Later this month is the 50th anniversary of the South Royalton, Vermont conference on Austrian economics. The Liberty Fund asked Richard Ebeling, one of the attendees, to write a long essay, and two people who attended (Me and Mario Rizzo) and one person who didn’t (Geoffrey Lea) wrote responses.
Here is an excerpt of my answer:
Like Richard Ebeling, I had the pleasure of attending the first Austrian Economics conference in South Royalton, Vermont. My motivation was different than Richard’s. I didn’t consider myself an Austrian economist, but I did Friedrich HayekThe work of the socialist accounting debate, and Ludwig von Mises‘ work in general, you have a deep understanding and you are important. I was also a big fan of Hayek The Road to Serfdom, the first Hayek thing I had read. I had read Hayek and Mises in the late 1960s when I was a freshman studying mathematics at the University of Winnipeg. I never studied Austrian economics: everything I studied was on my own. In the fall of 1971, when I applied for a Ph.D. program at UCLA, I knew a lot about UCLA’s strong free market and was looking forward to taking the course Armen Alchian, Harold Demsetz, and Sam Peltzman, three UCLA economists whose work I had studied. Although I knew that none of them were Austrian economists, I hoped that some of them would be sympathetic. So I took a chance on my application letter, writing, “I’d like to be in a graduate program where, when I refer to Mises, people don’t think I’m mispronouncing the name of a childhood disease.” It worked, judging by the result: I was offered full tuition and a 2-year teaching assistant position paying $440 per month for a 9-month year. That was more than this kid from rural Manitoba thought he could get, and, more importantly, more than what I was offered at my second choice, the University of Chicago.
The person who encouraged me to go into economics was Harold Demsetz, whom I met in January 1970, when he gave three lectures at the University of Winnipeg. I was immersed in economics. Although I almost always took Demsetz’s advice—he was my research advisor and mentor—this time I went against his advice. I told him that I had received an offer to attend the South Royalton conference at someone else’s expense, and the program looked interesting. The three main speakers were Murray RothbardIsrael Kirzner, and Ludwig Lachmann. I had read, and was impressed by, a lot of Rothbard Man, Economy, and State. Demsetz’s friend and colleague Ben Klein had offered Israel Kirzner’s Competition and Entrepreneurship in his industrial organization class earlier that year. Although I don’t recall Klein saying why he liked the book, I think one reason was that Kirzner rejected the idea that perfect competition was related to perfection. I remember that Ben liked the concept of dynamic competition that Kirzner, and Austrians in general, brought to the economic debate.
So I was surprised that Demsetz discouraged me from going to the South Royalton event. He told me that, now that my academic work was over, I should quickly dig out my book. But I needed a break after two tough years, and this “rider vacation” was just what the doctor ordered. I probably hit a thousand on Demsetz’s advice: to take it from all other matters and refuse it in this one. The conference was worth it.
Don’t miss the part of my story about Frances Hazlitt’s comments on Milton Friedman.
Pictured are, from left to right, Harry Watson, Milton Friedman, Jerry O’Driscoll, Jack High, and Richard Ebeling.
A personal note: I had a big medical exam yesterday. The results were dire; I don’t really like the word “negative” as I hear it from doctors. I was sweating the test on Monday and Tuesday morning and had a test on Tuesday afternoon. Hence the absence of blog posts on Monday and Tuesday.
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