Good News From GMU

A group of market economists at George Mason University first called themselves Austrians, then, when they took up hermeneutics, Market Process economists. Then they switched back to Austrian. Now they are dubbing themselves Coordination Problem economists. As Professor Pete Boettke announces on their blog, “This name change is symbolic as well as substantive.  The term ‘Austrian economics’ has become…a hindrance to the advancement of thought….” This is excellent news. There are different emphases in the Austrian School, but as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has long argued, the main branch is represented by Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises,  and Rothbard (and rooted in the School of Salamanca). Others are important too, of course, especially Hayek, and despite any theoretical differences, he was an enthusiastic supporter of my founding of the Mises Institute, telling me he thought it was a “grand idea” and serving on our initial board of governors. Margit von Mises, Mises’s widow, was our founding chairman and told me her husband, to whom I had served as editor at Arlington House, Publishers, would have given his blessing as well. For herself, she said, it was “a dream come true.” Murray N. Rothbard literally clapped his hands in glee when I told him the news, and asked him to head up academic affairs. He was our guiding light. He still is, of course, in the Austrian School.

Update from Robert Murphy:

Now look closely again at Boettke’s explanation. I realize this may strike some as gloating, but that can’t be helped: What Boettke is saying is that the people who decided to “take it to the common man” have been so overwhelmingly successful that the particular spin they put on “Austrian economics” has drowned out what the other camp wants people to think the term signifies. After all, I’m guessing it’s not as if citations to Hayek or Kirzner have dropped in 2008 and 2009, relative to five years earlier. Rather, it’s that people like Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, and–dare I say it?–Lew Rockwell–have gotten the term “Austrian economics” into the public discussion in a previously inconceivably short time frame. Ron Paul used the term on Jay Leno, for crying out loud!

I’d argue that addressing the intelligent layman as well as the academic, which was my strategy from the beginning, was based on Mises too. It was he who argued that economics was too important to be left to the economists, and who welcomed business and professional people into his seminar at NYU. Robert Nozick once said, at a dinner in honor of Mises, that this approach of Mises, and his ability to attact laypeople, stimulated the envy and hatred of other economists at NYU.

UPDATE from David Gordon:

Tyler Cowen praised them for their “intellectual courage”!

I should add that the then-head of the Koch foundation (oil plutocrats Charles and David Koch, who are also the major funders of the Republican party and Beltway “libertarianism”) vowed eternal enmity against the Mises Institute and me at its founding, as they had earlier against Rothbard. “Do you realize how much money we have spent purging Mises from Austrian economics? Everyone hates him. Even Milton Friedman hates him. Hayek is the only path to influence.” The Kochs fund the GMU program, of course. The competition continues, but this time, when they openly state their motives and strategy, in a healthy way. Oh, and as they themselves note, we are winning. This time, let’s hope the Coordination Problemists, unlike the Market Processists, stick to their name.

UPDATE Mario Rizzo asks:

I wonder how they managed to all agree on the new name.

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11:48 am on January 1, 2010