A Decade of SDAE Presidential Address

|Peter Boettke|

The Society for the Development of Austrian Economics was founded in the 1990s, while I was still an assistant professor.  At the time when Karen Vaughn spearheaded the organizational effort, you could count about 20-25 professional academic economists who were self-identified and active in teaching and researching, and probably less than a handful were located in PhD granting institutions.  The location in PhD granting institutions matters greatly for any scientific or scholarly endeavor because it permits graduate students to work in their chosen area of research from the "Austrian" perspective.  Remember, "Austrian" in my use of the term has little to do with location, and even less to do with ideological conclusions, and everything to do with methodological principles and analytical approaches (which I think also impacts choice of empirical methods though that is more contested).

The SDAE over the last decade has highlighted the contribution of the emerging generation of scholars making contributions to the related but distinct disciplines of economics and political economy. Here are the Presidents listed chronologically.

Anthony M. Carilli (2010)

• "Qui docet discit," The Review of Austrian Economics, 24: 327-333 (2011)

Richard E. Wagner (2011)

• "Viennese kaleidics: Why it’s liberty more than policy that calms turbulence," The Review of Austrian Economics, 25(4): 283-297 (2012)

David A. Harper (2012)

• "Property rights as a complex adaptive system: how entrepreneurship transforms intellectual property structure," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 24(2): 335-355 (2014)

Lawrence H. White (2013)

• "'Austerian' economics: Does the Vienna school favor fiscal deficit reduction even in a subpar economy?" The Review of Austrian Economics, 27(4): 351-358 (2014)

Christopher J. Coyne (2014)

• "Lobotomizing the defense brain," The Review of Austrian Economics, 28(4): 371-396 (2015)

Benjamin Powell (2015)

• "The economics of immigration: An Austrian contribution," The Review of Austrian Economics, 29(4): 343-349 (2016)

Edward Stringham (2016)

• "The fable of the leeches, or: The single most unrealistic positive assumption of most economists," The Review of Austrian Economics, 30(4): 401-413 (2017)

Diana Thomas (2017)

• “A process perspective on regulation: Who bears the dispersed costs of regulation?,” The Review of Austrian Economics, 31(4): 395-402 (2018)

Andrew Young (2018)

• “How Austrians can contribute to constitutional political economy (and why they should),” The Review of Austrian Economics, 1-13 (online first October 2019)

Claudia Williamson (2019)

(will be published in 2020)

 

This provides a good sampling of where many of those interested in pursuing methodological individualism, subjectivism, and process theorizing found themselves in the past decade.  I am excited to see where the next decade of research brings us.  And also discover, not only honor the old teachers, or even the students of those teachers, or the students of those students of those teachers, the next generation of teachers, scholars, and intellectual entrepreneurs which will move this scientific tradition forward in the 21st century.