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JUNE, the month of blue skies and roses, is for librarians who teach the end of the teaching year and for younger ones the month of examinations. It is for these and others the real beginning of outdoor library work where it may exist. Unfortunately a few days of beautiful weather early in May were the only adequate evidences of summer warmth to come, and the north‐east winds persist as we write in Southern England. Those who contemplate the open air roof‐top libraries, library gardens with tables and chairs for reading, Story‐hours in the public parks and so many more hopeful activities find this handicap a persistent one. There are, in the average year, very few days that may be given wholly to sedentary outdoor activities and some librarians, we learn, have abandoned official provision for outdoor reading. Private and personal outdoor reading will always continue; there is nothing more delightful. We doubt, however, if nowadays much serious use is made of books outdoors, although we should welcome evidence to the contrary. We are thinking of the general reader. The light romance, the romantic approach to the outdoor world in the modern equivalents of Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson seem more to tune with this part of the year. This, like every general Statement, is subject to many exceptions and the good librarian is alert to every reading possibility of the months. This month sees the annual holidays really begin and with plans for their conclusion in the Annual Meeting of the Library Association in late September at Hastings which we hope will be free from the unpleasant features of the Business Meeting at Llandudno.

The American National Red Cross is in many ways the iconic symbol for disaster response and recovery. The organization, founded in 1881, has a long track record for coming to the aid of those in need in the wake of wars, natural disasters, and other crises. However, in the wake of recent disasters, the Red Cross has been criticized for underperforming. By combining the literature on bureaucracy in Austrian economics and the literature on monocentricity in the work of Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, we provide an analysis of the Red Cross that helps explain the organization’s evolution over time and that also yields implications for disaster management more broadly. Specifically, the Red Cross is a bureaucracy that has become increasingly centralized and rigid as it has become further enmeshed with governmental responsibilities.

Ludwig Lachmann looked to the Austrian School of economics as an intellectual space of refuge from the sterile formalism that constituted the academic work of the mainstream economics establishment. From an early interest in capital theory, he moved to broader epistemological, methodological, and institutional concerns – specifically from the subjectivism of values to the subjectivism of expectations and the implications thereof for human action. Human action in disequilibrium was his central focus. This chapter examines the relationship of Lachmann’s views to the Austrians, those who preceded him, those of his time, and those who have come after him. During his lifetime, his views sometimes provoked controversy. I examine this from the perspective of 2017 and the concerns of the modern Austrian intellectual community and find that Lachmann’s views are surprisingly much more complementary to those of his contemporary Austrians than have perhaps hitherto been realized.

F. A. Hayek’s macroeconomic theory and policy ideas have gained renewed attention since the cheap-money boom until 2007, and subsequent bust, followed the basic Hayekian narrative. Only to a very limited extent, however, do we find Hayek’s ideas on the agenda of mainstream macroeconomic researchers since Robert Lucas’s research program gave way to “Neoclassical” and “New Keynesian” DSGE models. We find examples of deeper interest on the periphery of the mainstream. Hayek’s influence on today’s macroeconomic policy discussions remains similarly limited, although he has become an icon to some opponents of loose monetary policy.

This chapter uses Austrian capital theory to illustrate why empirical work can be elusive in typical Austrian themes. It explores the nature of the problem and different alternative solutions to empirical challenges. This chapter also discusses the Austrian literature’s epistemological approach to empirical work to shed light on the controversial relationship between Austrian theory and empirical testing. Finally, this chapter offers examples of how Austrian and mainstream economics can find a common empirical ground.

This introduction summarizes each of the papers in Studies in Austrian Macroeconomics. It begins with a brief overview of the core ideas and development of modern Austrian macroeconomics, focusing on its theory of the business cycle. The papers are then discussed by parts, starting with the papers on Austrian monetary and business cycle theory, followed by those addressing the relationship between the US and Canadian economic performance, and concluding with the three papers on the political economy of regulation and crisis.

Since Hayek’s pioneering work in the 1930s, the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) has been presented as a disequilibrium theory populated by less-than-perfectly rational agents. In contrast, we maintain that (1) the Austrian business cycle theory is consistent with rational expectations and (2) the post-boom adjustment process can be understood in an equilibrium framework. Hence, we offer a new interpretation of the existing theory. In doing so, we also address concerns raised with Garrison’s (2001) diagrammatic approach, wherein the economy moves beyond the production possibilities frontier. Our interpretation might accurately be described as a monetary disequilibrium approach grounded in an implicit general equilibrium framework with positive costs of reallocation.

Entangled Political Economy, the idea that the economy and the polity are a nexus of interrelations often with unplanned outcomes, is close to the concept of economics that Adam Smith presents, a concept which was not shaped by strict discipline barriers. I show that Adam Smith analyzes the nature and causes of the wealth of nations by analyzing the interaction of the economy with politics, ethics, and the law. In particular, Smith presents each of these systems as a network of relations with all the other systems: the economy is entangled not just with the polity, but also with other systems of behavior such as the law and morality. Adam Smith may help expand the horizons of the entangled political economy analysis and the explanatory powers of economics.

Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or manmade, disasters. Austrian economists have examined the political economy of natural disasters, disaster relief and recovery efforts, the economic effects of extended wars, post-conflict societal reconstitution, and the effectiveness of humanitarian aid. This literature advances two main findings: (1) that centralized governments are likely to be ineffective at providing the goods and services that are necessary for community recovery and (2) that decentralized efforts are better suited to address the needs of society, to discover the best course of action for producing and distributing these goods and services, and to adapt to changing needs, circumstances, and technology. This paper examines the Austrian theories utilized to examine disasters, provides a summary of the recent research on both natural and unnatural disasters, and proposes areas for future research.

Lester and Wolff (2013) find little empirical support for the Austrian business cycle theory. According to their analysis, an unexpected monetary shock does not alter the structure of production in a way consistent with the Austrian view. Rather than increasing production in early and late stages relative to middle stages, they find the opposite – a positive monetary shock typically decreases production in early and late stages relative to middle stages. We argue that the measures of production and prices employed by Lester and Wolff (2013) are constructed in such a way that makes them inappropriate for assessing the empirical relevance of the Austrian business cycle theory’s unique features. After describing how these measures are constructed and why using ratios of stages is problematic, we use a structural vector autoregression to consider the effects of a monetary shock on each stage of the production process. We show that, with a clearer understanding of what is actually being measured by the stage of process data, the results are consistent with (but not exclusive to) the Austrian view.