ABSTRACT
The Austrian concern with institutions shows up in the debate over economic calculation under socialism and capitalism and in discussions of monetary standards and monetary reforms. Perhaps more so than other schools, Austrian economists grasp the significance of one banal fact: economic plans and activities stretch out over time. A more general point is that coordination requires intertemporal as well as inter-industry meshing of plans and activities. Roger Garrison identifies the intersection of the ‘market for time’ and the ‘market for money’ as the subject matter of macroeconomics. Rapid coping with monetary disequilibrium is difficult because knowledge about tastes, resources, production possibilities, exchange opportunities, money and credit conditions, and conditions in specific markets is scattered across millions of separate minds. Monetary-disequilibrium theorists put less stress than the Austrians on shifts in the interest rate and relative prices not because they deny them but because such shifts are less central to their own account of the business cycle.
