Cobden Centre readers may want to set their radio clock alarms for 8:30pm on Monday evening, on the 31st of January, when Jamie Whyte takes a look at F A Hayek and the Austrian School, on BBC Radio 4:
My ‘Inner Rothbardian’ quails at that radio station branding a little, but if nobody tells Professor Hoppe then I’ll be able to listen too.
Here’s the BBC’s programme description:
Was the economic crisis caused by fundamental problems with the system rather than a mere failure of policy?
Over two weeks, Analysis investigates two schools of economics with radical solutions.
This week, Jamie Whyte looks at the free market Austrian School of F A Hayek. The global recession has revived interest in this area of economics which many experts and politicians had believed dead and gone. “Austrian” economists focus not on the bust but on the boom that came before it. At the heart of their argument is that low interest rates sent out the wrong signals to investors, causing them to borrow to spend on “malinvestments”, such as overpriced housing. The solution is not for government to fill the gap which private money has now left. Markets work better, Austrians believe, if left alone. Analysis asks how these libertarian economists interpret the state we’re in and why they’re back in fashion. Is it time to reassess one of the defining periods of economic history? Consensus would have it that the Great Depression of the 1930s was brought to an end by Franklin D Roosevelt’s Keynesian policies. But is that right? Jamie Whyte asks whether we’d all have got better quicker with a strong dose of Austrian medicine and whether the same applies now?
