Each year, the Mises Institute hosts an annual convention of scholars in various academic disciplines who are committed to the outlook of Ludwig von Mises.
This year, it will be held on March 20 and 21 at the Institute, which is located in Auburn, Alabama.
Usually, it's not worth attending a conference at which scholars read their papers to each other. They drone on and on and on. You see heads nodding around the room. Scholars attend these conferences mainly to schmooze with each other, desperately hoping to get a better job offer.
This is not the case most of the time at this research conference. The speakers usually speak while looking at the audience. They don't stare at their papers, reading them word for word. They actually try to persuade each other that what they are saying is relevant to something other than getting published in an academic journal that nobody has ever read, reads today, or ever will read. This is unheard of at most academic conferences.
This year, I have submitted a paper in honor of the centennial of the most important publication in the history of Austrian economics: Ludwig von Mises' 1920 essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." That paper was a frontal assault on socialist economic planning. It was because of this paper that dozens of young economists, mostly socialists, came to Vienna to study under Mises informally. One of them was F. A. Hayek. Another was Wilhelm Röpke. He converted them to the free market viewpoint. That was the first generation of Austrian economics scholars. They were initially hard core, but most of them defected in the aftermath of the Great Depression. They did not return to socialism, but they distanced themselves from Mises. Mises was just too hard core.
Young Austrian scholars today have this advantage: there are far more of them than there were in 1922. They also have another advantage: the Mises Institute is gaining worldwide attention, and has been for over two decades. The reason is the World Wide Web.
To get some idea of the outreach of the Mises Institute, consider this fact. Alexa ranks the traffic of websites around the world. The lower the number, the higher the ranking. The ranking for the American Economic Association's website is 43,500. The ranking for the Mises Institute is 22,300.
Think about this. The AEA represents at least 20,000 American economists. You get tenure by getting an article published in the AEA's journal. But the AEA does not get traction outside of academia. In contrast, the Mises Institute provides coherent, readable materials for intelligent noneconomists to read. The AEA has no interest in such people. While the AEA may not consider such people to be deplorables, it certainly considers such people to be woefully ill-equipped to deal with economic theory in its academic form. It considers such people as unfortunates. But it does nothing to help them climb out of the intellectual holes that economists think the general public is in. This gives the Mises Institute a tremendous advantage when it comes to conveying economic theory to intelligent people. It doesn't have much competition from the guild-certified experts in academia.
In my paper, I survey the origin of Mises' legendary article. Why was it published? Who published it? Why?
For 70 years after the publication of his article and also the subsequent publication of his detailed book, Socialism (1922), most academic economists took two approaches to Mises' essay. First, they pretended they had never read it, assuming they had read it, which most of them had not. Second, they tried to refute it. None of the refutations held water intellectually, but they were accepted by other economists because academic economists did not want to accept Mises' conclusion, namely, that socialist economic planning is inherently irrational. Only with the collapse of the Soviet economy in the late 1980's, and the dissolution of the USSR on December 25, 1991, that a few socialists admitted that Mises was right. He is still ignored by the academic community. But he really was right in 1920.
If you want to get an introduction to the high-level productivity of this fourth-generation of Austrian economic scholars, you should attend the conference.
I would like to meet you if you decide to attend. Maybe we can have a boxed lunch together.
To register, go here:
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