Economists are everywhere in the media these days, arguing with each other and pronouncing on what precisely needs to be done to fix our economic problems. The majority say that the government needs to spend and inflate like crazy, while others say that this will not only fail to fix the problem but will prolong the downturn.
The opinions of economists are not random. They can be classified into schools of thought, and to schools within schools. It’s too bad that the radio and television announcers can’t just say this before the economist ever opens his mouth.
The quiz is not only a quiz. It is an attempt in typology. Here is a my article in defense of the idea. FULL ARTICLE
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Quiz is fine IMO. Perhaps a more dumbed down version for newbs would be in order.
The test is not really that hard.
The test is not really that hard.
For my part, my worry is not that the quiz mixes theory with policy, but that it may misrepresent what the content of the policy programme (and, in some cases, even the theory) of Austrian economics really is.
To write a quiz such that a natural law based theory of anarchism is THE Austrian choice, or the MOST Austrian choice, seems to me to be a distortion. It amounts to saying that Mises, Hayek, etc. were less Austrian than they could have been or should have been. Surely that is absurd. You can say “They were not as thorough in applying their own framework for inquiry as they could have been”, but if they themselves are not the benchmark for how thoroughly we expect “Austrians” per se to use the framework, then who is?
I would like to see a quiz that allows more room for classical liberalism and legal positivism. After all, a quiz put out by the Ludwig von Mises Institute should have a quiz that Ludwig von Mises would pass, shouldn’t it?
Some complained it was too hard? This type of quiz is for classification purposes as such there are really no right or wrong answers. Maybe they mean there was too much reading? Seems to me that would also answer the questions.
I think what some may have interpreted as being hard is actually a desire for succinctness. I did find myself looking back through a set of answers to find a statement that represented an answer so that I could compare properly.
I do think that to pick the Austrian answers requires some education and research where the many of the other economic approaches are more common knowledge. There’s a certain sadness in that.
My main objection to the test is that most Austrian answers sound Austrian, and the other answers (Keynesian, Chicago, socialist) are obviously pro-government that even a non-Austrian can guess what the Austrian answer would be.
Jeffrey,
The quiz is not too hard; because even I scored 100 on it.
I agree. It wasn’t hard. However, when I did the test I simply went through and picked the answers that I felt were right. I didn’t go through the questions specifically looking for what I thought were going to be the Austrian answers. As it turns out, I am an Austrian but then again I knew that already lol.
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