All scholars dream of having one or more disciples who will make sure their legacy is kept alive and their works and theories prominently trumpeted before the public eye.
For the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, there was quite a following, including two couples, Hans and Mary Sennholz, and Percy and Bettina Greaves. On January 22 the last of the four, Bettina Bien Greaves, died at the astounding age of 100. (Mary Sennholz also lived to be 100. Austrian economists live long!)
Bettina Greaves deserves to be honored as Mises’ most devoted student, and in July a room will be dedicated to her at the annual FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas.
From the time she first heard Mises speak in 1951 at a Freeman seminar in Washington Square in New York City, Bettina was smitten. With a background in shorthand and secretarial work during the war years, she attended Mises’ famous New York University graduate seminar, taking copious notes on every lecture from 1951 until 1969. Although she had no formal training in economics, Greaves was the queen of the Austrian school and never deviated from it. She joined the Foundation of Economic Education (FEE) staff in 1953 and worked at the FEE mansion for the rest of her career. She survived everyone, including founder Leonard Read. After retiring, she stayed on as a board member and even donated her home in New York to FEE.
Bettina Bien Greaves was an uncompromising advocate of liberty, and will always be an inspiration to aspiring Austrian economists, and scholars everywhere.
I met her a few times when I visited FEE headquarters. My favorite Bettina Greaves story came from 2001, when I became president of FEE. After my first board meeting, Bettina came up to me and said privately, "I support you in every way as the new president. But could you do me a favor? Please be more critical of Milton Friedman!"
I nodded, and she left the room. A few minutes later another board member, Muso Ayau, came over to me. He was the founder of the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and a former president of the Mont Pelerin Society. He whispered, "Mark, I support you in every way as the new president of FEE, but could you do me a favor? Stop being so critical of Milton Friedman!" I’ll never forget it. I told this story to Milton and he had a belly laugh.
Bettina was a true believer in Austrian economics, and always sided with Mises when it came to differences between him and Milton Friedman and the Chicago school. (I’ve written a book on the differences, entitled Vienna and Chicago, Friends or Foes? A Tale of Two Schools of Free-Market Economics [Capital Press, 2005].) She focused her career on advancing the works and ideas of the Austrian school, including the contributions by Henry Hazlitt and Hans Sennholz. She wrote many articles for The Freeman, gave lectures, and compiled anthologies about Austrian economics. She spearheaded FEE’s program to provide libertarian material for high school debaters with packets on foreign aid, government regulations, medical care, and other issues. She compiled and edited Free Market Economics: A Syllabus, and A Basic Reader, a two-volume set that was distributed to thousands of students and teachers. After her husband’s death in 1984, she kept alive Percy Greaves’ lively interest in the controversies surrounding Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, and wrote several Freeman articles on events that led up to that day of infamy, December 7, 1941.
But her main interest was always in her mentor, Ludwig von Mises. As Margit von Mises noted, Bettina studied “line by line, word for word” her husband’s writings. Bettina and her husband traveled with Lu and Margit to Argentina, Mexico, and other foreign lands where Mises lectured. (She spoke fluent Spanish and German.) She compiled, edited, and translated many of his books after his death in 1973. She also worked with her husband Percy to make Mises’s writings more understandable to the public. It was published in 1974, called Mises Made Easier (but never easy!). With the help of Robert W. McGee, she published an exhaustive Mises: An Annotated Bibliography (FEE, 1993, 1995). When the Liberty Fund decided to publish the complete works of Mises, Bettina was asked to be the editor, writing introductions for each volume.
Bettina Bien Greaves was an uncompromising advocate of liberty, and will always be an inspiration to aspiring Austrian economists, and scholars everywhere. ¡Bien hecho!
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Editor’s note: Bettina Greaves was a loved and valued Contributing Editor of Liberty. Readers can find her articles and reviews from November 1997, “To the Dialecticians of All Parties,” to November 2008, “War from Six Sides,” by clicking here. More biographical information can be found in Jim Powell’s article, “A Salute to Bettina Bien Greaves,” July 1, 1997, on the FEE website.
