The Austrian School on Money and Gold

Abstract

Austrian views on money and the gold standard are consonant with the general characteristics of the school. First, Austrians are concerned with the complete picture, with how a whole economic system and alternative sets of institutions function. They are alert to the question of unplanned order and of how the decentralised decisions and specialised activities of millions of people can mesh without central planning. They investigate how the market and prices function as a vast communications system and computer, transmitting information and incentives and so enlisting knowledge scattered over many millions of minds that would otherwise necessarily go to waste. They recognise why accurate economic calculation is impossible under socialism. Second, the Austrians appreciate the implications of incomplete, imperfect and scattered knowledge and also the implications of change and unpredictability in human affairs. They pay attention to disequilibrium, to processes as well as end positions, and to entrepreneurial altertness and creativity. Instead of supposing, for example, that cost curves and demand curves are somehow “given” to business decision makers, they recognise it as one of the functions of the competitive process to press for discovery of ways to get the cost curves down — if one speaks of such curves at all. Third, Austrians have certain methodological predilections. They reject the tacit view of economic activity as the result of interplay among objective conditions and impersonal forces. They take pains to trace their analyses back to the subjective perceptions, decisions and actions of individuals trying to cope with a complex and unpredictably changeable world; they recognise introspection as one legitimate source of the facts underpinning economic theory. (While thus practising methodological individualism, they do not subordinate the big question of system‐wide co‐ordination to an excessively narrow focus on the administration of individual firms and households.) Finally, although Austrians like to think of their economics as value‐free and not logically tied to any particular policy position, their insights into positive economics, coupled with plausible value judgements of a humanitarian and individualistic nature, undeniably do lead them to favour free markets.

Citation

Yeager, L.B. (1988), "The Austrian School on Money and Gold", Journal of Economic Studies, Vol. 15 No. 3/4, pp. 92-105. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb002673