I have long argued that Austrian economics should be developed not as an alternative to the current academic discipline of economics but as a replacement for it. We will know that this goal has been achieved when the modifier “Austrian” is no longer used to designate the economics of Mises and Rothbard and it is called simply “economics.” In the meantime, however, a significant and gratifying movement toward this long-term goal of establishing Austrian economics as the mainstream is occurring as economists of different theoretical persuasions are increasingly using the history of economic thought as a laboratory to advance economic theory. This opens the door to a re-examination of the ideas and doctrines of Austrian economics, old and new. An outstanding example of this is the ongoing debate among contemporary macroeconomists over neo-Wicksellian macroeconomics, as my co-authors, Matt McCaffrey and Carmen-Elena Dorobat, and I illustrate in our article The History of Economic Thought as a Living Laboratory, recently published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics.
A smaller scale but noteworthy instance of this movement is a recent dissertation written by Mark Biernat and approved by the University of Gdansk in 2024. Titled How Wicksell Defined the Natural Rate and How Academic Literature Fragments and Misinterprets It: A Statistical Study, the dissertation tackles the cutting-edge and hotly debated issue of the natural rate of interest, its nature, measurement, and implications for monetary policy. Without delving into the details of the dissertation, it is noteworthy that Austrian economists are liberally cited alongside prominent mainstream economists. Hayek receives 52 citations, Mises, 47, and Rothbard, 10. Contemporary Austrian writers associated with the Mises Institute also receive their share of citations: Joe Salerno, 37; Bob Murphy, 13; Mihai Macovei, 13; and Roger Garrison, 12. Mark Thornton, Thorsten Polleit, and Philipp Bagus and Dave Howden are also cited.
