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The chapter argues that, for the long-term successful survival of the Austrian School as a distinct school of thought, the work on the theory must not be sacrificed in the name of short-term success in producing applied pieces of scholarship and of communicating with the mainstream. Advances in modern work in pure theory and methodology provide a necessary glue connecting individual pieces of applied research – and the debates about boundaries of the school contribute toward the reappraisal of Austrian School identity.

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of the Austrian school of economics, with specific emphasis on post-WWII developments. We provide a brief history and overview of the original theorists of the Austrian school in order to set the stage for the subsequent development of their ideas by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. In discussing the main ideas of Mises and Hayek, we focus on how their work provided the foundations for the modern Austrian school, which included Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. These scholars contributed to the Austrian revival in the 1960s and 1970s, which, in turn, set the stage for the emergence of the contemporary Austrian school in the 1980s. We review the contemporary development of the Austrian school and, in doing so, discuss the tensions, alternative paths, and the promising future of Austrian economics.

In general, the term “Austrian Economics” has been used both descriptively and normatively. It has either designated a set of ideas about the fundamental nature of economic theory and its logical implications or it has been viewed as a conception of society and the market with certain policy implications concerning the limits to and dangers from government intervention and control.

This chapter focuses on teaching practices used in multigrade classes and the importance of them being incorporated in teacher education as promising pedagogies for future use. Multigrade classes – defined as classes in which two or more grades are taught together – are common worldwide. Hence, there is a need for teacher candidates to become familiar with how to teach in split grade classrooms. However, research on multigrade teaching as well as its development in teacher education studies has been neglected, even though multigrade teachers need special skills to organize instruction in their heterogeneous classrooms. We argue that in successful multigrade teaching practices, the heterogeneity of students is taken into account and cultivated. Based on content analysis of teacher interviews conducted in Austrian and Finnish primary schools, we recommend teaching practices such as spiral curricula, working plans, and peer learning as promising teacher education pedagogies for future multigrade class teaching. We also suggest that the professional skills required in high-quality teaching practices in multigrade teaching should be further studied by researchers and educators.

This is a, somewhat indirect, rejoinder to Boettke (2019, this volume, Chapter 1). Doing Austrian economics is low prestige: Austrian economics does not get published in high-prestige journals and Austrian economists are not employed by top universities. And yet, up until World War II Austrian economics was an important part of the international economics community. The author argues that Austrian economists made several theoretical innovations that could have placed them at the frontier of research in economics, and present a brief counterfactual history of a thriving Austrian economics based on those innovations. However, the actual history of the Austrian School is quite different. A particularly decisive factor that has made Austrian economics a fringe movement was the rejection of formal methods in theory and empirics. The author argues that Austrian economics is basically dying out as a voice in the conversation of modern economists.

The papers collected here were written for the second biennial Wirth conference on Austrian Economics. The Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies sponsored the conference in cooperation with the University of Toronto in Mississauga. The conference was held from 17 to 18 October 2008 in Mississauga. The Wirth Institute has a natural home in Edmonton on the campus of the University of Alberta, which is a leading center for Central European Studies. The fact that the Institute has received support not only from government of Austria, but also from the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia reflects its historically minded recognition of the unique intellectual milieu of the Habsburg Empire. This intellectual milieu lasted beyond the breakup of the empire right through to the Anschluss in 1938. It is this milieu that shaped the Austrian school of economics and helped shape the context for the conference.

This chapter argues that if Austrian economics is to attain the influence, impact, and esteem enjoyed by comparable traditions, it cannot continue to produce research that only and always reaches free market conclusions. While the foundational principles of Austrian economics are incompatible with socialism, this does not settle every policy question in favor of laissez-faire. Factors such as historical circumstances and the particularities of local contexts should lead Austrians to take seriously some arguments in favor of government intervention. Freed from its ideological shackles, Austrian economics can provide a powerful toolkit for positive, scientific research addressing the most important questions in contemporary political economy.

For nearly 80 years, the field of macroeconomics has largely been shaped by the aftermath of the Keynesian revolution. Many economists have argued that this revolution and the subsequent internal and external disputes it has sparked have had the unfortunate side effect of crowding out much of what was good in macro-level analysis before it, leading to the dissatisfactory state of macroeconomics we have today. In the search for alternative paths for macroeconomics, I focus on two separate but compatible traditions: monetary disequilibrium (MD) theory and the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). I argue that scholars in these traditions employed a far richer micro-theoretic explanation for the business cycle well before Keynes’s General Theory. Unfortunately, their ideas were not united in time to mount a sufficient counterattack to the Keynesian crusade. My goal is to unite the best elements of these two traditions by providing what I believe is the “missing link” that can help connect these alternative paths: free banking theory.

The author presents a comparative study of the three evolutionary economic schools, namely the Austrians, neo-Schumpeterians, and institutionalists. The comparison is based on an analysis of nine basic features of the evolutionary process and evolutionary approach, including a dynamical view of economic phenomena (seen from a historical perspective), a focus on far-from-equilibrium analysis, a proper and realistic perception of time, and a population perspective (to what extent emergent properties are results of interaction among economic agents). The relevant features of the evolutionary process are the heterogeneity and behavior of economic agents, the search for novelty based on a concept of economic agents’ hereditary information, a selection process (based on the concept of rivalry), spontaneity of development, and the presence of decision-making procedures (how economic agents make decisions, and to what extent their subjective values play a role). The goal of the comparative analysis is to estimate the level of “evolutionary content” of the three schools. My subjective evaluation suggests that only the Austrian school can be called entirely evolutionary. Slightly less evolutionary are the neo-Schumpeterians, and the least evolutionary are the institutionalists.

Roger Koppl (2009, p. 1) argues that “Austrian economics is a school of thought within the broader complexity movement in economics.” Is he correct? Although there are many who have argued for some overlapping between the two, I shall argue that this is probably an overly strong statement. The main reason is that there are substantial elements and strands within Austrian economics that do not fit in with any of the multiple varieties of complexity theory, even though there are some that clearly do.