Talk:Austrian business cycle theory/Archives/2012/September

A few possible avenues of improvement

1. Laidler, a highly reliable source, spends a whole chapter on ABCT. His book should not be cited once only.
2. Similarly, Tyler Cowen's Risk and Business Cycles: New and Old Austrian Perspectives is published by a major academic press (Routledge) and needs to be mined for information.
3. Rothbard writes in Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure that the theory originated with David Hume and David Ricardo. A subsection of "History" could be written about business cycle theories in classical economics saying that Austrians draw the theory's history back to them, although the article should NOT say that this is the early history of the theory unless Rothbard also made that claim in a peer-reviewed publication—that would give him undue weight against Laidler, who says it has its roots in Wicksell. Hülsmann's biography of Mises is written and published by sources associated with the subject, but should be checked for information on prior economists whose work on business cycles influenced Mises.
4. The article needs a few graphs and possibly photos of Mises and Hayek for illustration.

- Cal Engime (talk) 02:17, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Good points. Byelf2007 (talk) 6 September 2012

Cal (User:Cengime) you're welcome to be bold. You sound like you know more about these things than we do. So go ahead. II | (t - c) 06:03, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Mises originated the theory, not Hayek

While some of the basic ideas in ABCT can be traced to David Ricardo, the credit for originating the complete theory goes to Ludwig von Mises, in his treatise "Theory of Money and Credit". Hayek was a student of Mises at Vienna, and learned the theory there. Later Hayek went to London, and can be credited with introducing the Austrian theory to the English speaking world. 76.170.147.37 (talk) 06:11, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

It is generally agreed among scholar of economics that ABCT was created by/started with Hayek. Mises laid some of the groundwork, yes, some of his positions are in ABCT, but Hayek completed the argument (at least in its first form) by creating a complete picture/explaining the 'triangle' of production, etc. Mises basically talked about how artificially low interest rates would lead to malinvestment, but it wasn't the complete theory. Byelf2007 (talk) 20 September 2012

Murray Rothbard credits Mises. Theory of Money and Credit contains all of the pillars of ABCT. Mises was using ABCT to successfully predict the great depression during the 1920's, when Hayek will still his pupil. The political motivation for crediting Hayek is that it allows for ignoring Mises' predictions, which constitute great empirical evidence in support of ABCT. 76.170.147.37 (talk) 18:31, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

"Murray Rothbard credits Mises". Are you implying that's enough to say Mises started it?

"Theory of Money and Credit contains all of the pillars of ABCT." I'm not sure if that's true--you'd have to demonstrate it. Part of the problem is that there's no general consensus on the precise definition of 'ABCT'. However, it is a commonplace belief that Hayek got the Nobel prize in economics for his "work on ABCT" (implying ABCT didn't quite exist until his work on malinvestment/central banking).

"using ABCT to successfully predict" ABCT as what definition?

"when Hayek will still his pupil." That's not relevant.

"The political motivation for crediting Hayek is that it allows for ignoring Mises' predictions, which constitute great empirical evidence in support of ABCT." This is just a reassertion of your opinion, albeit of a conspiracy theory stripe.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your opinion--it's just my present understanding based on what I've read that according to most economics scholars that ABCT originated w/ Hayek. What we should do in go over what just about every notable economics scholar has to say about it, and come to a conclusion. It may be something like "it's hard to say who started it, because it's hard to say what ABCT is (precisely) and when it came to fruition (precisely), but basically, it's started by Mises or Hayek". Another issue is if they have any disagreements about malinvestment/central banking issues (I'm not sure). Saying "Rothbard says so" isn't enough (although it's certainly relevant to our discerning a good answer to this question). Byelf2007 (talk) 27 September 2012