 My name is Chris Coyne, and I'm the F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Associate Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Today I'm joined by Robert Higgs, who is a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and is the editor-at-large of the Institute's quarterly journal, The Independent Review. Bob, welcome. Thank you very much, Chris. Let's begin, if you don't mind, by telling me a bit about your growth as an economist and your evolution from graduate school to the present and how your thought changed over time. Well, I actually started graduate school at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and that was in 1965. The program there was very conventional. It looked a lot like other leading programs in economics at the time. But I only remained there for one year, and I transferred to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and that's where I completed my Ph.D. work in 1968. Hopkins was a very good place to be a student. It was a relatively small graduate program compared to others of similar quality at the time. But the substance of what I was taught there was very similar to what was taught at other leading graduate programs in the country. And at that time in the mid-1960s, of course, the neoclassical synthesis was writing high, which meant that we were combining a kind of Keynesian economics training with some attention to competing points of view with the kind of modern welfare economics approach to microeconomics with a lot of emphasis on market failures and a lot of attention to modeling. In fact, my whole graduate education was in large part viewed as learning how to model what models are, what models ought to do, the necessary conditions for building a good model and making sure that we had equilibrium, stability and enough equations to solve the problem, things of that sort. So it was rather technical. None of my professors was anything like an ideologue. I was not even aware that one of my professors was a well-known Chicago school economist because he taught econometrics and all I knew was that he taught econometrics and he did not wear his Chicago school views on his sleeve. And other professors were similar in that they were more interested in the techniques of economics. They viewed economics as a box of tools. And one could reach into that box and pull out the appropriate tool to model a particular economic problem. So that was the way I was trained in a very mainstream conventional way. Now, when I first began to work as a professor in 1968, I was at the University of Washington in Seattle and a small group of people there, but an influential group were PhDs from Chicago. And those colleagues had very definite ideas about what good economics was and what it wasn't. And they were very much at war with the neoclassical synthesis in pretty much every respect. But they were certainly not even acquainted, I think, with Austrian economics, which I discovered by accident on a reading list one of them used, which had an article, very famous article by Hayek from 1945 on the Use of Knowledge in Society. And I read the article because I developed an interest in graduate school in the economics of information, which was a Chicago school endeavor, in large part at the time George Stigler was a leading contributor to that subfield of economics. And so I thought the Hayek article was probably about the economics of information. And in fact, when I read it, that's the way I thought about it. This is another contribution to the same sort of inquiry that Stigler's been carrying on. So it took me a while to start to understand what Austrian economics was about and how it differed particularly in its epistemological and methodological foundations. But what I did as a result of reading that Hayek article was become interested in Hayek's work. And so I began to find and read more of Hayek's writing. And not long afterwards I read Hayek's great book, The Constitution of Liberty. And I was just amazingly impressed by the scholarship of the book. I was not used to reading authors who commanded four or five different languages and who had a close acquaintance with a lot of history and philosophy and other things outside economics. But Hayek was, of course, an amazingly broad and deep scholar. And so reading his work was very influential for me. I didn't understand at the time, however, and for a number of years later, that I couldn't simply read Hayek and profit from what he had to say and just add that to or integrate it with what I'd been taught before in neoclassical economics. It took a long time for me to realize that Austrian economics has such distinct epistemological and methodological foundations that integration is difficult or impossible. People, of course, just differ on whether they think it's impossible or not. But however that may be, it was about 10 years later after I'd started reading Hayek that I ultimately read Mises' book, Human Action. And I read it from cover to cover and it had a powerful effect on my thinking. In fact, it made me feel for some time that I just wasted 10 years of my life. Everything I'd written and published was crap. And that it wouldn't stand up to the kinds of arguments that Mises brought against neoclassical economics of the kind I was practicing at the time. I later developed a more charitable view of what I'd done in those 10 years. But that required that I recharacterize what I had thought I was doing when I did it. But at all events, I began to become more interested in Austrian economics and to use that as a foundation for my work, which continued to be mainly in economic history for a number of years and then from the 1980s on, began to extend into subjects in political economy, sometimes contemporary subjects rather than historical subjects. And eventually, I deepened my understanding of Austrian economics. I discovered many other Austrian writers including Murray Rothbard and Israel Kursner and others. And so eventually, I really had a better understanding of not only Austrian economics but the distinctions between that and mainstream neoclassical economics.