Nobody is born an Austrian (economist) and the relative obscurity of the school makes it so that becoming one generally makes for an exciting story. If it is a story about their intellectual progress, Austrians love telling it — the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI) has an entire book dedicated to these types of stories. As an Austrian, I think it is only proper for me to tell mine.

The best way to describe me before early 2009 is as an economic illiterate. I was a “conservative,” but probably mostly because I rejected Spanish “socialism” (namely, the PSOE party). I agreed with things like minimum wage laws and an extensive social welfare net on an emotional level — I saw these type of things as being “right” and “necessary” in a world where some are (obviously) better off than others. However, I still supported “markets” (whatever that word meant to me, at the time), “capitalism,” and privatized production. I probably correlated capitalism with economic growth, because that is what I had been taught or, at least, that is what I had heard/read (I was an avid reader of World War II literature, and I was well aware of arguments made that the advanced industrialist economies of Britain and the United States were able to outproduce the controlled industries of Germany and Italy — at the time, of course, I was not well read on the Great Depression policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt).

The short of it: while I supported certain economic policies and/or ideas, I was not much of an economist. In fact, in high school I hated economics (although, probably because I was too preoccupied fooling around in the back of class or chasing girls). My first two years of college were spent unsuccessfully chasing a bachelors in history (I was not really interested in school, at the time). Then, I moved to Spain.

In Spain it was much of the same, until I was introduced to a few articles on Mises.org (which ones, I do not remember). I cannot remember exactly what kind of impact they had on me: probably very little. If my introduction to the Ludwig von Mises Institute did something, though, it was lead to buy Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. I bought a few other books, but I cannot remember which ones: I know one of them was Burt Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal (to disprove my Macro 101 professor on the effects of the New Deal — for some reason, I became really passionate about libertarianism and economics very, very quickly). Between first finding out about the Mises Institute and ordering Hazlitt’s book it must have been anywhere between five and seven months (I moved back to the United States in August 2009).

In April 2009, I ordered a book that would direct most my studies: Jesús Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (I also bought Garet Garrett’s The Bubble That Broke the World, which I review here). I probably had become aware of Huerta de Soto through his articles and was interested in him mostly because of his Spanish nationality. Much to my current embarrassment, I bought most of his arguments with regards to fractional reserve banking (both the economic and ethical criticisms). More importantly, I became enthralled with Austrian capital theory (not that I really understood it, at the time, or fully absorbed Huerta de Soto’s writing); my purchases thereafter reflect this interest — Ebeling’s (ed.) The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays, Harbeler’s Prosperity and Depression, and Hayek’s Pure Theory of Capital (interestingly, I also bought Sechrest’s Free Banking [just in case anybody accuses me of partiality!]).

It was that year (2009) that I attended my first and (to date) only Mises Circle, held at Newport Beach (California). The lecturers there were: Douglas French, Peter Klein, Robert Murphy, David Gordon, Thomas DiLorenzo, and George Reisman (and that is where I purchased Reisman’s Capitalism). Prior to that, in June 2009 I had also attended (on scholarship) Cato University: mostly to be able to meet and listen to Robert Higgs, who was (and continues to be) a major source of inspiration. By this time, I was a convinced libertarian and Misesian.

I started writing for Mises.org in February 2010. My first article was on the Recession of 1937: based largely on my understanding of Austrian business cycle theory, work by Benjamin Anderson, and a few articles published in The Freeman by Joseph Salerno and Richard Timberlake (a debate on monetary policy during the Great Depression). I am pretty sure that I started blogging around the same time (a piece on Zimbabwe that I had written was not accepted by Jeffrey Tucker, then managing editor at Mises.org, and I opted to post it on my blog). It was probably a mixture of my classes, and exposure on the internet (and the debates that came with them) that forced me to expand my interests on the history of economic thought outside of the Austrian school.

I cannot remember if it was in 2009 or 2010 that I bought John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory, but it was around the time that I did that I became most interested in becoming more aware of opposing arguments (not necessarily to see if I would agree with them, but to better refute them [but, sometimes the outcome of your action is not the outcome that you expected]). I believe that it was in the beginning of 2010 that I read George Selgin’s The Theory of Free Banking (after I found a copy of the book for $25 on Amazon.com), and I think this book led to the second great transformation in how I perceived economics — it may have also influenced me on reading other books, especially those by non-Austrians.

I think that I finally began to branch away from “core” Austrian literature is important in that it shows that I was not necessarily interested in reinforcing the ideology I already held. Rather, I was mostly interested in fleshing out the intricacies of economic theory, and in order to do this I had to explore alternative versions or criticisms of what I already believed in (and, to be clear, I still have to do this). I think it was this “branching out” that has made my understanding of Austrian theory stronger than, say, someone who has read only Rothbard and Mises (although, this sentiment is probably subjective).

It was in 2010 that I started to better understand the concept of the “market process” and I finally began to put together the pieces of Austrian theory had I been, up to then, collecting separately. I do not remember if it was a single piece of literature that put it all together for me or many different readings; I know that it was only around that time that I finally read Mises’ Human Action. I also became interested in the writings of Ludwig Lachmann, which led me to G.L.S. Shackle, and started to embed in me the idea of an economy characterized by forces of coordination and discoordination. What I learned in 2010, though, led me to finally be able to put the pieces together to write this piece in 2011: “Government Spending is Bad Economics.” I like to think of this article as a very good one (even if some may not agree), because it was by this time which I could finally fit government spending into the context of the market process and economic coordination.

2011 has been a year of consolidation and the formulation of baby branches that will lead me to my studies in 2012 (which I hope will be the most fruitful of them all). I became interest in the writings of Keynes, Yeager (through Selgin), Hicks, et cetera. Keynes and Hicks, certainly, will form an important core of my research in early 2012. What I am really interested in is in the various interpretations of Keynes’ The General Theory, and how these led to the various branches of the Keynesian School during the 1940s and 1950s (and, then, how these led to modern macroeconomics). With Keynesian economics will come my research into interest rate theories, and consequently into capital theory (again).

What will be most interesting, I think, is how I will look back on the first three years of my foray into economics at the end of 2013. Will my view of economics be extremely different? Will I still be an Austrian?