Volume 3, No. 1 (Spring 2000)
Persons with an Austrian perspective must evaluate the probability that an Austrian message will reduce their publication chances in mainstream journals. Since historically the discrimination against Austrian scholarship has been high, a new Austrian academic infrastructure has emerged. We have a Dual Academy: mainline journals and universities, and an alternative Austrian–classical liberal research and teaching infrastructure. Institutions evolve to meet needs prompted by human action. Very often today, the costs of publication to the author are increased by the convention of making editorial decisions by groups of persons. One has to satisfy not one editor, but a group of scholars. Presumably this is done to assure quality control, and to balance the supply and demand for papers using non-price methods. While this raises the cost of publication in general, it particularly hurts those whose ideas deviate from the ideological mainstream, including Austrian economists. This, has led to the Dual Academy. As the Internet and other forms of electronic communication grow, it may well be that the conventional modes of communication (academic journals and university classrooms) may lose some of their importance. While much Internet academic discourse is qualitatively lacking, at least it is not censored. The Austrian infrastructure and technological change, then, have reduced the ability of mainstream economists to submerge views that vary dramatically from their own perspective on the world. This bodes well for the
continued growth in the early twenty-first century in the Austrian “market share” in the world of ideas.
