Joseph Salerno

Joseph T. Salerno

Austrian School
Nationality	United States
Institution	Pace University
Influences	Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises

Joseph T. Salerno is an Austrian School economist in the United States. A professor at Pace University, Salerno is an active scholar in the areas of banking and monetary theory, comparative economics, and the history of economic thought.

Early life

In an autobiographical essay, Salerno describes his parents as "first generation Italian-Americans." Salerno says that after witnessing his "New Deal Democrat" father's disdain for a relative who declared himself a communist:

I quickly became an ardent anti-Communist but knew little else about politics or political philosophy until Barry Goldwater began to campaign for the Republican nomination for President when I was 13 years old. His firebrand anti-Communism greatly appealed to me at the time and after reading an article about him in Life Magazine in late 1963, I became aware of the conservative-liberal political spectrum and immediately proclaimed myself a conservative, much to my father’s chagrin.

Education

It was while he was a high school student that Salerno read Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative as well as Ayn Rand's Anthem and Atlas Shrugged and determined that he wanted to study economics. In 1968, Salerno began his freshman year at Boston College. While attending Boston College as an undergraduate, Salerno encountered an article written by Murray Rothbard and was converted to what Salerno describes as "the pure libertarian position... anarchocapitalism." It was this experience that Salerno credits with piquing his interest in the Austrian School.

Upon his graduation from Boston College in 1972, Salerno enrolled in the graduate economics program at Rutgers University from which he received his Ph.D. in 1980. Salerno attended the seminal June 1974 Austrian economics conference in South Royalton, Vermont.^{[citation needed]}

Career in economics

Salerno is a professor of economics at Pace University. He is also the chair of the economics graduate program. He is also a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, for which he frequently lectures and writes, and he serves as editor of the Institute's Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Salerno wrote an introduction for and edited the 2002 and 2005 Mises Institute editions of Murray Rothbard's A History of Money and Banking in the United States.

He has written scholarly articles on:

• Monetary theory and Policy
• Banking
• Comparative economic systems
• History of economic thought
• Macroeconomic analysis

Salerno's writings on the history of thought in economics has been cited by Peter Boettke (who also uses Salerno's work in his classes at George Mason University), Israel Kirzner, and others.

Praise of Hans Sennholz

He has notably praised Hans Sennholz as an under-appreciated member of the Austrian School who "writes so clearly on such a broad range of topics that he is in danger of suffering the same fate as Say and Bastiat. As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, these two brilliant nineteenth-century French economists, who were also masters of economic rhetoric, wrote with such clarity and style that their work was misjudged by their British inferiors as "shallow" and "superficial."

Bibliography

• Money, Sound and Unsound (Full Text; ISBN 978-1-933550-93-0) (2010)

External links

• Pace University faculty biography
• Mises.org faculty biography
• Mises.org Salerno daily articles archive
• Mises.org Salerno media archive
• Autobiography detailing Salerno's intellectual development