Hayek Program Podcast

We're celebrating 300 years of Adam Smith! On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, we'll hear a keynote from the 2023 Markets & Society conference given by Emma Rothschild, the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University. In this lecture, Emma Rothschild begins by building an understanding of Adam Smith's conception of markets. She reanalyzes Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor, challenging the traditional interpretation and suggesting that it might not primarily refer to markets or economic equilibrium but rather the economics of uncertainty and trust. Emma also discusses Frank Knight, F.A. Hayek, Smith's frustration with the frivolity of markets, the abolition of feudalism, the four bad markets, Smith's hope for the future, and more.

This lecture is part of the University of Glasgow’s Smith@300: Celebrating Adam Smith as Scholar, Educator, and Citizen supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

The introduction is given by Craig Smith.

Read more about Emma Rothschild.

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Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season two, now releasing!

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CC Music: Twisterium

Welcome back to the Environmental Economics series, hosted by Jordan Lofthouse. On this episode, he interviews Bobbi Herzberg on a polycentric approach to solving climate change. Bobbi and Jordan discuss the importance and meaning of "polycentricity", how we can vote with our feet, major themes from public choice, Elinor Ostrom's work on climate change, and the six advantages that polycentric systems have for coping with climate change: (1) competition among decision makers, (2) cooperation among decision makers, (3) perceptions of legitimacy that lead to coproduction, (4) mutual learning through experimentation, (5) institutional resilience/robustness, and (6) emergent outcomes that are socially desirable but not centrally planned.

Bobbi Herzberg is a Distinguished Senior Fellow for the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow. Previously, she served as assistant director of individual freedom & free markets at the John Templeton Foundation, as administrative director of The Institute of Political Economy, and as president of the Public Choice Society from 2014-2016.

Check out Jordan Lofthouse's work.

Referenced Works: Jordan and Bobbi's "The Continuing Case for a Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change", Elinor Ostrom's "A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change"

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season two, now releasing!

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

This week, Peter Boettke interviews Jennifer Burns, author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Milton Friedman achieved tremendous sucess as an economist including being a John Bates Clark Medal winner, a Nobel Prize winner, and the president of the American Economic Association (AEA). In this episode, they discuss Friedman's time at Columbia University, the origin of his economic theory, the influence of Frank Knight, Friedman's female coauthors including Anna Schwartz and Rose Friedman, Friedman's association to conservatism, and more.

Jennifer Burns is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. She is the author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (November, 2023) and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009). An expert on this history of conservative ideas and politics, she has written for The NewYork Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Dissent, and has discussed her work on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

This episode of the Hayek Program Podcast is a special crossover episode from Virtual Sentiments, S1E9, with a special introduction by Jayme Lemke to celebrate the start of Season 2! Go check out S2E1 of Virtual Sentiments featuring Christopher Coyne today!

On this, the last episode of Season 1 of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen Collins interviews Eileen Hunt, a Professor and Political Theorist at the University of Notre Dame, on Mary Shelley and the Ethics of AI. Hunt begins by providing historical context of Mary Shelley regarding her parents and Shelley as a child of the Enlightenment. Hunt explains the interdisciplinary nature of Mary Shelley’s work, rooted in a Grecian philosophical past and concerned with future-oriented questions about the rights of human beings, tying in Mary Shelley’s famous Gothic novel, Frankenstein, to modern considerations of the ethics and rights of artificial life. She encourages us to think of ourselves as artificial, technological creatures and to contemplate the rights of all artificial creatures, including humans and other forms of artificial intelligence. Additionally, Hunt discusses issues of genetic engineering, humanity as a built environment, Jeremy Bentham and reproductive justice.

Read more about Eileen Hunt.

Read more work from Kristen Collins.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

Continuing our series on Enviromental Economics, host Jordan Lofthouse chats with Katie Wright about sustainability, extensive and intensive margins, intellectual humility in statistical analysis, how her experience in Mercatus fellowships has aided her research, the nature of the water scarcity problem in the Western United States, and more.

Katherine (Katie) Wright is a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). She is an expert on water policy and her current work includes exploration of solutions to western water scarcity. Katie is an alum of the Mercatus Oskar Morgenstern Fellowship.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode, we’ll hear a book panel discussion on Randall Holcombe’s book, Following Their Leaders: Political Preferences and Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In it, Holcombe examines how expressive voting preferences are determined and how we tend to adopt the preferences of the political elite. The panel is moderated by Christopher J. Coyne, and they are joined on the panel by:

• Roger D. Congleton, Truist Professor of Economics at West Virginia University
• Bobbi Herzberg, Distinguished Senior Fellow for the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow
• Michael C. Munger, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program at Duke University

Randall G. Holcombe is the DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

Welcome to our new series, Environmental Economics, hosted by Jordan Lofthouse!

Jordan Lofthouse sits down with Megan Jenkins to talk about endangered species, Prairie dogs in cemeteries, issues of incentive alignment, the rise of private conservation, the willing buyer and willing seller approach, and more.

Megan E. Jenkins is the Senior Director of Research at the Center for Growth and Opportunity where she manages the Center’s portfolio of policy-relevant research while ensuring student fellows receive quality mentorship and hands-on research experience. Megan is an alum of the Mercatus Frédéric Bastiat Fellowship. To learn more about her work at CGO.

Learn more about the Center for Growth and Opportunity's fellowships.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode, we complete our three-part miniseries on Civil Society, hosted by Mikayla Novak who explores civil society, encompassing the practical nature of voluntary mutual assistance outside but entangled with the domains of market and state, the theoretical dimensions of civil society, and the intersection of classical liberalism and civil society.

Joining Novak for this episode is Paul Dragos Aligica, discussing the impact of growing up in communist Romania, the importance of human freedom, the "third sector" or voluntary and nonprofit sectors, the variety of institutional organizational forms associated to civil society, Ostromian polycentricity, checking central power, and more.

Paul Dragos Aligica is a senior research fellow and senior fellow at the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Learn more about his work.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Rosolino Candela interviews Peter Boettke on his most recent book, The Road to Socialism and Back: An Economic History of Poland, 1939-2019, coauthored with Konstantin Zhukov and Matthew Mitchell.

Pete and Rosolino dive into the world of scarcity and limited information, discussing the road to socialism and back. What does socialism lead to? What is necessary for countries to transition from poverty to wealth? Why did Poland do better than its neighbors? Have we overcome poverty today?

They answer these questions and more and discuss the transitional gains trap, factors of recovery such as overcoming the pathology of privilege, shock therapy vs. gradualism and the issues with simultaneity, and the importance of critical people at critical times.

Peter Boettke is Vice President for Advanced Study, Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, as well as the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and a Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University.

*Recorded on August 17, 2023.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

On this special crossover episode, Ideas of India podcast host, Shruti Rajagopalan, interviews Peter Boettke on Austrian economics and the knowledge problem. In this, the second half of their conversation, Boettke speaks on the feasibility of technosocialism, why artificial intelligence will not solve the knowledge problem, what many economists throughout history misunderstood about the market process, mainline vs. mainstream economics and more.

If you liked this two-part series with Shruti Rajagopalan, go check out the Ideas of India Podcast!

Shruti Rajagopalan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, a Fellow at the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University School of Law, and host of the Ideas of India Podcast. Previously, she was an Associate Professors of Economics at Purchase College, State University of New York.

Learn more about Shruti Rajagopalan's work here.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium