Remembering Roger W. Garrison, Who Led the Way

I first heard of Roger Garrison from Murray Rothbard. At a social gathering in 1973 of Rothbard and a few younger Austrian scholars and grad students in the New York City area. Rothbard excitedly recounted to the group the contents of a brilliant term paper he had just read involving a graphical comparison of Austrian and Keynesian macroeconomics. The paper was titled “Austrian Macroeconomics: A Diagrammatical Exposition” and its author was Roger Garrison, then an MA student. A week or two later, I received a copy of the paper in the mail. It was widely circulated among the small but growing Austrian movement and eagerly, if informally, discussed and commented on over the next year. The paper deftly integrated the Keynesian cross diagram with the Hayekian structure-of-production triangle and the Rothbardian time-market graph depicting the supply of and demand for present goods. The brilliance of the paper lay in its lack of false or contrived originality; it simply used the existing analytical tools and techniques of Austrian economics to discover new truth and generate new insights into the economic process.

By the time I first met Roger in person at the Austrian Economics Conference in South Royalton, Vermont in 1974, he already had achieved celebrity status among us younger Austrians on the strength of this unpublished paper. By the time of its publication in 1978 concurrently as a book chapter and in pamphlet form, he was widely acknowledged as one of the leaders of the younger generation of Austrians.

The reason I focus on Roger’s first paper in remembering him, is not only because it foreshadows the creative theorizing manifested throughout his later work but because it accelerated the momentum that the Austrian economics revival gained from the South Royalton conference. At the conference, the three giants of post-Misesian Austrian economics, Murray Rothbard, Israel Kirzner, and Ludwig Lachmann each gave a series of scintillating lectures, later published as a book, that inspired their young listeners to read and master the discipline. Since all three lecturers were formidable and creative scholars who had made transformative contributions to Austrian economics, however, many in the audience harbored concerns about their own capacity to make original contributions too along Austrian lines. Roger’s paper put all such concerns to rest and fueled our aspirations not merely to read and teach but to advance Austrian economics.

Of course, Roger’s creativity and influence go far beyond his pioneering article. In fact, this article was only the first step in developing over the course of his career what has come to be called “Capital-Based Macroeconomics,” a full-blown Austrian alternative to mainstream macroeconomics that he laid out in his great work, Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of the Capital Structure.

All Austrian economists in my and subsequent generations owe Roger a debt of gratitude for illuminating the path forward in doing original research in Austrian economics.