This interview was first published in the Austrian Economics Newsletter, Vol. 16, Number 3 - Fall 1996.

An Interview with Joseph T. Salerno

Joseph Salerno, professor of economics at Pace University, is a leading figure in today's growing Austrian School. He has been a pioneer in many fields, including monetary theory, comparative systems, the history of thought, and the economics of war. After the death of Murray N. Rothbard in 1995, Salerno assumed the editorship of the Review of Austrian Economics, together with Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Walter Block. He is now editor of its successor and current flagship scholarly journal, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He was interviewed by the AEN staff at the 1996 Mises University, the Mises Institutes summer instructional conference at Auburn University.

AEN: What's your take on the present state of Austrian economics?

SALERNO: How could anyone be at the Mises University and not be elated? This is my eighth. The students are more passionate and well read than ever. We've got all levels, all fields, and many different countries represented. Many students have come on the recommendation of their professors, who had attended in the past. So we're now working with the second and sometimes third generation of alumni.

This article was first published in Vol. 29, Number 1 of The Free Market - January 2005.

Should economics be pursued as a profession or a vocation? The choice isn’t about the job title of a particular economist or what tasks he or she fulfills in the course of a day’s work. It is about the motivation behind the work and the subjective orientation one brings to the task. The choice tends to dictate whether an economist will serve the cause of truth and freedom, or waste his or her talents on convenience, ephemera, and statism.

Think about the word "vocation" as a work or function to which a person is called that requires dedication to an idea. A vocation involves what Ludwig von Mises called "introversive" labor while a profession involves "extroversive" labor.  The essence of introversive labor is work undertaken solely for its own sake and not as a means to a more remote end. Extroversive labor, in contrast, is performed because the individual "prefers the proceeds he can earn by working to the disutility of labor and the pleasure of leisure."

This was first published in April, 1990 as a postcript to Mises Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920).

Mises's Thesis

In "Economic Calculation in a Socialist Commonwealth," Ludwig von Mises demonstrates, once and forever, that, under socialist central planning, there are no means of economic calculation and that, therefore, socialist economy itself is "impossible" ("umm?glich")--not just inefficient or less innovative or conducted without benefit of decentralized knowledge, but really and truly and literally impossible.

At the same time, he establishes that the necessary and sufficient conditions of the existence and evolution of human society is liberty, property, and sound money: the liberty of each individual to produce and exchange according to independently formed value judgments and price appraisements; unrestricted private ownership of all types and orders of producers' goods as well as of consumers' good; and the existence of a universal medium of exchange whose value is not subject to large or unforeseeable variations.