Who wants to be in the "mainstream" if the river is flowing into the mouth of Hell?

Here's a good article from recently (January): Peter Boettke Explains Austrian Economics - External Link 

Unlike Keynesian economics, the major failing of Austrian School economics is that it works.

Glib goes without saying. I'm more bemused at the term ur-text. Big thought for the usually painfully un-original NYT.

Regarding the NYT's description of the "Manichaean choice between laissez-faire capitalism and a government-run economy destined for disaster", the point of "Road to Serfdom" was not that there never exists anything between those two poles, but rather that so-called "mixed economies" always moved slowly but inexorably towards the command-economy pole. History has proven him right, as the mixed economies of the West have all moved uniformly towards more and more control over the last 60 years. You can have your mixed economy if you're willing to pay the cost in inaccurate price information, but you can't keep the bureaucracy from eventually taking over the whole economy.

I'd also like to point out how excited I would be to ever see a major newspaper describe Marxism this way. Marxism as an economic theory has been discredited widely for over 100 years, and is much more popular in sociology departments than in economics departments. One could easily claim "Mainstream economists have long dismissed the Marxist labor theory of value, but it retains a devoted following among socialists and some liberals."

Milton Friedman was NOT part of the Austrian school, Mr. Goldberg.

Milton Friedman:
"I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You’ve just got to let it cure itself. You can’t do anything about it. You will only make it worse. You have Rothbard saying it was a great mistake not to let the whole banking system collapse. I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and in the United States, they did harm."

Maybe try a little fact-checking next time.

Milton Friedman was absolutely not an "Austrian" economist, even though he agreed in many cases with their specific policy recommendations. The essential differences between Austrian and neoclassical economists have to do with the method of economic analysis. Neoclassical economics relies on mathematic modeling to derive empirically testable hypotheses of individuals' economic behavior, and then tests those hypotheses using statistical methods and data from the 'real' world. Austrians reject this formalist and mathematical/statistical approach for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they generally don't believe in equilibrium end-states as the outcomes of economic behavior (which generally rules out optimizing mathematical models). As a consequence of rejecting economic equilibria, Austrians also don't believe in reduced form econometric equations, which can be estimated to determine the parameters of the underlying functions which capture and/or reflect economic behavior (e.g. utility and production functions).

Milton Friedman was very much a neoclassical economist, believed in both the theoretical and empirical dimensions of the neoclassical methodological paradigm, and in fact made substantial contributions to neoclassical economics. He respected Hayek immensely but his approach to economics was very different.

PS Sorry to get in the weeds here on economic geek-ery...

Thanks! That was me

sorry JG, you have no idea what you're talking about. There are as many faculty in the top ten economics departments who study "austrian economics" as there are who study "marxist economics", ie one or two who got tenure then lost it.

And Milton Friedman was as neoclassical and mainstream as you get.. NOT austrian.