This chapter, never before published, was presented at the 1980 Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) meetings in Denver, Colorado, September 5–7. The session was entitled “Recent Developments in Economic Theory: Austrian Economics.” Both the location and time of year were experimental, which made for smaller than average attendance. The session was well attended, however, and was in the first time slot at 8 a.m. on September 5. O’Driscoll attended and presented the paper. The paper was well received. Among those in attendance was Lord Lionel Robbins. He described the paper as “interesting,” which we were later told was, for him, a polite way of expressing disagreement. One got the impression that we were raising issues that he did not wish to revisit.
M. Bruce Johnson chaired the session. Other papers presented were “Intertemporal Coordination and Macroeconomic Stability” by Roger Garrison; and “The Moderate Quantity Theory” by J. Huston McCulloch. Mark Perlman, T. K. Rymes and Mack Ott were discussants.
About two months later Rizzo received a letter from René Olivieri, with Basil Blackwell encouraging us to consider turning the paper into a book. We learned that Rymes had brought the paper to Olivieri’s attention. And that is how the book was born.
The chapter that follows was revised in October 1980, shortly after the September ASSA meetings.