For lefties only: which school is WORSE, Austrian or Chicago?

[buritobr]

Both schools of economic thought are related to conservative politics. The most famous members of the Austrian School are Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. The Chicago School includes monetarists and new classicals. Milton Friedman is the most famous monetarist, Robert Lucas is the most famous new classical from Chicago.

[Babeuf]

Austrian is certainly worse as a collection of theories / ideology. But perhaps Chicago has done more real world damage as the more influential version in the modern world.

[Stranger in a strange land]

The Austrian School is to Economics what Young Earth Creationism is to Biology, what Homeopathy is to Medicine, and what Astrology is to Astronomy. It would be devastating if a nation actually adopted it, but this is unlikely because a nation that actually starts believing in its delusions will fail. To paraphrase George Orwell, 2 + 2 may equal 5 in the classroom, but on the battlefield, 2 + 2 must always equal 4.

[W]

Austrian and it's not all that close. Chicago has probably done more overall damage but on a purely theoretical basis Austrian is far worse.

[Red Velvet]

Voted Chicago. Chicago in practice because many people treat their neoliberalism as the ideal target nowadays, or the “status-quo”. While Austrian hasn’t been as widely implemented. But theoretically I agree Austrian could be even worse.

Chicago can be more good if your place is already somewhat rich and everything is going just perfectly. And even then has negative setbacks. But that’s why whenever there is a crisis, people slightly shift away from them, just to later go back to the same path even stronger. I just wish Keynesian capitalism could be the real “centrism” again, in the mold of the great leaders during WW2 and the following decades. But mainstream media talks like as if Keynesianism is the new Marxism or something.

I feel like it’s so disrespectful to the true communists of those days, to be compared with young millennials and zoomers who don’t even want a proletariat revolution, they just want more government investment on health, jobs, industry instead of living in corporate hellworld where monopoly rules. That’s what too much economic freedom leads to, not to more “competition”. Adam Smith already warned us all about the danger of monopolies under a laissez-faire economic system, one company swallows everyone else and society is forced to submit themselves to them. What companies like Facebook, Disney and others have become is terrifying and a threat to civilians freedom.

But if Socialism is what it takes to at least compensate the radicalism of laissez-faire and push the Overton window back to a Keynesian approach being in the center, so be it. Kids defending communism is a great thing to be a strong counterbalance, the fact it became so “popularized” is already a reaction to excessive market-driven solutions being presented by governments. If leaders were smart, a shift to more Keynesian responses would be celebrated and end demands for “socialism”. That’s what visionary people like FDR and others (here in Brazil it was Getúlio Vargas) did in the 30s and 40s, even before Keynes published his masterpiece in 1936.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Austrian is certainly worse as a collection of theories / ideology. But perhaps Chicago has done more real world damage as the more influential version in the modern world.

This. Austrian is a trashy niche fantasy novel, Chicago is an almost-as-bad mainstream bestseller.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Can someone ELI5 the Austrian school for me? I didn't take above a sophomore level class in Economics in college so the wiki article and most summaries I've read on it are incomprehensible and I'm not able to see why it's so shockingly wrong and would be a disaster if ever implemented.

[buritobr]

Austrian School has some characteristics of orthodox schools and some characteristics of heterodox schools. Like the orthodox, austrians accept methodological individualism. Like the heterodox, the austrian reject the conceptions of perfect rationality and equilibrium. Usually, heterodox economics is related to left-wing policies and orthodox economics is related to right-wing policies. Austrian School is an exception. It is an hybrid of heterodox and orthodox, but it is on the right of the orthodox.
Brief description of how austrians see the economy: the production has different stages, the stages of inputs and the stages of final consumption goods. When people save more, they send the signal that they want less consumption in the present and more consumption in the future. Higher saving creates lower interest rates, which are a sign to the firms that they should produce more inputs and less final consumption goods.