The Austrian school is a heterodox school of economic thought that advocates strict adherence to methodological individualism, the concept that social phenomena result primarily from the motivations and actions of individuals along with their self interest. Austrian-school theorists hold that economic theory should be exclusively derived from basic principles of human action.
Friedrich August von Hayek, often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-born British academic who contributed to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize. He was a major contributor to the Austrian school of economics.
Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a former contributor to the Freakonomics blog and EconLog. He currently publishes his own blog, Bet on It. Caplan is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, or Mises Institute, is a nonprofit think tank headquartered in Auburn, Alabama, that is a center for Austrian economics, right-wing libertarian thought and the paleolibertarian and anarcho-capitalist movements in the United States. It is named after the economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and promotes the Misesian version of heterodox Austrian economics.
The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) is a non-profit organization that promotes the teaching and research of classical liberalism in higher education in the United States. IHS offers funding opportunities, programs, and events for faculty and graduate students seeking careers in academia as well as various fellowships.
Spontaneous order, also named self-organization in the hard sciences, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. The term "self-organization" is more often used for physical changes and biological processes, while "spontaneous order" is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders in human social networks from the behavior of a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. Proposed examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order or self-organization include the evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet, Wikipedia, and free market economy.
Thomas Gordon Palmer is an American libertarian author and theorist, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Network.
Burton W. Folsom Jr. is an American historian and author who held the Charles F. Kline chair in history and management at Hillsdale College from 2003 until his retirement in December 2016.
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is an American conservative, libertarian economic think tank. Founded in 1946 in New York City, FEE is now headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a member of the State Policy Network.
Armen Albert Alchian was an American economist who made major contributions to microeconomic theory and the theory of the firm. He spent almost his entire career at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is credited with turning its economics department into one of the country's best. He is also known as one of the founders of new institutional economics, and widely acknowledged for his work on property rights.
The Mercatus Center is an American libertarian, free-market-oriented non-profit think tank. The Mercatus Center is located at the George Mason University campus, however the organization is privately funded and its employees are independent of the university. It is directed by Benjamin Klutsey and its board is chaired by American economist Tyler Cowen. The Center works with policy experts, lobbyists, and government officials to connect academic learning with real-world practice. Taking its name from the Latin word for market, the center advocates free-market approaches to public policy. During the George W. Bush administration's campaign to reduce government regulation, The Wall Street Journal reported, "14 of the 23 rules the White House chose for its 'hit list' to eliminate or modify were Mercatus entries".
George Selgin is an American economist. He is Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he is editor-in-chief of the center's blog, Alt-M, Professor Emeritus of economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. Selgin formerly taught at George Mason University, the University of Hong Kong, and West Virginia University.
Russell David "Russ" Roberts is an American-born Israeli economist. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. He is known for communicating economic ideas in understandable terms as host of the EconTalk podcast.
Robert A. Levy is chairman emeritus of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC. He was co-counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court case establishing a Second Amendment individual right to gun ownership. Levy also organized and financed the Heller litigation. Before becoming a lawyer, he was the founder and CEO of CDA Investment Technologies.
Steven G. Horwitz was an American economist of the Austrian School. Horwitz was the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the department of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 2017, he retired as the Dana Professor of Economics Emeritus at St. Lawrence University.
Charles de Ganahl Koch is an American billionaire businessman. As of February 2024, he was ranked as the 23rd richest man in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated net worth of $64.9 billion. Koch has been co-owner, chairman, and chief executive officer of Koch Industries since 1967, while his late brother David Koch served as executive vice president. Charles and David each owned 42% of the conglomerate. The brothers inherited the business from their father, Fred C. Koch, then expanded the business. Koch Industries is the largest privately held company by revenue in the United States, according to Forbes.
Ronald Hamowy was a Canadian academic, known primarily for his contributions to political and social academic fields. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus of intellectual history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Hamowy was closely associated with the political ideology of libertarianism and his writings and scholarship place particular emphasis on individual liberty and the limits of state action in a free society. He is associated with a number of prominent American libertarian organizations.
Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter is a 2013 book from Stanford University Press by George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. Somin argues that people are ignorant and irrational about politics and that this creates problems for democracy. He further claims that this consideration argues in favor of smaller and more decentralized government.
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World is a 2010 book by economist and social theorist Deirdre McCloskey that is the second of a three-book series laying out the thesis that a change in the rhetoric surrounding the value of business, innovation, and entrepreneurship was the main factor responsible for the takeoff of economic growth in Northwest Europe in the late 18th century. Bourgeois Dignity focuses on arguing that there was a fairly significant and unprecedented takeoff of economic growth, and that existing explanations for this takeoff are inadequate. McCloskey provides a rough outline for why she thinks that the changes in rhetoric surrounding the dignity of business and markets were crucial, but leaves the elaborate case for later books in the series.
The decoupling of median wages from productivity, sometimes known as the great decoupling, is the gap between the growth rate of median wages and the growth rate of GDP per person or productivity. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee highlighted this problem toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This problem furthermore leads to wage stagnation for the median despite continued economic growth overall. Mathematically, if inequality grows, then top incomes and total income can increase even if median income is relatively stagnant.
