The preaching must never stop: Remembering Larry Moss

In 1988, Sandra Peart was a graduate student who worked at that year's meeting of the History of Economics Society in Toronto. Twenty years later she reflected on that conference in her presidential address to the same group: "I spent most of my time sitting behind a registration desk taking names. Since I knew hardly any of you at that time, few of you made an impression. I remember two young snappy dressers, Larry Moss and Roger Koppl, arriving together, talking a mile a minute, demanding attention" (Peart 2009: 3). I remember that conference, too. It was the first time I had met Larry in person, and we hit it off right away, as Sandy's story suggests. He was easy to talk to. Larry read widely--and he listened. Larry was open. For a new Ph.D. in the Austrian tradition, Larry's openness was refreshing and helpful. In those days many of us in the "Austrian" school thought we had the truth and the rest of the world had to come to us. I never liked that attitude. Thus, it was a glorious thing on a warm summer evening in Toronto to meet Larry Moss in person. He moved smoothly between neoclassical and Austrian arguments without feeling he had crossed any great divide. He knew the history of economic thought without feeling an obligation to pick heros and villains. Sandy was right, we were talking a mile a minute. And we did demand attention; conference registration was getting in the way of more talking! I was excited to talk to Larry in part because he was one of the original participants in the Austrian revival that began in June 1974 with the famous South Royalton conference. He was among the happy few who were there in South Royalton! I learned in Toronto that his history with the Austrian school began much earlier. With a characteristic mixture of pride and self-deprecation, he told me about the day he and a friend knocked on Ludwig von Mises's apartment door in Manhattan. These two young high school students thought Professor Mises might be interested in a periodical they liked called The Freeman and wouldn't he like to buy a subscription? They did not know that The Freeman was created mostly as a vehicle for Mises's ideas. (1) It seems they were surprised to learn from Mrs. Mises, who answered the door, that Professor Mises was already familiar with that particular publication and was currently subscribed, thank you. Larry would finally meet Mises in person when, at the age of 19, he began attending Mises's famous NYU seminar (Moss 1976a: 6). I was also excited to talk to Larry in Toronto because of two of his publications from 1976. Larry edited a re-publication of Israel Kirzner's classic The Economic Point of View (Kirzner [1960] 1976), and he edited a collection of essays on Mises entitled The Economics of Ludwig yon Mises: Toward a Critical Reappraisal (Moss 1976a). These were two of the earliest books published by Sheed and Ward (later Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel) as part of the Austrian revival. They were published in the series "Studies in Economic Theory," which Larry edited. Larry's introduction to The Economic Point of View notes that "applied economics [had] become synonymous with trying to change the behavior or specific values of statistical aggregates." He was right to object to such methodological narrowness, which prevailed at the time. "If, however, one considers the most important task of applied economics to be the discovery of the type of institutional structure that provides for the greatest coordination of individual plans and efforts, then the subjective character of the discipline is brought to the forefront" (Moss 1976b: xi-xii). Larry's introduction to The Economics of Ludwig von Mises concludes with a passage that captures something essential to both the economics of Ludwig von Mises and the character of Laurence S. Moss. After attending Mises's seminar for a period, Larry, who was still an undergraduate, invited him to speak at his college. The school newspaper asked him to write an article on Mises to publicize the talk. …