Shattering 20 Myths of the Austrian School
The untold triumph of free markets
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Austrian economics is usually dismissed in a sentence, as ideology dressed up as science, and the dismissal rarely comes with evidence. The record is more mixed than that, and on several counts it now favors the Austrians.
This book sets twenty widely repeated charges against the school beside the historical and statistical evidence, so you can tell which ones collapse, which ones hold, and why.
In 1920, Mises argued that planners without market prices for capital goods could not rationally allocate resources; in 1990 the socialist economist Robert Heilbroner wrote in The New Yorker that Mises had been right. Milton Friedman found no link between the size of a boom and the bust that follows, yet a 2012 study of fourteen advanced economies from 1870 to 2008 found that rapid credit growth strongly predicts financial crises.
Where the Austrians lost, the book says so: asked in 2012 whether a gold standard would improve price stability and employment for the average American, not one economist on a leading panel agreed. You come away able to answer the standard dismissals with named studies and dates, and to concede the points that keep your case honest.
Questions about this book
Does the book cover the Great Depression and how governments responded?
Yes. It examines Hoover’s November 1929 appeal to business leaders not to cut wages, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff, the 1932 tax increase and the New Deal, and sets them beside the short 1920–1921 depression.
Does the book cover the 2008 crisis and the recent inflation?
Yes. It traces the Federal Reserve’s rate path from 1 percent in 2003–2004 to 5.25 percent in 2006, the 2020–2022 money-supply surge and 9.1 percent inflation, and the March 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
Where do the facts and figures come from?
The book ends with a Selected Sources list in four groups: the Austrians’ own works, histories of the school, critics and mainstream research, and official data from the CBO, IMF, Federal Reserve and BLS.
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