The business cycle · Course 1 of 15 · Origins and method
What the Austrian school is
A tradition that explains an economy from individual people, not aggregates. What it claims for its method, what its critics answer, and where it stops.
This is the first course of a track about one theory: the Austrian account of the business cycle. That theory sits at the end of a long chain of reasoning, and the chain is worth more than the conclusion. This course is the first link.
The Austrian school is a heterodox tradition. It is not the consensus of the economics profession, it is not what most economics departments teach, and several of its central claims have serious published objections against them. This track teaches the tradition as a tradition: what it argues, who argued it, and what the strongest answers to it are. None of that requires believing it.
Seven lessons. The first two place the school and its people. The next three set out the three commitments that make it a school rather than a set of opinions: explanation that starts from individuals, value as something a person holds, and the method Mises claimed for the whole subject. The sixth states the standard objection to that method at full strength, because a course that skips it is advertising. The seventh writes down the boundary this track will not cross.
No economics is assumed. No mathematics is used. Nothing here is a forecast, a market call, or a view about any security, and a theory of the cycle is not a timing tool. ValueScreener is a research tool, and this academy is free to read without an account.
A theory, not a measurement
What the Austrian school is is 7 lessons on where the school came from and what it claims to be doing. It is a method of reasoning about an economy, argued against its rivals. It produces no figure about any company, and a way of thinking accepted is not a holding of yours examined.
Related
- Menger and subjective value is the next course, and it builds the tradition's first idea properly: that value is something a person holds, not a property of a thing.
- Methodology shows the discipline this track applies to economic arguments, applied to numbers: every figure traced to the statement, the fiscal year and the filing it came from.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.