Joseph T. Salerno

Joseph T. Salerno was born in 1950 in the United States to parents who had emigrated from Italy. As a teenager he was a conservative supporter of Barry Goldwater. When he enrolled at Boston College in 1968 he encountered libertarian ideas and left the conservatism of his youth behind. He has told the story of this path, which led him to Murray N. Rothbard and the Austrian School, in the essay “It Usually Ends with Murray Rothbard.” He earned his master’s degree and his PhD in economics at Rutgers University.

For decades he taught at the Lubin School of Business of Pace University in New York City, where he is now professor emeritus of economics. From 1991 to 2018 he was a research associate of the Foundations of the Market Economy program in the economics department of New York University. He is academic vice president of the Mises Institute and serves on its board of directors, and he is editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He held the inaugural Peterson-Luddy Chair in Austrian Economics at the Mises Institute and the inaugural John V. Denson II Endowed Professorship in the economics department at Auburn University.

He has published more than 70 articles and essays in refereed journals and scholarly books. His essays on money were collected in Money, Sound and Unsound (2010), and those on Mises and the classical economists in Nation, Migration, and Trade (2020). With Annette Godart-van der Kroon he edited The Austrian School of Economics in the 21st Century (Springer, 2022). With Patrick Newman he wrote the intellectual biography Murray N. Rothbard: The Making of an Austrian Economist (2026). He has testified before the US Congress several times.

Sources: Mises Institute — Joseph T. Salerno · Wikipedia — Joseph T. Salerno · Mises Institute — “It Usually Ends with Murray Rothbard”