to educate the public on austrian theory which definitely includes capital theory, history of economic thought, the errors of socialist calculation, block quotes from the wisdom of Menger/Bohm-Bawerk/Mises/Hayek/Kirzner/Rothbard and on and on…
Thanks, Adam. I agree. Maybe we should direct more profs and grad students to http://www.econjournalwatch.org for reality checks, and also learn to write in the popular press as Hazlit did.
How one views Professor Leeson’s remarks perhaps is determined by whether one considers economics, as Professor Salerno has noted, as a “vocation or profession.”
Or put another way, does one hold the pursuit of truth and a more accurate understanding of our world as the foremost goal of an economist and of any scientist, or do professional considerations also exert notable influence.
And regarding the socialist calculation debate, socialist governments are responsible for the death of tens of millions, if not 100 million human beings (not to mention tremendous economic waste in non-human terms). Those mainstream economists who do not acknowledge the immense practical significance of the socialist calculation issue, I believe represent a fundamentally different type of person and “scientist” than Mises and other Austrians that have devoted considerable time and resources to its study. In particular, if the entire world were to adopt state ownership of the non-human factors of production, thus barring any socialist economy from parasitically using the price system of market economies to crudely calculate, how would civilization and human existence be impacted? Austrians realize the gruesome answer to this question.
Furthermore, given the crucial importance of capital to production in advanced economies, economies to which most of us owe our lives, attempting to better understand this concept is also of immense practical significance.
“Socialist government” is redundant, so your figure is awfully low.
Angelo Mike,
I was attempting to ball park the figure. A careful accounting would likely lead to a significantly higher death toll, as you point out.
Interesting discussion, to say the least. Another no-no that could have made the original list was the use of the term “progressive research program.” Revealing that it didn’t.
In one of these threads Prof. Salerno notes that the GMU mafia (my term, not his), while certainly influenced by
Austrian themes, are better characterized as “Post-Austrian,” akin to the Post-Keynesians (for introducing alien concepts to the original, foundational influences).
What about us dilettantes? Can we do all that crap?
This whole article was disgusting. The proper title should have been “10 Things to avoid so that you can sell out your soul and intellectual honesty for the sake of a government job at taxpayer expense instead.” This is just like when the German Historical School derided the early Austrian school as being “unscientific” while also claiming to be the “intellectual bodyguards of the House of Hohenzollern”.
Dr. Salerno’s latest response to Dr. Boettke’s mea culpa:
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2007/04/clarifying_some.html#comment-65195076
Pete;
1. Labels are not “provided by intellectual enemies”; they are part of the spontaneous development of a scientific discipline. It is true that the German Historical School coined the name “Austrian school” as a pejorative. However, Boehm-Bawerk, Wieser and other Menger students as well as sympathetic foreign economists viewed the term as apposite and began to use it spontaneously in their writings. The Post-Keynesians as I noted named themselves and this was eventually accepted by the rest of the profession.
2. My initial intervention in this thread was a direct reaction to Pete Leeson’s post on “10 Austrian Vices to Be Avoided,” in which he presumed to criticize the diverse research programs pursued by other Austrians as vicious and to hold up his own unique research program as THE ideal Austrian research program. You have also done this here and on the Mises List on many occasions, touting the GMU research program as ideal. Well the rest of us mundane Austrian economists are sick to death of being lectured to, especially by someone 3 or 4 years out of grad school. We seek to distance and differentiate ourselves from such a monolithic conception of Austrian economics and such sophomoric and unscholarly sermonizing. Imagine the firestorm of protest that would have ignited on this blog and elsewhere if someone associated with the Mises Institute had the arrogance to write as Pete Leeson had.
3. If you and Pete Leeson think that there is one model Austrian research program, and all others are ridden with “vices” then why not relieve the rest of us of the burden of having to continually defend ourselves as “Austrians.” My humble suggestion was to simply choose a different name for the new research program that you and Pete Leeson have created and take ownership of it. (How about the “New Political Economy”?) In this way, we can all go on peacefully coexisting and pursuing research each according to his own lights and not wasting time on this nonsense. Had Leeson written on “10 New Political Economy Vices to Be Avoided” I would have smiled and gone on with my substantive work.
Joe
I found austrian economics through my thirst for justice, a couple books I stumbled upon, and a kind elderly gentleman in D.C. (those in the know will recognize him immediately), I know many others have followed a similar path.
These quibbles over the best way to get into economics journals are so 20th century.
You don’t need a job at a state-run school to teach economics or make an impact and follow the tradition anymore.
In the Middle Ages there existed three or five universities as the only places to get a fine education, centuries later the number had grown to maybe twenty. In the 19th centuries, there were maybe a 100 places, and in the late 20th centuries maybe 500, all of them equipped with what you need to study and do your own creative research. Nowadays, these brick and mortar institutions do no longer matter. You can have access to the largest library of the world (the Internet) from almost anywhere in the world.
I tell my students here in Brazil that only a decade or so I could not have stayed here longer than half a year without losing my contacts, my instant information, my discussion groups, etc. Now, all these things have changed. I get the central banks reports and the academic publications, or whatever I need for my research, in the same second as my former collegues in Berlin, Paris, Bologna, Cambridge or in the US, and I have my discussion groups.
Let us “as Austrians” not play the game of the past. Let us not be corrupted. Let us not be deceived by former standards. Mises.org, for example, probably, has more intellectual impact on a worldwide scale than many of the boring Harvard guys have. They publish “in the finest journals”, however, do they get read? Let us not be envious and let us not be too shy, and instead let us celebrate what Lew Rockwell has set up with the Mises Institute, which may be more powerful and beneficial in its intellectual impact than all the ivy leagues together – at least in economics.
I was disturbed by this at first but then spoke to my brother who is an econ professor and has met Leeson. I can now understand that it is necessary to avoid these vices to advance in academia. However, I am still somewhat disturbed by the negative connotation throughout the article. It is an infectious disease being spread when telling others they can’t do what it is they desire. I wonder if Prof Leeson has ever read Napoleon Hill’s “Your Magic Power to be Rich.” To quote Napoleon Hill……”Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” Perhaps academia is not the proper platform to achieve great things, but if one never tries it surely will remain that way.
“It is time for Austrians to follow Prof Leesons advice – stop prattling on about subjectivism & capital theory, natural law, natural rights, thymology, praxeology, & similar nonsense that the average player in the economics profession does not know about & would not care about (|& think kooky) if they did know about it.”
No. Because that means fighting the Keynesians etc. on their ground. Keynesians win if all you talk about is GDP theory, government stimulus theory, spending multiplier theory, printing press theory, and permanent quasi-boom theory.
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