For those of you who don’t know about “the name game” and Austro-musical chairs, I’ll try to draw up a quick timeline.

Peter Boettke, an Austrian economist and Professor at GMU, is a diligent and hard-working economist who I respect. Yesterday on the Austrian Economists blog (now the Coordination Problem blog) he announced the abandonment of the term “Austrian Economics” in favor of “Coordination Problem.” Here is his announcement. He disabled comments for that blog post.

Tyler Cowen mentioned the announcement on his Marginal Revolution blog, and comments are enabled. The comments range from great to awful to crazy to uncontrolled. I laughed hysterically while reading through all of them. Of course, even Tom Palmer – the Captain of the Lew Rockwell Hate Team – had to get his worthless two cents in. Generally, I don’t like to see people acting so trashy and using adolescent language, as with many of the comments. But then again, no one has been more lowbrow, vomitous, and hateful than Tom Palmer. He has no opportunity costs to sitting all day at the computer, blogging hate-filled treatises about Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute.

Then George Selgin – a top-notch economist – drops the comment: “Why didn’t you just change the blog name to “The economists formerly known as Austrian”? Funny stuff.

Here is Lew Rockwell’s comment on the name change. Says Lew:

I’d argue that addressing the intelligent layman as well as the academic, which was my strategy from the beginning, was based on Mises too. It was he who argued that economics was too important to be left to the economists, and who welcomed business and professional people into his seminar at NYU. Robert Nozick once said, at a dinner in honor of Mises, that this approach of Mises, and his ability to attact laypeople, stimulated the envy and hatred of other economists at NYU.

Then Robert Murphy chimes in.

Now look closely again at Boettke’s explanation. I realize this may strike some as gloating, but that can’t be helped: What Boettke is saying is that the people who decided to “take it to the common man” have been so overwhelmingly successful that the particular spin they put on “Austrian economics” has drowned out what the other camp wants people to think the term signifies. After all, I’m guessing it’s not as if citations to Hayek or Kirzner have dropped in 2008 and 2009, relative to five years earlier. Rather, it’s that people like Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, and–dare I say it?–Lew Rockwell have gotten the term “Austrian economics” into the public discussion in a previously inconceivably short time frame. Ron Paul used the term on Jay Leno, for crying out loud!

Then there is a good post by Robert Wenzel: “GMU Takes a Page Out of the ‘People of Color’ Book.” And lastly, Lew Rockwell makes this post after drinking too much leftover eggnog (just kidding Lew!).