text: Photograph by Justin Sullivan 
   
   As he declared quasi-victory in Iowa following a third-place finish, Ron Paul puzzled cable news watchers across the country by proudly proclaiming, “We are all Austrians now.” The average Republican presidential candidate would sooner officiate a gay marriage than praise Europe, yet here was Paul pledging allegiance to Vienna. What did he mean? Why would we all be Austrians? 
   
   Paul’s statement was crystal clear to those familiar with the internecine controversies of the libertarian movement. He was referring to so-called “Austrian economics,” an idiosyncratic passion of his and a set of beliefs that put him at odds with the vast majority of well-known economists of all ideological inclinations. 
   
   For starters, it’s important to note that the term has something of a double meaning. The Austrian school originally referred to a set of classical liberal thinkers with diverse interests who came out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of these thinkers are obscure today, but the most distinguished member of the group, Friedrich Hayek, is anything but. By the same token, an appreciation for Hayek’s work by no means makes you an “Austrian.” Hayek, who died in 1992, won the Nobel Prize, and mainstream economists thoroughly embraced his important work explicating the role of the price system in conveying information. His ideas undergird everything from carbon taxes to wireless spectrum auctions and thoroughly permeate policy throughout the Western world. 
   
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   But “Austrians” in Paul’s sense refers to something narrower, specifically the thought of Ludwig Von Mises and his student Murray Rothbard. It is a form of capitalism that is even more libertarian and anarchic than that espoused by many libertarians. Rothbard‘s followers, most prominently longtime Paul associate and founder of the Mises Institute Lew Rockwell, have been waging a decades-long war against the Koch brothers and the more mainstream form of libertarianism the Kochs represent. 
   
   “Austrian economics,” in this sense, goes beyond standard-issue free market thinking in a number of ways. Most notably, it seeks to build a strong ethical case for strict libertarianism without admitting that this would lead to any practical problems whatsoever. Therefore, along with rejecting the legitimacy of any intervention to protect the poor or regulate anything (a position much more extreme than even the Hayek of Road to Serfdom), Austrians reject the idea that there is anything at all the government can do to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations. This, to be clear, is different from the mainstream Republican view that the stimulus bill enacted by Congress in 2009 and signed into law by President Obama was wasteful or ineffective. Austrians also believe that cutting taxes to boost economic activity doesn’t work either. And they disagree with Milton Friedman that appropriate monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression. Indeed, they disagree with even the least controversial of all stabilization measures, the ordinary tweaking of short-term interest rates that all modern central banks use to try to prevent either inflation or deflation. In the view of the Austrians, practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets. Rather than curing recessions, claim Austrians, stimulative policies cause them by producing unsustainable bubbles. 
   
   The way this works, according to the Austrians, is that artificially low interest rates spur “malinvestment” in unworkable enterprises that inevitably crash when the stimulus is withdrawn. This is an emotionally appealing idea, positing that the suffering of a bust is a kind of cosmic payback for the boom. But it doesn’t make much logical sense. For one thing, as George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, who’s ideologically sympathetic to the Austrians, points out, it’s hard to understand why businesspeople would be so easily duped in this way. If Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises know that cheap money can’t last forever, why don’t private investors? Why wouldn’t firms avoid making the supposedly dumb investments? Ironically, the Austrians have replicated an error from the crudest forms of postwar Keynesianism—the failure to consider the role of expectations feedback in macroeconomic policy. 
   
   More broadly, the Austrian story of investment booms and busts doesn’t actually explain recessions and unemployment. Spending patterns shift all the time without sparking a recession. People stop buying BlackBerrys and they buy iPhones instead. Or people stop buying boot-cut jeans and buy skinny jeans instead. Across sectors, maybe people go see fewer movies and with the money they save they eat out at nicer restaurants. A business that curtails its investment spending should have extra money to pay out as dividends. Or if they want to horde the cash, it sits in a bank for someone else to lend out. 
   
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   It may seem “obvious” that the decline in housing activity caused the current recession, in line with the Austrian view, but in fact fixed residential investment turned negative in 2006. It stayed negative for more than a year before the recession began, and then continued negative for a couple more quarters before it turned severe. People spent less on home-building and renovation and more on other things. If investment spending in general declines, you would expect spending on consumer goods to rise to offset it. In practice, this doesn’t always happen and you get a recession. It’s this anomalous collapse in overall spending that needs explaining, and describing some of the past spending as “malinvestment” doesn’t help you understand it. 
   
   The interesting question is what to do about it. Many of the original Austrians found their business cycle ideas discredited by the Great Depression, in which the bust was clearly not self-correcting and country after country stimulated real output by abandoning the gold standard and engaging in deficit spending. Then for a long time after World War II, policy elites more or less agreed on a combination of “automatic” fiscal stabilizers (the deficit naturally goes up during recessions as tax revenues fall and social service outlays rise) and interest rate cuts. And it worked, so nobody much cared about Austrian economics outside of crank circles. But when short-term rates hit zero and the Fed couldn’t push them any lower despite high unemployment, political consensus broke down. ||||| Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. 
   
   Economic forecasting is a mug’s game. There are simply too many unknowable factors that affect “the economy” for anyone to make accurate predictions. The Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster, for instance, had a noticeably negative macroeconomic impact around the world, and nobody knows what lurks inside the hearts of central bankers. Plus, if I did possess the secrets to the future, I’d be making a fortune as a speculator, not telling you about it. 
   
   Still, the application of economic theory should be able to help us avoid the commonplace error of simply assuming that the future will be like the past, that after 18 months of sluggish growth we’re due for sluggish growth to continue. The conventional wisdom is that the relatively strong growth in the fourth quarter was a false dawn, and the economy is destined to stall out. This is mistaken. Some tragic unforeseen disaster could hit us, but if it doesn’t we should be in for a string of increasingly strong quarters and accelerating growth that put us back on the path to full employment. 
   
   My guru in this prediction is Karl Smith, an economist at the University of North Carolina, one of the authors of the Modeled Behavior blog, and one of the few sources who saw through the cloak of pessimism this past summer and accurately called for a strong close to the year. But in a deeper sense, I’m following the long-dead Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, whose work is so fundamental that people sometimes forget to return to it. 
   
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   Wicksell argued that there is a “natural rate of interest,” at which desired savings is balanced by desired investment and the economy suffers from neither inflation nor massive excess capacity. A recession occurs when the natural rate of interest falls below the actual interest rate. Instead of savings being channeled into investment and driving the economy forward, firms and households start merely hoarding and the economy stalls, leaving workers and equipment idle. 
   
   
   
   Wicksell’s work leaves open the question of why the natural rate of interest might rise or fall, so it doesn’t make for much of a causal theory of recessions. But under normal circumstances central bankers can cure recessions by cutting interest rates to bring them closer to the natural rate. This brings saving and investment back into equilibrium and ensures that resources are put to good use. 
   
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   Unfortunately, the financial crisis we’ve been suffering through pushed the natural rate very low—below zero. The Fed can’t set the nominal interest below zero, and has steadfastly refused to engage in the variety of “unorthodox” measures that would push real rates lower, thus ensuring a long and painful recovery process. 
   
   The important thing to note, however, is that each month of recovery closes the gap between the natural rate and the rate the Federal Reserve is willing to set. The downward creep of unemployment from 10.1 percent in October 2009 to 9.7 percent a year later to 9 percent in October 2011 and then down to 8.6 indicates a rising natural rate of interest. And while the Fed has refused to resort to exotic moves to push rates down further, they’ve committed to holding nominal rates where they are until the economy recovers. There’s no precise precedent for the situation we’re in, since the Fed’s never hit zero before. But the basic mechanism of a narrowing gap between the natural and actual interest rates has been behind all of our recoveries from postwar recessions and the same logic applies today. Improvement will lead to further improvement, with the economy growing rapidly as idle resources—workers, machinery, storefronts—are put back into use. 
   
   What will this recovery look like in concrete terms? Total bank credit, which collapsed during the crisis, is growing again and will keep growing. That will make it easier for Americans to buy new cars and reverse the four years of growth in the average age of America’s passenger vehicles. Families will also invest in other kinds of durable goods—refrigerators, washing machines, etc.—that they’ve been hesitant to upgrade or replace. The housing bust, meanwhile, has been followed by an epic construction slump that’s actually left us with a shortage of homes. But every downward tick in the unemployment rate is another twentysomething moving out of his parents’ basement, stimulating a return to a more normal level of construction. Multifamily housing starts are already up 80 percent over the past year to accommodate the likely coming flood of renters, and there’ll be more to come once people have more cash in their pockets. 
   
   This increase in economic activity will boost state and local tax revenue and end the already slowing cycle of public sector layoffs. Re-employment in the construction, durable goods, and related transportation and warehousing functions will bolster income and push up spending on nondurables, restaurants, leisure and hospitality, and all the rest. Happy days, in other words, will be here again. 
   
   None of that means we’ll remember 2012 as the best of times. What we’re talking about is a spurt of rapid employment growth from a low base, not a tight labor market and rapidly rising wages like we had in the late ’90s. But compared with the past four years, it’ll look like a magnificent boom.
target: – Just what did Ron Paul mean when he finished third in Iowa and said, "We are all Austrians now"? Republican candidates don't often celebrate European economic policies, but this is different, Matthew Yglesias writes in Slate. Those familiar with the inside baseball of libertarianism know that Paul is referring to two thinkers, Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard, whose idea of capitalism "is even more libertarian and anarchic than that espoused by many libertarians," writes Yglesias. "Austrian economics" rejects all government regulation and intervention to help the poor, and considers the tweaking of short-term interest rates a mistake that lures investors into doomed enterprises. Yglesias mounts a counter-argument, noting that the "Austrian" view doesn't explain the effectiveness of post-Great Depression fixes or the spending habits that fuel recessions. Yglesias sees an economic recovery around the corner, but if there isn't one, "these faddish views may gain more steam and perhaps we really all will be Austrians someday soon. But let’s hope not."