The genre of introductions to Austrian economics has always been a troublesome one. Leaping right into the core books of the school has frequently been a problem for non-specialists. Thankfully, the last decade or so has seen several attempts to fill this gap, and all five of the books I’ll discuss below are worth your time for different reasons. My list proceeds from the most “introductory” to the least and tries to provide a sense of their differences and their appropriateness for different audiences.
Howard Baetjer, Free our Markets, 2013. Written for the most general of readers, this book uses Austrian insights, ably presented for newbies in the first few chapters, as a framework for analyzing a variety of economic policies, including a whole section in the 2008 financial crisis. Baetjer’s goal is clearly ideological, as the title suggests, but the book does serve as a very effective introduction to a handful of foundational Austrian ideas, and is a very easy read for the non-specialist.
Gene Callahan, Economics for Real People, 2004 (second edition). Callahan’s book is much more explicitly Austrian than Baetjer’s and covers the school in a topical fashion. Like Baetjer’s, in applies those ideas to a variety of policy questions in very effective ways. The book is very readable and offers more theoretical depth than Baetjer’s. For many years, this was really the only option for this sort of introduction, and the only weakness it has now is that the newer ones can cover things like the financial crisis and other more recent applied topics.
Robert P. Murphy, Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action, 2015. This is the book that, in my view, hits the sweet spot between accessibility and depth of coverage. Organized as a kind of reader’s guide to Mises’ Human Action, it tackles the same topics in the same order, but translates Mises into more accessible and contemporary language. It also has the advance of minimizing the policy issues and really focusing on Austrian economics as an analytical framework. I have used it to great success in an upper level course on Austrian economics, but there is no problem handing it to someone with an interest but no formal training in economics.
Peter Boettke, Living Economics, 2012. This book is the best introduction to what contemporary Austrian economists are interested in and how they think about the communication of economic ideas. The book is really about Boettke’s passion for economics and how that plays out in the thinkers he finds interesting and the issues he thinks economics should be addressing. The essays reproduced in this volume cover all of that and more, and do a particularly good job at showing why Austrians should also be interested in Public Choice economics and the work of the Ostroms and the Bloomington School. This is not necessarily a book you’d want to give to someone with no economics training, but is ideal for an undergraduate or an adult who has done some reading on their own and who wants to drink deeply from Boettke’s passion for economics and the Austrian school. (P.S. There’s an EconTalk for that!)
Randall Holcombe, Advanced Introduction to the Austrian School of Economics, 2014. Holcombe’s book is a short but very effective introduction to the major ideas of the school. It’s organized in five chapters, four of which cover areas of economics, including one on Austrian macroeconomics. The fifth is a nice overview of the contemporary Austrian school. It’s clearly written for those with some background in economics (hence, the “advanced” in the title). It is different from Boettke’s book in that the focus is more narrowly on the Austrian school and it lacks the teaching and history of thought chapters. If you are someone who already knows a little bit of Austrian economics or economics more generally, and you want just an introduction to the Austrian school proper, this might be the best short option for you.
(P.S. In a later post, Professor Horwitz also shares his suggestions for the best Essential books in Austrian Economics.)
Steven Horwitz is Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. He is also an Affiliated Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center in Arlington, VA, and a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute of Canada.
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Dec 12 2019 at 11:55am
My favorite is Mark Skousen’s Time and Production.
Roger McKinney
Dec 12 2019 at 11:57am
That should be The Structure of Production
neal phenes
Dec 12 2019 at 12:40pm
Close enough to Austrian Econ is Thomas Sowell’s 2 easy to follow (for a numbers challenged lawyer) books: Basic Economics and Applied Economics.
Patrick T Peterson
Dec 13 2019 at 12:42am
I’m glad to read and have this article.
I respect Steve Horwitz’s experience and analysis very much.
While not having read 3.5 of the 5 books, I am familiar with them all from reviews and selected excerpts.
I generally agree with his characterizations of the books.
But I wonder if other books by foundational Austrians might not be considered for the intro level of Austrian economics.
Principles of Economics by Carl Menger was the first book of the Austrian School and probably the best of the three subjective value marginal revolutionary books (the others being by Jevons and Walras). I listened to it on audio file a few years ago for the first time and found it simply marvelous and not that difficult to follow. It could possibly be considered an intermediate level book, but heck, so could Boettke’s or even Murphy’s above, or for that matter Adam Smith’s really, really long Wealth of Nations.
The book that got me into Austrian economics was Planning for Freedom by Mises. It too could be considered slightly at the intermediate level, but I think that anyone with any substantial interest in economic issues would find it pretty easy to comprehend… AND get excited about. It is a GREAT antidote to the terribly misleading mainstream microecon ideas of perfect competition as well as the macroeconomics of Keynes, and nails some of the key fallacies of Marx to boot.
And if this book hits you well, the next thing I suggest is get copies of Human Action and Socialism. Not with the idea of reading each book cover-to-cover right away. Well, do that if you have the time, energy and focus. But you can VERY profitably and pleasurably just go to the Tables of Contents or even the Indexes and then pick and choose the page, pages or sections that REALLY interest you.
I often would do that to answer questions that nagged me such as “The Free Market can’t REALLY handle xxxxx can it? Then I would look up xxxxx in the Index to see what Mises had to say about it. More often than not he approached the problem from a point of view and with a rigor of logic and historical example that totally clarified the issue for me. Doing that 5 – 10 – 20 times profitably and enjoyably kinda gave me the idea that the full books were worth reading.
Economics in one Lesson by Henry Hazlitt was consciously a modernization (in the 1940s, but has been since revised) of a combination of Bastiat, Austrian and other basic economics insights. The book has sold millions of copies and I daresay enlightened most of it’s readers.
I would suggest one other that several friends swear by: Value and Price by Böhm-Bawerk. This book is an excerpt from his monumental Capital and Interest, so is a classic. From my reading of Böhm-Bawerk, he seems quite fundamental and approachable, not too technical or dry at all.
I’m happy there are more and more good Austrian summaries, updates and modernizations, as Steve Horwitz pointed out above. But I still love the originals for most of the basic ideas, and don’t find them that difficult at all.
Amy Willis
Dec 13 2019 at 9:21am
But wait… there will be more. 😉
Mark Brady
Dec 15 2019 at 1:39am
I am surprised that Steve recommends Randall Holcombe’s Advanced Introduction to the Austrian School of Economics (Edward Elgar, 2014). The book is not “advanced,” it lacks the history of thought that would put Austrian insights into context, and, I submit, it does not adequately distinguish positive analysis from normative prescriptions.
On a more upbeat note, I recommend Stephen C. Littlechild’s The Fallacy of the Mixed Economy (Institute of Economic Affairs, 1978; revised edition, 1986). You can download it for free here: https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/the-fallacy-of-the-mixed-economy
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