Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist
by Bryan Caplan · George Mason University
A George Mason economist trained inside the tradition itemises where he thinks Mises and Rothbard fail: value scales versus utility functions, indifference, welfare economics, monopoly, the business cycle, and the rejection of mathematics and econometrics. A serious scholarly treatment situating the school against mainstream economics, argued point by point on the theory rather than on politics. Reading it after Human Action is what turns exposure into understanding.
More resources on Austrian Economics
Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure
Garrison renders Austrian business-cycle theory as an explicit graphical model, linking the Hayekian triangle, loanable funds and the production possibilities frontier, then compares the resulting capital-based macroeconomics with Keynesian and monetarist alternatives.
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Scholar's Edition)
The definitive anchor. Everything else in Austrian economics is either an input to this book or a commentary on it. Mises's 1949 treatise deriving the whole system from purposeful action: praxeology and its method, subjective value, money and economic calculation, interest, capital structure, the business cycle, and the critique of interventionism. About 900 pages.
Principles of Economics
Menger's 1871 founding text, in the Dingwall and Hoselitz translation with Hayek's introduction. Builds value from human needs and causality: goods of higher order, marginal utility, time and uncertainty, and the unplanned origin of money. Nothing else shows where subjective value and marginal analysis actually came from, and it is far shorter and more approachable than Human Action.
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
Mises's 1920 essay that opened the socialist calculation debate: without private ownership of the means of production there are no money prices for capital goods, so a central planner cannot rationally compare competing production plans. Reading it makes the later Hayek and Lange literature intelligible instead of second-hand.
Austrian School of Economics — The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
Peter Boettke sets out the school in ten propositions: subjective value and cost, prices as knowledge signals, the calculation problem, competition as entrepreneurial discovery, heterogeneous capital and monetary non-neutrality, with brief intellectual history from Menger onward. It names the actual theoretical commitments rather than sloganeering, and it is short enough to read before committing to Menger or Mises.