Are You an Austrian?

Ludwig von Mises Institute ^

[logician2u]

Are You an Austrian?

Take the following quiz of 25 questions on economic issues (or go to truncated 10-question version). Click on the answer that most describes your view. You must answer all 25. Submit your quiz, and get your score emailed to you. There will be no follow up emails. (Q&A prepared with the assistance of Randall Holcombe, Peter G. Klein, Robert Murphy, D.W. MacKenzie, Joseph Stromberg, and Mark Thornton&?none of whom bear final responsibility for the answers.)

The method and scoring of the quiz will be revealed once you submit your answers. Essential sources for understanding the Austrian School intellectual framework are the Ten Must Haves from the Mises Institute catalog and the Austrian Study Guide. (Professors who want to use a version of this quiz in their classroom can email quiz manager.)

[Liberal Classic]

Your score is: 90 out of 100.

The few questions I answered 'incorrectly' were of the Chicago School.

[logician2u]

Congratulations!

Were you an econ major, or did you find Austrian economics apart from school?

(As for myself, Henry Hazlitt gave me my first taste of it - in Newsweek, of all places. That was in the olden days when "conservatives" were out of favor and the word libertarian hadn't been invented.)

[Liberal Classic]

So, you scored 102? :)

[logician2u]

84% is nothing to be embarassed about.

From your profile, I would deduce that you are somewhat versed in the principles of a free market.

Have you looked into Austrian economics?

[logician2u]

Too much Friedman, then.

He was one of my heroes until I learned about his role in justifying income tax witholding during WWII.

A "temporary," wartime measure we are stuck with in perpetuity or until hell freezes over.

[thrcanbonly1]

Your score is: 94 out of 100.

Each question is followed by an Austrian School answer (4 points), a Chicago School answer (2 points), a Keynesian-Neoclassical School answer (1 point), and a Socialist answer (no points)--all broadly defined.

[yatros from flatwater]

One ought to remember that not all Austrians are alike. Some "Austrians" believe in the supremacy of state interests over private property and some the opposite. Herr Schickelgruber fell in the former category and Herr von Mises in the latter. The Austrian School of Economics, like the signers of the Declaration of Independence, put property rights foremost.

Given his economic adviser, Mr. Buffet, it would seem that Herr Schwarzenegger favors state control over private property, und zich?

[sourcery]

Thanks for the ping!

[logician2u]

The general cause is human psychology.

No doubt that's a factor which affects the depth of recessions and the height of booms, but let's be more specific: People feel a lot better if they have money in the bank, more like spending it.

When the fed pumps up the money supply and everyone has that warm-all-over feeling they spend it on new cars, new houses, wide-screen TVs, etc.

When the fed contracts, as they always must to keep the dollar worth something on the world market, people stop spending quite so extravagantly. But factories are geared up to produce more and more, because a false signal was given that told businessmen and investors that good times would go on forever.

That disconnect is psychological but it's also a monetary phenomenon.

[Agnes Heep]

Have you looked into Austrian economics?

I wasn't even aware that such a thing existed. It looks a lot like monetarism combined with libertarianism--sound stuff, as far as I can tell.

[Eärendil]

The fact that what you freely choose to do for your own benefit happens to also benefit someone else does not give you a valid lien on the property of the unintended beneficiary. The converse is that the needs of others do not justify a lien on your property. The two principles intrinsically go together. You can't have one without the other, without logical contradiction, because the two principles are really just different sides of the same coin. The idea that one person's needs form a valid claim on the life, liberty and property of others is, of course, the fundamental tenet of socialism.

[Liberal Classic]

We should know empirically that the government tends to not give up an authority once it has been granted it. :)

[Rifleman]

Electrical Engineering degree. I read _Human Action_ (honest, cover to cover) just after graduating. Also, _Socialism_. His ideas had a HUGE effect on me.

I think that one of Mises most interesting insights is that, a socialist system, to replace the calculations that the market provides would need to create a system of partial differential equations that by their nature are not, in general, solvable (being nonlinear and all) and far to big to calculate via numerical methods. Modern computers might have solved that, but it turns out that you can't calculate solutions anyway because the model will be, like weather models, sensitive to initial conditions and will diverge from reality too quickly to be of any use.

Without this calculation, a planned system will ALWAYS be enormously less efficient than a market system. So socialism isn't just wrong and oppressive, but a guarenteed failure as well.

[Rifleman]

So, you scored 102? :)

HA! Good one.

[MattAMiller]

I got a 62 with mostly Chicago School answers. I'm actually kind of suprised I managed as much consistency as I did, and understood as much of the answers as I did. I'm a sophistimacated economic thinker I am.

[johnb838]

No Worries, mate. Too Right, Oy'm an Austrian. Throw another shrimp on the Barbie, eh?

[Consort]

Are you an Astrian?

[Rifleman]

Unless you have actually read quite a bit of Von Mises, the differences between Chicago and Austrian are pretty subtle. And the Misean statement of a problem will read stilted and doctrinaire unless you have been introduced to his prose style.

In any case, give 'em a real problem to address and the two schools will _usually_ produce very similar answers.

[Starwind]

Are you qualified to be Fed Chairman?

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

It gave me an 83, but one of the non Austrian answers should have been Austrian except the button selection changed on a down arrow. So that should have been a higher score. All my other answers were Chicago, which I never heard of before, and on question nineteen Free trade/globalism, there was no answer that I agreed with at all.