Mark Skousen – Vienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes?

In this book prolific writer Mark Skousen presents the main views of the Austrian and Chicago school of economics in a popularized form, making the subject matter easily accessible to non-experts and undergraduate economics students. The Austrian and Chicago views on money, business cycles, as well as the main interpretations of the causes of the Great Depression are succinctly described and discussed. Skousen makes his own contribution by proposing a synthesis of the two schools of economic thought.

From the back cover:

“The Austrian and Chicago schools have played a successful role in advancing classical free-market economics and countering the critics of capitalism during critical times in the battle of ideas. […] Yet these schools of free-market economists heatedly disagree in their theories of money, business cycle, government policy, and methodology. The Austrians favor a subjective market-process approach; the Chicagoans a quantitative, empirical science. The Austrians support a market-oriented gold standard and free banking; the Chicagoans a state-controlled monetary rule based on a fiat paper money standard. The Austrians argue that monetary inflation creates asset bubbles and other structural imbalances in the capital markets that are unsustainable; the Chicagoans reject the Austrian theory of the business cycle […]”

Skousen has also commented upon on his own book in the Freeman.

Mark Skousen
Vienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes?
Capital Press, 2005