[hga]

Popular in academia doesn't mean right, and at least one Austrian (Hayek) won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics; note that it's not a real Nobel and the committee's notorious practice of giving the award to so many people with radically and incompatibly different theories shows it's poor guidance about the truth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Economi... for a start).

The Austrians deserve respect if for no other reason being one of the "last men standing". The stagflation of the '70s should have put a stake in the heart of the neo-Keynesians, but the lure of "borrow, spend (and then get reelected)" is obviously too strong for most politicians (Keynes' advice that you pay back the borrowing in good items was at best naive, although upon rare occasion it has been followed).

Paying much attention to the officially popular in academia after watching the last 3 years of failure of their nostrums (and two decades in Japan) just doesn't strike me as a good use of the time of a beginner. Better to study a school like the Austrians that hasn't been falsified by the real world multiple times.