James Grant Interviewed By Mises.org
This interview was conducted in 1996. If you’re a fan of James Grant please take the time to read this.
*Found this article via Value Investing World (Great Find Joe)
Click Here To Read About Mises Interviewing James Grant
Introduction (Via Mises.Org)
AEN: Your argument about business cycles in The Trouble with Prosperity rests heavily on the work of the Austrian economist Wilhelm Röpke instead of the more well-known Austrians.
GRANT: I am an observer of the contemporary scene, a journalist, rather than a theorist. I picked up Austrian economics almost everywhere except in school. It came to me, and I to it, in the way that the Austrians say that so many good things happen, that is, by accident, rather than by design.
Over the years I read Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and others on interest rates, capital, and the business cycle. I’ve long been inspired by Henry Hazlitt’s career, someone who wrote as well as he did, and as long. To think that this man professed the ideas he did in the pages of the mainstream press is certainly startling and revelatory.
I chose to feature Röpke because of his book Crises and Cycles, which appeared in English during the Great Depression. He offers a clear and forceful exposition of the mechanics of the Austrian interest-rate and business-cycle model, and the very difficult but rewarding structure of the theory itself. Vera Smith must have done a great job in translating the work. By the way, I recommend Vera Smiths book The Rationale of Central Banking as a further elucidation on Röpke’s already clear theory. I know there are all sorts of holes in my bibliography; there might be better and more faithful explanations than Röpke offers. But I really do recommend this to people for its simplicity.
