 Since the financial crisis, a number of groups have called for remaking or restructuring economics, especially the way it's taught in colleges and universities, to make it more useful, more applicable, more relevant to the real world. The Institute for New Economic Thinking funded by George Soros and a group in the UK called the Post-Crash Economic Society have been in the headlines in recent weeks for their calls to change the economics curriculum. Now their argument is that economics is dominated by a kind of free market orthodoxy that cannot explain the financial crisis, the recession, and other important economic phenomena. And they want to overturn mainstream economics with something else built more to their liking, relying heavily on the writings of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes and other interventionists. Now from my point of view, adding more Marx and Keynes is just sort of making a bad situation worse. Certainly the mainstream of economics is not at all dominated by any kind of a free market orthodoxy. Nonetheless, I sympathize with the frustration that these groups feel towards some of the economics they get in the textbooks and they see in the nightly news and in the mainstream newspapers and so on. Indeed, there is a need to make contemporary or mainstream economics more useful, more relevant, more applicable. And I think the way to do that is to embrace the teachings and writings of the Austrian economists. Now Austrian economics is often described as a theoretical discipline because Mises emphasized the a priori and because Austrians have spent a lot of time and effort developing a well-coherent, a nicely coherent body of economic theory. But it's sometimes forgotten that the great Austrian economists were very practical people. Karl Manger was a financial journalist before turning to economic theory. Eugen von Bomberwerk was the Minister of Finance on three separate occasions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And Ludwig von Mises himself spent most of his career, not as a theoretician, but as the staff economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, where he spent most of his days working on very practical business problems, policy problems, trade problems, and so on. So Austrian economics is very useful and relevant and applied. Take for example the business cycle and the current economic crisis. Some critics of Austrian economics like Paul Krugman, for example, have offered a number of very naive arguments claiming, for example, that because we have not had hyperinflation since the expansionary monetary policy and quantitative easing and so forth were really put into full gear in the last few years, therefore the Austrians must be wrong and the notion that monetary expansion causes booms, which later become busts, has to be thrown out the window. But if you look more carefully at Austrian business cycle theory, it does not at all say that an increase in the money supply immediately and automatically leads to a certain rate of increase in prices and the price level. There are a number of different ways in which the malinvestment that the Austrians talk about can take place. And we've seen a lot of that just in the last few years with the prices of other assets rising, land, commodities, and so forth. Even if the consumer price level itself has not gone up by very much. Now my point in using that example is simply to say that without some kind of theoretical lens, without some theoretical understanding of how money affects real economic variables, we cannot simply stare at the data. We can't compile a bunch of charts and graphs and draw the kind of naive conclusion that Paul Krugman draws. However, if we're armed with that body of theory, we can make very good sense of what we see in the real data, what we see real companies doing, how entrepreneurs are behaving, why the stock market is doing what it's doing, how the economy as a whole is performing. In other words, a little bit of economic theory goes a long way in understanding the real world. Now does that mean that to be successful in the real world, one has to have an advanced degree in Austrian economics? Well, obviously not. There are many successful business people, investors, entrepreneurs, managers who have a very solid intuitive understanding of how markets work, even if they haven't been formally trained. Yet at the same time, thinking through Austrian economic principles, more systematically and a little bit more detail, really helps us to know what to look for in the data. It helps us to know what relationships, to examine what is cause and what is effect, and it really helps us to understand the real world, as in my business cycle example. And that doesn't mean that studying Austrian economics will make you rich. It might help, but there's no guarantee. Nonetheless, it's important that we always remind ourselves and our friends that Austrian economics is a very practical science. As it turns out, I'm going to be teaching a course in our Mises Academy program starting just in a few weeks on applications of Austrian economics for business, specifically for management, for finance, for human resources, and so forth. If you're interested in learning more, please sign up for the course or just look at Mises.org for many of our articles, books, lectures that deal with practical problems of business, of entrepreneurship, of finance, and of course of public policy.