A Great Teacher

Professor Pete Boettke is one of our advisors and friends. In the English speaking world, if you want to know anything about economics – go to Pete, from the most obscure point to the most life changing, Pete will have a good grounding in it. In fact, economics is just a branch of knowledge Pete is familiar with.  He is a polymath across the social sciences as all good people who style themselves as economists should be. He is the father and grandfather now of a growing body of social scientists, schooled in the Austrian tradition. This is a positive thing for the world. The concept of “Mainline” economics is Pete’s great contribution, in his latest book, to our understanding of economics, as opposed to the hapless mainstream economics we are confronted with in the halls of academia, the media and politics – be it the Platonic abstracters who come up with the mumbo jumbo of perfect competition, rational expectations, modern portfolio theory, the efficient market hypothesis, and so on, or the aggregating Keynesians and monetarists. What we know as Austrian economics underlies the majority of what is good in economics, the individual human actor being historically specific and unique in all he does, the subjective values of the acting individual being the driving force of the market, the entrepreneur as alpha and omega of the market process, deductive reasoning from solid fact IS the mainline theme. The mainstream have diverted from this plumb line and just as we moved down into the Dark Ages from the age of reason of the Greeks and Romans and back up into the Renaissance of the Europeans, we will eventually move back to mainline economics. This is a hopeful and realistic message from Pete and his new book. Our friend Jeff Tucker has reviewed Living Economics here.

Professor Gabriel Calzada introduces Pete at the start of this lecture. Gabriel heads the Insituto Juan de Mariana, a leading Spanish Austrian institute and is a Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. This is where Professor Jesus Huerta De Soto leads the economics department – a Pete Boettke for the Spanish speaking world. The Universidad Francisco Marroquin is another leading Spanish speaking university in Guatemala, which has acknowledged Pete with a Honorary Doctorate. It is wonderful to see the English and Spanish speaking world-class institutions link up in this way. In a very humbling speech during his acceptance of the honorary doctorate, Pete reminds us we are always students of life and what we learn best is actually learning how to learn. His acceptance speech starts 7 mins into this video.