The Austrian Economists are gone…Long live Austrian economics!

The Austrian Economists blog has changed its name to Coordination Problem. From time to time various name changes for Austrian economics have been considered, for example “evolutionary economics”. This change of course only applies to the name of the blog and the linguistic usage of the speople who post on it.

The problem is that Austrian economics and the names of  von Mises and Hayek in particular are overwhelmingly associated with ideology, not scholarship and science. That applies even in the profession.

These trends are not recent, but have been constant throughout our respective careers.  We have always been among those who attempted to offer resistance to this use of the term.  It has become evident to us that our efforts have been futile.  Rather than resist the pure ideological identification, we are choosing to devote our efforts elsewhere.  The name Austrian economics has been lost as a focal point for a tradition of economic scholarship, and is now a focal point for something else.  We have to let it go.

This follows hard on the heels of a move to get away from the term “capitalism” to speak in less ideologically loaded terms about the market order, free trade and the classical liberal agenda.

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