Abstract
A history of economic thought perspective on The Economics of Time and Ignorance reveals that the book rehabilitates some major themes in the Austrian tradition that were all but lost subsequent to the formalist revolution in economics that took place in the middle of the twentieth-century. The book also anticipates some important ideas that were extended and applied in Austrian economics after it was first published. Reviews have claimed that the book was a “classic” and also “original”. The book is too close in a temporal sense to judge whether or not future generations will canonize it as a “classic”. Using Stigler’s criteria as to what constitutes scientific “originality”, it is concluded that, taken as a whole, the book was not original. From the vantage point of the overall discipline of economics, it was a work advancing controversial ideas that would not easily change the beliefs, practices and interests of economists in general but it offered sound reasons for taking the Austrian thought-trajectory more seriously. It would be more fitting to view the authors as providers of many innovations contributing to the mature Austrian economics of the twenty-first century.
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Notes
Morgenstern (1972b: 1178) was still drawing attention to the problem in the 1970s; economists, he maintained, had not produced any “clarity and explicit recognition of time, information and expectations” (considered as an interrelated whole).
Otherwise, in a book entitled “Handbook on Contemporary Austrian Economics” ETI does not rate further mention in any of the other essays in the “Handbook”.
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I am obliged to David Harper and Christine Woods for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Endres, A.M. Is the economics of time and ignorance a “classic”?. Rev Austrian Econ 26, 17–25 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-012-0176-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-012-0176-6