Excelente entrevista al economista austriaco George Selgin en The Daily Bell. Lo de tachar el apelativo de “austriaco” tiene un claro motivo:

Daily Bell: Do you consider yourself an Austrian economist?

George Selgin: While at NYU I did consider myself an Austrian and, more precisely, a Misesian. Despite the influence Hayek’s Denationalisation of Money had on me, I came to regard him as rather too namby-pamby for me! But that attitude didn’t survive my first few years in the profession, which taught me that, if I was really going to be a scholar – and by then that was what mattered to me most – I needed to forget all about schools of thought and such. That is, I decided that I preferred being an independent thinker to being a representative-in-good-standing of this-or-that school or ideology. What’s more, I decided that having an ideology or identifying with any school was just going about things the wrong way, by starting with a set of answers before researching a question.

Daily Bell: That sounds like a tough road – “less traveled.”

George Selgin: I no longer refer to or even think of myself as an Austrian economist, or as any sort of “free market” economist. If other people think I’m one of those things, that’s fine – but I don’t conduct my research with any thought of making such labels fit. There’s a cost to this, of course: people may think I’m being ungrateful; and I certainly feel very lonely at times. But it’s the only way I know in which to stay true to my values.

Parece una postura valiente y admirable. Le encuentro algún punto de similitud a la postura de Carlos Rodríguez Braun de deseos de independencia intelectual.

Tratan otros muchos temas: cómo se llegó a interesar en la economía cuando le interesaba la biología marina y su padre, que tenía ideas socialistas le recomendó que estudiara economía (la caída del socialismo real le hizo cambiar de opinión); unas críticas a los objetivistas de Ayn Rand; ideas sobre el free banking, el trabajo que ha desarrollado con Larry White, sobre el periodo free banking en Escocia y las críticas inadecuadas de Rothbard sobre esto, a las que contesta; las razones por las que el free banking no se espera en el futuro, hasta que la comunidad académica changes his mind… y alguna cosita más. Recomendable.

Más sobre George Selgin en este post sobre críticas a la banca central.