Cultural Considerations within Austrian Economics

We consider three important differences of Austrian approaches to economics compared to non-Austrian: focus on culture as meaning rather than as norms, beliefs, or attitudes; emphasis on culture as an interpretative lens rather than a tool of capital; and insistence that cultural analysis be a qualitative exercise rather than a quantitative one.

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Increasingly, economists realize that a deeper understanding of culture can improve their insights into the most important questions in economics. The Austrian school of political economy, which has always taken economics to be a science of meaning, and therefore, a science of culture, offers a unique approach to the study of culture in economic life. We consider three important differences between these Austrian and non-Austrian approaches: the Austrian focus on culture as meaning rather than culture as norms, beliefs, or attitudes; the Austrian emphasis on culture as an interpretative lens rather than as a tool or form of capital; and the Austrian insistence that cultural analysis be a qualitative exercise rather than a quantitative one. We also examine Geertz's description of culture, Gadamer's approach to hermeneutics, and Weber's interpretative sociology, demonstrating their connections to the Austrian approach and offering examples of what Austrian cultural economics can look like.