Hall, Mary. “The Austrian School of Economics .” Investopedia, Dotdash, 24 Jan. 2018, http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/austrian-school-of-economics.asp.
Summary: In the last post I talked about how Neoclassicalism is widely regarded as too simple to be accurate. But, there is a school of thought that humans are much too complicated to understand, and creating complex mathematical models only serves to confuse the issue. Instead, simple observations will lead to a good understanding of the economy.
This idea results in the Austrian school of thought. Instead of doing math, experiments, or even rigorous observation, they had a strategy of reasoning aloud in order to determine what was and wasn’t true. Although this didn’t work very well, and the Austrian school no longer really exists, they were the first to realize that the value of goods or services was truly subjective.
For example, one important classical idea was that of the gold standard for money. The Classicalists believed that value was inherent to an object, and so for paper money to have value it must be linked to something with inherent value, gold. The Austrians rejected this idea, and instead said that something was worth as much as someone was willing to pay for it.
Analysis: The Austrian school is interesting because of its radical simplicity, as well as the many innovative ideas it had, many of which have gone on to influence Neokeynesian and Monetarist schools of thought.
I still need a picture for this post, and this topic is very difficult to find images for, so here’s a picture from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School showing how the Austrians believed price is determined, not intrinsic: ![]()