More Horwitz Now Available Online

Before our thousands of devoted female readers get too excited, it's just more of my work that's now available.

I spent the afternoon scanning and uploading some old published papers of mine, most of them from the 1995-1998 period, including my 1996 JHET piece on monetary equilibrium theory and the ensuing exchange with Allin Cottrell, my 1998 HOPE piece on Mises and monetary calculation, and my feminism and Austrian economics paper from 1995, as well as some other goodies.  I will be adding a few more later this week. You can find everything I have posted on line listed here.  Enjoy (and Go Wings!).

Comments

[Sinclair Davidson]

Thanks for that. Just yesterday I wanted to download your feminism piece, only to discover our subscription started the next year.

[matthew mueller]

Thanks Dr. Horwitz,

All of this looks really great. I look forward to reading the essays on feminist economics and monetary disequilibrium. I would encourage all of the readers of this blog to read the great debate between Hill and Horwitz in Critical Review. I wasn't aware that Horwitz wrote an additonal reply to Hill's rejoinder! I am going to read that now. But beware: As Garrison himself noted in a reply piece to Hill, if you are on the fence of post-Keynesian and Austrian economics, DO NOT read Greg Hill. He will turn you into a Shacklian (Chapter 12 Keynesian). I made the mistake of reading Greg Hill before coming across Garrison's warning. Now I cannot help but read any piece of Austrian literaure through the sceptical lense of Shacklian uncertainty and discoordination.

Anyway, thanks for posting all this up!

I also would like to see Dr. Horwitz put all this together in a book. This also goes to Dr. Rizzo. I think Austrian economics desperately needs Rizzo's several essays collected into one book.

[Lee Ann]

De-lurking to say that I loved the first line. It made me smile *before* coffee and that's tough!

[Steven Horwitz]

Matt,

In scanning all this stuff, I had the same thought. I really need to get an edited collection together.

[Steven Horwitz]

And Lee Ann... I knew the women were out there lurking! ;)

[Dain]

The paper on Austrianism and Feminism was very interesting. It sort of boiled down to the more general dichotomy between scientism and subjectivism, or the skepticism of the universally applicable ideal type economic actor.

At the end of the paper Horowitz writes that Austrianism can positively critique feminist prescriptions, but I'm not sure that Austrian inspired input would actually deviate much from a neoclassical one for the intents and purposes of a feminist view toward policy. I'm quite sure that Chicago School criticism of the solution to the "glass ceiling", for instance, would not be too dissimilar to that of the Austrians.

So after the differing approach to epistemology, the idea of "natural monopolies", etc. are explained to feminists, what is it that feminists should find appealing in Austrianism to distinguish it from Milton Friedman and the like?

Roderick Long has discussed how, if anything, Austrian insights on the difficulty of rationally calculating marginal productivity actually make the case for the free market somewhat weaker from a minority perspective. If the cost of pinpointing any one minority's benefit to a firm are greater than simply yielding to popular prejudice and short-cut cultural heuristics, then they are likely to be overlooked.

[Steven Horwitz]

Well Dain, I think if a sufficiently open-minded feminist read McCloskey's *The Bourgeois Virtues*, he or she might see how a more Austrian vision of the market might be more consistent with important feminist principles. I'd like to think someone might say the same about the work I'm currently doing on the family.

If nothing else, the point is to take feminists at their word: if what they dislike about mainstream economics is its philosophy of science/methodology and not just the policy prescriptions they claim it offers, then they should be much more open to Austrian approaches, if what we do is closer to how they understand knowledge and the human sciences. If they aren't, then we need to figure out why. If it's because they don't like our policy conclusions, then it is THEIR problem not ours. Their own insincerity will be made obvious in a way the mainstream could not.

Is feminist economics genuinely a different way to approach economics or is it a series of policy conclusions in search of a theory and a philosophy of science to justify it? Knowing what a feminist economist thinks of modern, sophisticated Austrian economics might help answer that question.

[Robert]

My name links to a post in which I point out that in arguing with Hill, Horwitz is completely wrong. Maybe I'll read Hill sometime in the future.