Austrian School

About Austrian School

The Austrian school of economics is a school of economic thought that advocates strict adherence to methodological individualism, the concept that social phenomena result primarily from the motivations and actions of individuals along with their self-interest. Austrian-school theorists hold that economic theory should be exclusively derived from basic axioms of human action, known as praxeology, rather than primarily from statistical analysis. The Austrian school originated in 1871 in Vienna with the work of Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and others. It was methodologically opposed to the Historical school, in a dispute known as Methodenstreit, or methodology quarrel. Current-day economists working in this tradition are located in many countries, but their work is still referred to as Austrian economics. Among the theoretical contributions of the early years of the Austrian school are the subjective theory of value, marginalism in price theory and the formulation of the economic calculation problem. In the 1970s, the Austrian school attracted some renewed interest after Friedrich August von Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with