This made Vienna a leading Continental outpost of the market-oriented “neoclassical” economics that also became dominant in Britain and eventually the United States. But the Austrian school also had some unique properties. One was a fascination with entrepreneurs, expressed most famously in Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 account of the “creative destruction” of business failure and creation. Another was a skepticism of the mathematical tools used by neoclassical economists elsewhere. Most pronounced of all was a disdain for government management of the economy.

Early on, this disdain was reserved for full-on socialist seizure of the means of production. The Austrian economists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries endorsed progressive taxation and the welfare state, and Schumpeter even served briefly as finance minister in his country’s first socialist-led government, in 1919. In subsequent years his contemporary Ludwig von Mises and Mises’ protégé Friedrich Hayek took a less compromising line, eventually arguing that virtually any government economic intervention was, as Hayek put it in 1944, a step down “the road to serfdom.”

By then Hayek and the rest of the Austrian school had fled Austria. Schumpeter and several others settled down to distinguished academic careers in the United States, with Schumpeter also enjoying a posthumous renaissance as patron saint of Silicon Valley. But it was Hayek and Mises who came to define the new Austrian school, attracting wealthy patrons in the United States who had despaired of finding credentialed economists willing to offer such a full-throated defense of free markets. Before long they were joined by younger Americans like Friedman (although even he found Mises a tad extreme).

There the stories of these two books intertwine, at least a little. Wasserman is a history professor at the University of Alabama and he doesn’t really have an ax to grind; his book is a fair-minded, deeply researched account of how a school of thought developed and wielded influence. It is a narrative with many protagonists, and keeping track of all of them can be a bit much, but it’s still quite well done, and full of fascinating stories.

Appelbaum does have an ax to grind, but unsheathes it only occasionally, usually to offer cutting one-sentence dismissals of particularly dubious claims by economists. His book is a marvel of popular historical writing, propelled by anecdotes and just the right amount of explanation but also impressively well grounded in the latest academic research by historians, sociologists and others. Much of the territory it covers was familiar to me, but I was constantly learning new twists and nuances.

What are we to think of economists after all this? Wasserman tells the story of the Socialist Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who when asked to account for his country’s spectacular post-World War II economic success said: “I explain it by our attention to export. We exported all of our economists.” It was a joke, but one that hints at the truth that economists don’t have a monopoly on good economic policy.

Appelbaum makes this explicit by comparing the development experiences of Chile and Taiwan. University of Chicago-trained economists devised a market-dominated approach for Chile that has left the country wealthier than its South American neighbors but beset by high inequality and civic malaise. Taiwan’s far more spectacular rise to affluence was steered by electrical engineers who consulted economists and enlisted market forces but were never ruled by them. “They regarded the economy as a machine,” Appelbaum writes, “and they were not afraid to tinker.”

The United States is currently led by a man who regards the economy as an extension of himself and pays no heed to economists. This approach worked remarkably well for his first two years in office, but now seems to be unraveling. The economists will be back. When they return, one hopes that they and the rest of us will have learned a few things since the 1970s.