July 1, 2008
Before beginning this topic, let me point out what should be obvious: almost no one who gets published on LewRockwell.com, the premier libertarian website, has a Ph.D. in economics.
Almost no one who has ever published in The Freeman since 1956 has had a Ph.D. in economics. The one major exception was Hans Sennholz. No peer-reviewed academic journal ever published one of his articles. He wrote hundreds of articles. He was cogent until the end. He never stopped writing: www.Sennholz.com.
Sennholz taught in a good but nationally obscure four-year private college that sounds like a junior college: Grove City College. He got the job only because the multi-billionaire (in today's money) who financed the college told the president to hire him in 1955. He had a sugar daddy: J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil.
You don't have a sugar daddy, do you?
The lack of participation by Ph.D.-holding economists in the non-peer-reviewed, life and death battlefields of free market economics tells us something about the productivity of university economists. They are just not interested. They are not paid to be interested. They are unwilling to devote their lives to getting out the message of free market economics. They have a personal agenda governed by career-driven self-interest. "If it does not advance me to tenure, forget it." After they get tenure -- few do -- they have forgotten entirely. Most of them never write another article.
Also, they cannot write worth a hoot. They had to spend half a decade learning how to write mathematical gibberish and variations of the prisoner's dilemma. If they should lose this skill, they will never get articles published in peer-reviewed professional journals. They will not be granted tenure.
It's hopeless anyway. Almost no article ever published in a peer-reviewed professional economics journal has been written by an Austrian School economist. Murray Rothbard abandoned the attempt no later than 1961, five years after he was granted his Ph.D. He saw that it was not only futile to attempt it, there was no way to change the professional economists' minds. They were mostly state-salaried drones whose self-interest was to suppress Austrian School ideas, which they have done systematically for a century.
This has not changed. It has gotten worse. The articles are more incoherent than ever.
As a collegiate economist, you must play the game according to anti-Austrian methodology, from the day you teach your first discussion group in economics IA until the day you retire. That is, you must teach your students to believe what Austrian economics says cannot possibly be true. I have written about this here:
By the way, on this issue of the methodology of the textbooks -- the conceptual illegitimacy of contiguous supply and demand curves -- Professor Walter Block agrees with me. This practice has gone on for so long that most Austrian School economists have surrendered to the profession's practice. They see nothing wrong with curves. This even included Murray Rothbard.
The Ph.D. Glut
Years ago, I published an article on Lew Rockwell's site on the Ph.D. glut: why earning a Ph.D. is a high-risk, low-payoff venture.
This was my only article that ever got picked up by the New York Times.
What I wrote then is equally true today -- as it was in 1969. The glut continues because departments are paid to crank out graduate students. Senior professors refuse to teach undergraduates. So, they have set up a system where grad students do their research for them, or at least keep their classes small: under 10 students. No one cares whether these misguided and deliberately misled grad students will be able to find employment in academia. (You don't need a Ph.D. in economics outside of academia.)
From around America, I received letters from Ph.D.-holding students who confirmed what I said. I also received emails from tenured professors who said I was all wrong.,
Professor Block, a now-tenured professor who spent years outside any university, due to hostility to his Austrian School views, has offered a rebuttal. He think salaries are high in the field of economics.
This is true -- if you get tenure. If you don't get tenure -- and very few do -- then you are tossed out of the university-level teaching slots (most of which are tax-funded universities) and relegated to part-time teaching at below-plumber hourly rates in a community college. Your career hits a dead end either immediately after you earn a Ph.D. at age 28, or eight years later, when you are thrown off the tenure track into academic oblivion.
The statistics on salaries that he cites are for full-time employees who have survived the cut or who are laboring to get tenure as assistant professors. Most Ph.D.-holding hopefuls do not survive the cut.
If you make it into the NBA, you will make a lot of money. The salaries are great. Hardly anyone gets signed. Most are journeymen.
When you think "college professor," think "NBA." Then think "never survived the cut." We tell ghetto youths not to dream of making it into the NBA. We don't warn undergraduates of the same unrealistic dream of making it onto a college faculty.
These high salaries are also for people who are willing to teach in tax-funded schools, where most of the jobs are. That means that you must conform to the unwritten laws of academia and also the anti-religion laws of the Federal government.
To gain these above-market salaries, you must participate in an government-created oligopoly.
You will spend the rest of your life teaching students who are not interested in majoring in economics, or if they are, than who are not interested in Austrian school economics. You will increase the supply of students who think they understand economics but who really don't.
I think there are better ways to spend your life.
A More Profitable, More Productive Career Strategy
I assume that you are committed to the idea of a free society. For the sake of argument, I also assume that you are at least 50 years old. You want to learn a great deal about the free market, and you want to share your insights regarding the free market with other interested people who share your commitment. What is the best way for you to achieve both goals?
At the age of 50, you have money saved up. You are thinking of using that money for your retirement as age 65. But maybe there is a better way. Maybe the money could be put to more productive uses. Instead of planning for retirement, you make plans to stay in the workforce until age 80. This is what I have done. This frees up the capital that would have been required to support shoot in comfort for those 15 years. That is a lot of money.
Your next step is to decide how you can learn about the free market in an effective way. An inefficient way to learn about the free market would be to enroll in a university and major in economics. You would learn the academic version of economics, which might be Keynesian, Chicagoan, or some version of highly mathematical neoclassical economics. You would pick up bits and pieces of information about the working of the free market, but in terms of the amount of time devoted to mastering the required curriculum, the marginal return on your investment would be extremely low. Also, you would have to subject yourself to the grading system imposed by your professors. You would also have to pay a bundle of money in tuition, room and board, textbooks, and all the rest of it.
Instead of doing this, you could decide to teach yourself economics based on the free materials that are available on the Literature section of the Mises.org website, the Liberty Fund website, the Foundation for Economic Education website, the website of the Independent Institute, GaryNorth.com, and numerous other sites. You might even decide to spend a few thousand dollars to buy printed versions of these materials. This is if you suffer from the affliction I have called Picard's syndrome.
The great advantage of a digital version of a book is not its low price: free. Rather, it is the fact that you can use an electronic note-taking system to extract direct quotations from the material, add your comments, and insert key words for future search and retrieval. We have moved into the digital age, and digital books are part of this development. You can still print out a book, use a three hole punch, and file it in a binder. This gives you lots of room for notes in the margins and on the blank page that faces the printed page.
You therefore concentrate all of your time on reading and mastering materials that have been screened in terms of Austrian School economics, or other principles of liberty, without having to subject yourself to the academic meat grinder. Your goal is increased knowledge, not getting a union card stamped by some federally accredited university. Dollar for dollar, hour for hour, this is the way to get an education if you have the brains and self-discipline. If you lack self-discipline, maybe you do need to enroll in grad school.
As you get your education, you should begin to write. You write book reviews, brief essays, analyses of the latest news in terms of the intellectual framework you have been working on, and you post these on your own website or blog site. You also send a copy to Lou Rockwell, just in case he thinks it is good enough to post on his site. In other words, you increase your skills as a writer, and you spread the information you have been learning at the same time. There is no better way to master new material than to write original material based on what you have been reading. This is the way the ideas become a part of your thinking.
You may decide that you're unwilling to do this for 12 hours a day, six days a week. Then keep your day job, and do it for three hours a night and all day Saturday. This way, you do not forfeit any income, and it gives you extra money that you can send to the Mises Institute as a tax-deductible donation. Everybody wins. Well, not quite everybody. The university that does not get your tuition loses. This may not break your heart. It surely doesn't break my heart.
The great advantage of this strategy for someone who is 50 years old is that he doesn't waste time and money jumping through academic hoops that will do him no good in his career. He is too old go get a college professorship. But what about somebody who is 25 years old? Should he jump through the hoops for five years? Or would he be wise in following the schedule that I've recommended to somebody age 50?
The number of professors in American universities who have tenure and who are Austrian School economists may be as many as 20. I cannot actually name these people, but there may be this many. That is the total out of over 4,000 colleges in the United States. There may be another hundred who would like to get tenure. Frankly, I think the number is more likely to be 50 or 60. But I could be wrong. This is the situation over a hundred years after Ludwig von Mises received his Ph.D. -- in law, not economics. (They did not give a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Vienna. Hayek got his in law, too.) This is 40 years after Mises retired at New York University, never having been granted full-time teaching status at that school. They never paid him a dime. The money that supported him came from outside donors.
Of course, there is at least a possibility that you are more talented than Mises, intellectually speaking. I doubt it, however.
Perhaps you are as talented as F. A. Hayek. Hayek was blackballed by the economics department at the University of Chicago. He had to teach in the university's obscure Department of Social Thought, a Ph.D. degree that entitled holders to basically nothing. It was not a recognized academic discipline.
Or maybe you are as talented as Murray Rothbard. Rothbard spent most of his academic career teaching undergraduates majoring in science at a university that did not even offer an economics major. Only in the last decade of his life that he receive a full-time teaching position in a state university with a graduate program in economics. That is because somebody donated the money to give him the job.
Are you getting the picture?
Then there was Henry Hazlitt. Hazlitt never went to college. He published his first book at the age of 19. It was a book on philosophy. He spent the rest of his career as a journalist in the field of business and economics. He had more readers in his lifetime than anyone else who held the free-market view, except for Milton Friedman. I still prefer to read Hazlitt. You have to go through the academic meat grinder to prefer Friedman to Hazlitt. When you graduate, you will not be able to write as well as Hazlitt did. You will have to spend the rest of your career learning how to write again. (Doubt me? Read Thomas Sowell's academic book on Say's law. Read his academic book on Marxism. He was still suffering from his Ph.D. experience at Chicago. It took him years to become cogent again. He has not been in a classroom for decades. He works at the Hoover Institution.)
If you want influence, imitate Hazlitt. This assumes that you have the skills that Hazlitt possessed. If you don't have the skills that Hazlitt possessed, do the best you can. Don't expect to be as famous as Hazlitt. But, at the same time, don't spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder at the academic position you might have received, since probably the best you can hope for is to be treated as well as they treated Mises and Rothbard, i.e., like dirt.
Do not assume that the road to either wisdom or influence is the yellow brick road we call academic certification. You will have more influence on more people by publishing an article a month on LewRockwell.com and two articles a year on Mises.org and you will have teaching undergraduates for 30 years in an academic department filled with professors who are committed to a view of economics completely opposed to Austrian School economics.
The best economic future that an Austrian School economist can hope for is a fat salary at the Cato Institute, which hides its few remaining traces of Austrianism under a blanket.
Hans Sennholz had a great deal of influence during the 35 years that he spent teaching economics at Grove City College. But most of this influence came as a result of the hundreds of articles that he published, and the hundreds of lectures he gave at investment conferences, during this period. He did influence perhaps a dozen students to go on and get advanced degrees, but I can think of only one who earned a Ph.D. in economics, and who says in retrospect that the great influence in his life was Sennholz. Ronald Reagan read his articles and later told Sennholz that he used those articles to write his own materials. Ronald Reagan never took a class from Sennholz.
Here is what I am trying to get at. You have a limited amount of money and a limited amount of time. Your goal is to achieve something important with the least expenditure of time and money. Anyway, that is how you think about it if you understand economics. I am challenging you to think about the best way for you to achieve this influence on the largest number of people with the least expenditure of time and money.
Don't waste time reading materials that have nothing to do with Austrian School economics or libertarian philosophy or Christian economics or whatever it is that you think you should devote your life to studying and promoting. Don't jump through the hoops established by the enemies of Austrian School economics, libertarian philosophy, and Christian economics. What is the payoff for hoop-jumping? What are the risks that you will never achieve your goal? What are the risks that you will spend tens of thousands of dollars in waste five to 10 years trying to achieve these goals, and at the end of the period, your dissertation adviser chairman says that you don't have what it takes, so please go away?
To produce one Henry Hazlitt takes it least a thousand people trying to become Henry Hazlitt. Or maybe 10,000 people. With the rise of the World Wide Web, and the rise of low-cost ways to publish books, it is possible that we will get a thousand people whose goal is to become Henry Hazlitt. In making the attempt, they will provide lots of good material to help thousands of other potential laborers in the field who will also decide they want to become Henry Hazlitt. This is good. Most of them will fail in their attempt, but if they fight the good fight, they will add to our knowledge of how the free society works.
Meanwhile, they will not quit their day jobs. They will have money to donate to the Mises Institute. They will also have retirement savings. Maybe they will imitate Hans Sennholz and buy a dozen homes in their community for their retirement income. All the consumers they serve will be better off, their families will be better off, and the people who read their materials will be better off. There will be no losers. Well, maybe some losers: the universities that did not get their tuition money.
The key to transforming this civilization is not gaining a tenured position in a federally licensed oligopoly called higher education. If the key to transforming civilization is to get a tenured position in higher education, then the war for civilization is over. We lost.
There are many ways to skin a cat. There are also many ways to drown a cat. I suggest that you skin the career cat and drown the accredited cat. I can think of nothing better to restore a free society than to remove all tax funding from all universities, including West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy. All of them. Let them compete with the University of Phoenix, with its 300,000 students at $10,000 a semester, or whatever it is they pay. Let them compete in the free market. Then, and only then, will I recommend that a young person go off and earn a Ph.D. in economics. That Ph.D. will be granted by university that teaches Austrian School economics.
When the enemies of liberty use government power to create the academic screening system that they use to screen out the defenders of liberty, then it is probably unwise to play their game unless you have a lot of spare time, spare money, and a high IQ. It is probably wiser to do an end run around the system. The World Wide Web allows this. Low-cost printing allows this. All that is missing is the removal of government licensing by means of the accreditation system. So, until that is done, regard higher education as a high-risk, high-cost, low payoff crap shoot.
If you have a spare hundred thousand dollars to throw away, write a check to the non-profit educational foundation of your choice. Don't write a checks for five years to an accredited university. This will also save you three to five years of time that you would otherwise waste studying non-Austrian School economics.
We need more people like Henry Hazlitt and Lew Rockwell. They are more likely to appear on the World Wide Web than they are in a classroom in a non-Austrian School economics department in a university which has been accredited by a government licensing organization. That is my take on it, 36 years after I got my Ph.D. Of course, I spent only one semester teaching at college -- a deservedly obscure Baptist institution that was in no way visibly Baptist. I made more money in the second semester by moving to a state with no income tax.
Understanding Austrian economic theory is good. There are many ways to convert this understanding into positive cash flow. Getting a teaching job in an obscure college to spend the rest of your life teaching non-Austrian economics to students who resemble Ben Stein's class in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is not my idea of a life well spent.
What did I learn in grad school? This: how to write for enough money to support myself. That was the most important thing I learned in grad school. Now there is the Web. You don't have to go to grad school to learn what I learned.
You want to learn? Read. You can do both for the cost of Internet access, a printer, and paper and toner.
You want to teach? Write. Post it on the Web.
You want to spend a pile of money? Donate it to the ideological educational foundation of your choice.
You want a Ph.D? Find a diploma mill and buy one.
Think "Hazlitt." Think "Leonard E. Read." Think "Lew Rockwell."
That's enough thinking. Go write something. Even if it's only a check.
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