This is a katry daily podcast for Monday, March 20th,

20th, 2023. I'm Caleb Brown. This is a podcast in appreciation of the

great Austrian economist is Kursner.

And who better to talk about him than someone who's learned so much from him?

George Mason University Economics Professor Pete Beepke, we spoke last week.

This podcast is apropos of exactly nothing.

There is no news hook, although, you know, after I reached out to you, I noticed that the subject of our

podcast celebrated a birthday, which was not, again, not a hook for this discussion. This is a podcast in appreciation of Israel Kursner, who I think I first became acquainted with with lectures that he had given for at the Foundation for Economic Education many years ago

and I became acquainted with a bunch of his ideas, in particular the Kursnerian entrepreneur.

But before we get into that specifically, what should we appreciate about the work of Israel Kirsner?

Well, that's a great question, Caleb.

I mean, there is Kirsner the scholar.

For those of us who pursue an academic path,

he represents a kind of old school scholar that took his craft very seriously. I had the amazing opportunity to work

with him very closely for eight years at New York University and I don't know in my entire career whether I not have ever met a more dedicated person to the craft of teaching and of seriousness of scholarship and whatnot and so that's the lesson to academics I think

but you know not not everyone's an academic and those are very personal characteristics.

And so I think that to the general audience it's the quality of his mind communicated in his attention to detail and argument and the sort of

generosity he had in dealing with his critics and the way that he always presented their argument in the best

possible light steel mandate as we say today rather than straw mandate and so he's an exemplar I think of the scholarly life and also of the

rigorous way to approach you know this the subject matter of economics.

And I'll say one other thing, which is that is very out of fashion today.

But Kursner cares about the extended conversation in economics that goes all the way back to before Adam Smith to today and the carefulness with which he interacted with various texts through the years

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