A chapter-by-chapter Austrian critique of textbook economics, examining how human action, entrepreneurship, prices, capital, money, state intervention, growth, trade, employment, inflation, and debt shape economic life.
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Explain how textbook models of rational choice and empirical aggregation differ from Austrian reasoning based on purposeful action, deduction, and economic calculation.
Analyze how prices, profit and loss, entrepreneurship, capital, costs, wages, interest, and uncertainty coordinate production and exchange over time.
Evaluate arguments concerning regulation, antitrust, redistribution, welfare, environmental policy, taxation, and public goods using the competing frameworks presented.
Compare Keynesian, monetarist, and Austrian explanations of money, credit expansion, investment, business cycles, inflation, unemployment, and monetary policy.
Identify the uses and limitations of GDP, price indexes, unemployment measures, inequality statistics, and other aggregates in economic explanation.
Explain how saving, capital accumulation, institutions, comparative advantage, exchange rates, and international capital flows shape growth and global exchange.
Jeffrey M. Herbener presents a systematic Austrian critique of the framework developed in Samuelson and Nordhaus’s Economics. Beginning with purposeful human action, economizing, and economic calculation, the course reconsiders demand and supply, prices, firms, costs, competition, wages, interest, profit, risk, and uncertainty. It then tests textbook arguments for regulation, redistribution, environmental policy, welfare, and other forms of state intervention against explanations grounded in property, voluntary exchange, entrepreneurship, and profit and loss. The macroeconomic lessons assess national statistics, consumption and investment, money and banking, business cycles, monetary policy, unemployment, inflation, and government debt while emphasizing capital structure and credit expansion. Further lessons examine economic growth, uneven development, international trade, exchange rates, and open economies. Throughout, students encounter competing assumptions, methods, causal explanations, and policy interpretations rather than isolated objections to individual textbook models.
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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