A systematic introduction to Austrian economics, connecting purposeful human action and subjective value to prices, production, capital, financial markets, business cycles, fiscal policy, and competing economic systems.
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Explain how purposeful action, scarcity, subjective value, marginal utility, uncertainty, and opportunity cost form the basis of Austrian economic analysis.
Analyze how preferences, supply, demand, bargaining, speculation, arbitrage, productivity, and interest shape prices for consumer and producer goods.
Trace how saving, investment, monetary calculation, profit and loss, bonds, stocks, and capital values coordinate production across time.
Compare commodity money, money substitutes, fiat currency, full-reserve banking, fractional reserves, and central-bank credit expansion.
Distinguish ordinary market fluctuations from credit-driven cycles and explain the sequence from boom and malinvestment through crisis, liquidation, and recovery.
Evaluate how taxes, expenditures, debt, price controls, product controls, state enterprises, and command systems affect incentives, calculation, and resource allocation.
This course develops Austrian economics from its foundations in purposeful human action, subjective value, scarcity, choice, and voluntary exchange. It explains how marginal utility, supply and demand, time preference, and monetary calculation shape consumer prices, wages, interest, producer-good values, profits, and capital allocation. The analysis then follows income, saving, investment, bonds, stocks, money, banking, and the multi-stage capital structure to show how entrepreneurs coordinate production under uncertainty. Later lessons distinguish ordinary market fluctuations from credit-driven business cycles, tracing the boom, crisis, bust, and recovery through monetary inflation, interest rates, malinvestment, and financial fragility. The course concludes by evaluating taxation, public expenditure, government debt, price and product controls, state enterprises, and command economies, comparing their effects on incentives, calculation, production, and resource allocation with those of an unhampered market economy.
Chair and Professor of Economics · Grove City College
Jeffrey M. Herbener is an economist and scholar of the Austrian school whose research addresses money, business cycles, capital, interest, and economic history.
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