 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 ] Next Last |
Austrian economics is currently closely associated with advocacy of radical laissez faire views. However, earlier Austrian economists were more cautious compared to later economists such as Ludwig von Mises, with Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk saying that he feared that unbridled free competition would lead to "anarchism in production and consumption." However the Austrian School, especially through the works of Friedrich Hayek, would be influential in the revival of laissez-faire thought in the 1980sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s Years: 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 Events and trends.
The school originated in ViennaThis article is about the city and federal state in Austria. For other places or things called Vienna, see Vienna (disambiguation). Vienna ( German: Wien [viːn]) is the capital of Austria, and also one of Austria's nine federal states Bundesland Wi and owes its name to members of the Historical School of economicsEconomics is the social science studying how society uses its limited resources to meet desires and wants. Put otherwise, economics studies what, how and for whom society produces. This involves analyzing the production, distribution and consumption of go who during the MethodenstreitMethodenstreit was a controversy over the method and epistemological character of economics carried on in the late 1880s and early 1890s between the supporters of the Austrian School of Economics, led by Carl Menger, and the proponents of the (German) His, where the Austrians defended the reliance that classical economists placed on logic over observation. Their Prussian opponents derisively named them the "Austrian School" to emphasize a departure from mainstream German thought and to suggest a provincial approach.
Menger's contributions were closely followed by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser. Austrian economists developed a sense of themselves as a school distinct from neoclassical economics during the economic calculation debate, with Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek representing the Austrian position, where they contended that without monetary prices or private property meaningful economic calculation was impossible.
The Austrian economists were the first liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the Historical School. Though many Marxist authors have attempted to portray the Austrian school as a bourgeois reaction to Marx, such an interpretation is untenable: Menger wrote his Principles of Economics at almost the same time as Marx was completing Das Kapital. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes. Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists--including Rudolf Hilferding--attended his seminar in 1905-06. In contrast, the classical economists had shown little interest in such topics, and many of them did not even gain familiarity with Marx's ideas until well into the twentieth century.
The school was no longer centered in Austria after Hitler came to power. Austrian economics was ill-thought of by most economists after World War II due to its rejection of observational methods. Its reputation has lately risen with work by students of Israel Kirzner and Ludwig Lachmann, as well as an interest in Hayek after he won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. However, it remains a distinctly minority position, even in such areas as capital value.
Austrian economics can be broken into two general trends. One, exemplified by Hayek, while distrusting of many neoclassical concepts, generally accepts their formulations, the other exemplified by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, seeks a different formalism for economics. The primary areas of contention between neo-classical theory and the Austrian school are on the possibility of consumer indifference - neo-classical theory says it is possible, where as Mises rejected it as being "impossible to observe in practice" - Mises and his students argued that utility functions are ordinal, and not cardinal, that is, one can only rank preferences, and not measure their intensity. Finally there are a host of questions about uncertainty raised by Mises and other Austrians which argue for a different means of risk assessment.
While the Austrian school itself is radically conservative, some would even say reactionary, many of their specific problems with the neo-classical formulation have analogs in other parts of economics. Game theory is used to challenge probability, volatility argued for as a better measure of preference and risk assessment than price, and chaos theory argues for highly discrete rather than very smooth functions of utility and value. Neo-classical economists have replies to each of the Austrian objections, which is why, while specific results of Austrian economics have been adopted by mainstream theory, as a whole, the paradigmatic assumption that economics should rest on deduction from principles rather than induction from observation has been largely rejected.
An area which is often overlooked is the influence that Austrian school ideas have had on Keynesian macro-economics. The source of this influence is the period of time where the London School of Economics brought in Hayek and other "continental" economists. While their students "flew the coop", refusing to join the Austrian school, many of the concepts, particularly relating time to the value of capital and its importance, would find their way into the work of Keynesians such as John Hicks.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|