10 Lecciones de Economía (que los gobiernos quisieran ocultarle) is the name of my first book (Spanish), available at http://bit.ly/10LeccionesEcon.
10 economic lessons (that governments would like to hide from you) Read Post »
Our fellow blogger and friend Vijay Boyapati is running 26 miles for the cause of Austrian Economics and Libertarianism. He will match up to $13,000 from the donors (you can donate 5, 10 or 15 dollars an up and he will match your donation) for a total of $26,000 to be donated to the Ludwig von Mises Institute. That is $1000 per mile. The Ludwig von Mises Institute was surprised by Vijay’s spontaneous initiative and so are the rest of us. The donations amount to $7,500 at this time, so to our readers I say “join the campaign!”
Run Vijay, run!
Activism for the long run, literally Read Post »
When I embarked upon the task of teaching Austrian Economics at USFQ (as ECN101 and with some concessions to the mainstream such as teaching their flawed theories before attacking them) I couldn’t predict beforehand if I was going to find either resistance or support from my students and colleagues. I promise to tell TLS readers about the latter in another occasion. Of every class of 30-33 students for ECN101 I end up focusing on the 5-10 that are really into the material. We read a lot of Hoppe, Rothbard, Reisman, Dilorenzo, Kinsella and Block. Of course I tell my students that my class’ purpose is to show them a different point of view, since the “official” one can be found on the MSM of Ecuador and the U.S. and other classes even at USFQ (most PhD professors being either natural science types or liberal arts former hippies that support any soft form of socialism you can imagine there is.)
Of course of this 5-10 (per class, and I teach 3 classes per semester) maybe 2 or 3 become ardent libertarians and are encouraged to attend Mises University and FEE Seminars during the following summer. Last semester, I taught an “Advanced Libertarianism” seminar for the 12 best students from the past two years. Their enthusiasm being at a peak, they decided to do as Helio Beltrao and his libertarian cadre did in Brazil and create a LVMI-Ecuador think tank. My students Esteban Perez, Cindy Aguiar, Esteban Torres, Lizeth Torres, Alejandro Veintimilla, Pablo Mateus, Paul Riera and Lizeth Vasconez are the culprits: they are they driving force for LVMI-Ecuador. I’ll just say you better remember their names, they are very young but I bet they will make the headlines of libertarian and MSM publications later on.
The most exciting thing is that thanks to web 2.0 we can hold board meetings via Skype, promote our articles (60% of mises.ec being the translated Mises Daily articles) and events (this Wednesday we begin with “Cuba and the elephants” a thought-provoking documentary) via Facebook and keep our fixed costs to $40usd a year (for the .ec domain.)
In sum, today I want to share with you the official launch of www.mises.ec as the core service the Instituto Ludwig von Mises Ecuador has to offer the region and country in which it operates.
The Instituto Ludwig von Mises Ecuador is born Read Post »
Reader Ryan reminded us that not everyone who happens upon The Libertarian Standard will know what Austrian Economics is. Since an understanding of sound economics is so important to understanding the case for liberty, and Austrian Economics just is sound economics, we decided to make this the first question-and-answer for our Q&A series and the first addition to our Libertarian FAQ. Remember, you too can submit questions to us that you would like us to answer, if not for yourself then for the benefit of others. Inspire us!
Austrian Economics is paradigm, a way of analyzing economic and social phenomena that is sometimes completely at odds with the “mainstream” of Economics both in academe and among the ruling elites. AE is centered in the acting human being and thus follows a strict causal-realist that -claim its enthusiasts- render a far deeper and truer comprehension of what goes on in human societies.
This tradition or school of thought is the culmination of centuries and perhaps even millenia of (European) continental subjectivist notions that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and all the way through Roman thinkers, Medievalists, Renaissance and finally modern authors. What makes it distinctive is the focus on human action rather than in objective (materialistic), aggregated additions and substractions of actors and goods (viewing the forest but losing sight of the trees or ignoring them altogether) as well as idealized mathematical and geometrical models (in a supposed desired to seem “more scientific” that otherwise).
The Austrian School’s founder, Carl Menger, wrote his “Principles of Political Economy” as a structured marginalist1 answer to the Methodenstreit (a debate on method) that he was having with the German historicists, who claimed that there are no economic (reality) laws but rather recipes that may or not work depending of time and place. His successor, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, used the same marginalist approach to explain capital, savings, investment, interest and time preference. His contenders of the time were the Marxists but also the clearly stuck “Classical” economists of the British islands who were making mistakes as grave as to have engendered -at least partially- the bases for Marxism and Keynesianism. Böhm-Bawerk’s most brilliant student was Ludwig von Mises, considered by many as the best economist ever. Mises predicted as early as in 1921 that socialism was an untenable ideas because it kills the possibility of economic calculation (the final products being more than the intermediate goods and other things spent used to make them) and thus renders the whole of society (qua division of labor) a chaotic and inharmonious cluster of errors.
Mises also demonstrated that economic booms and busts are caused by an easy credit (no previous savings backing it up) policy mainly coming from States. Finally Mises demonstrated the universal character of economic laws as features of human action thus recouperating Economics from the relativistic pitfalls of empirism and historicism once again popular in his time. Mises’ most famous student, Friedrich A. von Hayek was awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 in big part due to this work with Mises on the direct threat that Intervencionism and Inflationism pose for free societies. The Austrian School found a Misesian revival after Hayek abandoned Economics to pursue other intellectual interests under the influence of Karl Popper and others, when Murray N. Rothbard wrote his treatise “Man, Economy and State”. Rothbard went beyond his teacher not only on strict Economics matters such as monopoly or Interventionism but mainly he set a foundation of Ethics that would resist any utilitarian attempt to seek anything but freedom because of special considerations of any kind. Other students of Mises that need mention are Hans Sennholz, a prolific writer on the subjects of money and inflation; Henry Hazlitt -the NYTimes Economics editor- who although wasn’t a student of Mises personally, was tremendously influenced by him; Israel Kirzner from NYU, with a clear Hayekian strand of analysis of entrepreneurship and coordination, Ralph Raico a revisionist historian of prime qualities and George Reisman, whose attempts at an Austrian + Classical synthesis are controversial but very interesting nonetheless.
Currently the hotbead of Austrian Economics is Auburn, Alabama where Llewellyn Rockwell Jr. setup the “Ludwig von Mises” Institute to help spread the Misesian-Rothbardian strand of AE. Scholars close to or directly working with the LVMI are prof. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a radical and pathbreaking thinker, prof. Jörg Guido-Hülsmann who has made original contributions to several subjects including the Ethics of money production, profs. Joseph Salerno, Peter Klein, Walter Block and Thomas Dilorenzo. Today www.mises.org is a world famous source of economic education in the causal-realist paradigm and is in no small part responsible for the revival of AE and its arrival to countries such as Ecuador, Brazil, Spain, Sweden and Chzech Republic among dozens others that are seeing the formation of Misesian centers for thought and education in the tradition of the Austrian School.
Analyzing the whole from the relevant unit added to it instead of analyzing wholes/aggregates ↩
TLS Q&A: What is Austrian Economics? Read Post »
Today we mourn the passing away of Latin America’s titan of liberty, Manuel “El Muso” Ayau. His life was truly inspiring from being entrepreneurially successful, to having two doctoral degrees (Literature and Law) to founding a school (Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City) based on the idea of taking the world back for classic liberal ideas in a continent ridden with defeatist, authoritarian socialist ideas.
To those of us lucky enough to meet him, it was surprising how warm and elegant he always was in any conversation, specially in heated debates. This he probably took from his beloved F.A. Hayek. But he was also frontal, direct and precise in logic. This, in contrast, I guess comes from his deep admiration for Ludwig von Mises.
Alas, it were Mises and Hayek the two thinkers that he wanted his young students at UFM to know about. At this truly unique university, students had to get themselves acquainted with Misesian Economics (i.e. sound, coherent economic theory and history) and Hayekian Social Thought (i.e. spontaneous and evolving social orders that escaped any pretense of social planning). I myself studied my master’s program at Muso’s UFM thanks not only to UFM existing in the first place and being considered a Mecca for Austrian Economics in our region, but also thanks to his direct support and endorsement. He was always able to gather the best Austrian minds in the region (at some point this was undoutedly the Argentinian profesors) and some of us have been granted the resulting opportunities still unmatched in several other regions of the world.
Muso was kind enough to send a video message for the members to the Movimiento Libertario in Ecuador andcopies of his books (brilliant, easy to understand books I have to say) whenever one of us was invited to the Austrian Mecca for a Liberty Fund event hosted by UFM.
This is a very sad day in which Latin American libertarians ought to make pause and reflect upon this great man’s legacy of courage, vision and clarity. It is now our task to multiply his deeds to a point that would make him eternally joyful wherever he now is.
Manuel F. Ayau (1925-2010), R.I.P. Read Post »
