Walter Block over at the Mises Blog has posted his advice to young Austrian economists in academia. For anyone who has followed either the Mises or Hayek discussion lists the points of agreement and disagreement that exist between my friend Walter and I are of public record. The bottom line is that both Walter and I want to see young Austrians succeed in academia and advance our common cause with respect to truth in economic science and the normative project of libertarianism. Walter and I are both members of the open-conspiracy for the advancement of Austrian economics.

But as a follow up to Walter’s post and also our public discussions, I do think any young economist would do well to emerse themselves in the literature on the economics discipline. For the present purpose, it is not the vast literature on methodology and method that I am referencing, but the literature on the economics profession and how to build a career. Students contemplating graduate school should start with David Colander and Arjo Klamer’s The Making of an Economist (Westview, 1990). I was actually interviewed for this project while I was in graduate school at GMU in the 1980s when it was being researched by Arjo Klamer and in his concluding essay he makes reference to the differences in student attitudes at mainstream programs like MIT and Chicago, and heterodox programs like GMU and the New School for Social Research. Colander has recently updated the work as it relates to the economists who were products of the top programs in an essay that was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter 2005).

Colander has in fact written a wonderful essay that I give to all my graduate students, “Surviving as a Slightly Out of Sync Economist,” in A Guide How to Do Economics (Steven Medema and Warren Samuels, eds.): Edward Elgar, 1996. So starting here and recognizing how the economics profession views you as someone who is working outside of the mainstream is an important first step in figuring out not only a survival strategy, but a winning one. After Colander, the most important source of basic advice to economists wanting to succeed in the economic profession is to be found in a variety of articles by the labor economist Daniel Hamermesh on how to prepare for the job market. The AEA also puts out an annual survey on job market conditions which should be consulted — it can found at the home page for Job Opennings for Economists.

There are also three excellent books that help in learning how to do economic research and write papers for academic journals. Deirdre McCloskey’s The Writing of Economics, William Thomson’s A Guide for the Young Economist, and now Steven Greenlaw’s Doing Economics: A Guide to Understanding and Carrying out Economic Research — which while designed to introduce undergraduates to the practice of economic research provides a useful guide to anyone. McCloskey’s work is just a good general introduction to writing effectively as an economist. But Thomson’s and Greenlaw’s books explain to the reader the expectations that other professional economists have when reading research. There is, of course, a problem with these works as well as great advice. The problem is that the dominant methodology dictates what are the good questions and what are considered good answers, and as Austrian economists our methodology and methods are radically different and thus the questions we ask and the answers we provide often depart drastically from the expectations of other economists. To succeed in this professional game of economics, young Austrians have to both compete on the margin of meeting professional expectations and on the margin of changing those expectations. Obviously this is a tough intellectual burden to shoulder, but it is a competition we can and must win. We must cultivate a culutre of academic excellence among young Austrians and demand that the older economists working within the Austrian tradition continually fight the good fight in the profession to create an intellectual niche in the republic of science that is the economics profession and be willing to get out of the way as the young advance in their careers and push out the frontiers of our discipline.