Later this month will mark the 50th anniversary of the Austrian Economic Conference in South Royalton, Vermont. Liberty Fund asked Richard Ebeling, one of the participants, to write the long essay, and then two people who were present (Mario Rizzo and me) and one person who did not (Geoffrey Lea) wrote their responses .
Here is an excerpt from my response:
Like Richard Ebeling, I was delighted to attend the first Austrian Economics Conference in South Royalton, Vermont. My motivation was different from Richard’s. I didn’t consider myself an Austrian economist, but I found Frédéric Hayekthe work of on the debate on socialist calculation, and Ludwig von Mises‘ work more generally, deeply insightful and important. I was also a big fan of Hayek The road to serfdom, the first thing by Hayek I had read. I had read Hayek and Mises in the late 1960s, when I was a young undergraduate mathematics student at the University of Winnipeg. I never took an Austrian economics course: I did all my reading on my own. In the fall of 1971, when I applied for the Ph.D. program at UCLA, I knew a lot about UCLA’s strong free-market orientation and looked forward to taking courses in Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, and Sam Peltzman, the three UCLA economists whose work I had read. Although I knew that none of them were Austrian economists, I hoped that some of them would be friendly. So I took a chance in my application letter, writing: “I would like to participate in a graduate program in which, if I refer to Mises, people do not assume that I am mispronouncing Mises’s name.” a childhood illness. It worked, if you judge by the result: I was offered full tuition plus a 2-year teaching assistant position paying $440 per month for 9 months per year. It was more than this rural Manitoba kid had imagined he could get and, more importantly, more than I was offered at my second choice, the University of Chicago.
The person who motivated me to get into economics was Harold Demsetz, whom I met in January 1970, when he was giving three lectures at the University of Winnipeg. I was addicted to economics. Although I almost always followed Demsetz’s advice – he was my thesis advisor and mentor – in this case I went against his advice. I told him I had received an offer to attend the South Royalton conference on someone else’s dime and that the program sounded interesting. The three main speakers were Murray RothbardIsrael Kirzner and Ludwig Lachmann. I had read and been impressed by much of Rothbard’s writing. Man, the economy and the State. Demsetz’s friend and colleague, Ben Klein, told Israel Kirzner Competition and entrepreneurship in his industrial organization class earlier that year. Although I don’t remember Klein explaining why he liked the book, I think one reason was that Kirzner rejected the idea that perfect competition had anything to do with perfection. I remember Ben liking the idea of dynamic, evolving competition that Kirzner, and Austrians in general, brought refreshingly to the economic debate.
So I was surprised that Demsetz discouraged me from going to the South Royalton event. He told me that now that my classes were over, I should immediately start working on my thesis. But I needed a break after two intense years, and this “busman vacation” seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. I probably struck a thousand on Demsetz’s advice: accept him on all other questions and reject him on this one. The conference was worth it.
Don’t miss the part of my essay on Frances Hazlitt’s comment to Milton Friedman.
Pictured are, from left, Harry Watson, Milton Friedman, Jerry O’Driscoll, Jack High and Richard Ebeling.
Note to self: I had a major medical exam yesterday. The results were negative; I never like the word “negative” more than when I hear it from doctors. I was sweating during the test Monday and Tuesday morning and took the test Tuesday afternoon. Hence the absence of blog posts on Monday and Tuesday.
