A Kirznerian Economic History of the Modern World

I think the history of How I Discovered Israel illuminates the trouble that Aus-trian economics has had against Samuelsonian economics (which we com-monly but self-defeatingly call the “mainstream”). And it shows how in the end the Austrians can save economics from itself. In college during the early 1960s I had been taught to respect at least Schum-peter, which was reinforced as a graduate student when I specialized in economic history. In college I had a roommate, a brilliant electrical engineer, who would break from solving second-order differential equations by reading Ludwig von Mises ’ Austrian classic Human Action. But I was the official economics major, so I supposed that what my teachers were telling me in classes about Keynesian economics and social engineering was the Real Thing. My roommate’s Misesian hobby was obviously “conservative ” nonsense. Oy veh iz mir. How I wish I had earlier read Mises—the senior colleague of Friedrich Hayek and the teacher of Kirzner! It would have sped up my intel-lectual development by two or three decades, and given me more respect for the entrepreneur-centered thinking of my friendly opponent early in my career as an economic historian, the historian David Landes. It might have allowed me as early as the 1970s to use the Kirznerian entrepreneur to make progress on the puzzle of economic growth—instead of having to wait until the 2000s, painfully extracting myself over the decades from a Samuelsonian-Friedmanite devotion to equilibrium and routine