Policy@McCombs

Human Smuggling is Underrated substack

Luigi Achilli

Philippe Lemoine joins Salem Center visiting scholar Richard Hanania to discuss epidemiology in the US and across the globe.

Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works.

His TED talk "When Ideas Have Sex" has been viewed more than two million times.

He writes a weekly column in The Times (London) and writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal.

As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to the House of Lords in February 2013. He served on the science and technology select committee 2014-2017.

With BA and DPhil degrees from Oxford University, Matt Ridley worked for the Economist for nine years as science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman.

He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock plc and Northern 2 VCT plc.

He also commissioned the Northumberlandia landform sculpture and country park.

He founded the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010.

He won the Hayek Prize in 2011, the Julian Simon award in 2012 and the Free Enterprise Award from the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014.

He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is honorary president of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle.

He has honorary doctorates from Buckingham University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and University Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala.

He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert.

They have two children and live in Northumberland in the north of England.

Bryan Caplan interviews Richard Hanania, head of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, on international relations, war, peace, sanctions, grand strategy (and the lack thereof), partisanship, ideology, wokeness, academia, discrimination, civil rights, legal reform, and Hanania’s unique career path

Jay Battacharya is a Professor of Economics and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University.

Dr. Tyler Goodspeed is the Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2020-21 he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President, having previously served as Member, Chief Economist for Macroeconomic Policy, and Senior Economist for public finance and macroeconomics. Before joining the Council, he was a Junior Fellow in Economics at the University of Oxford, and Lecturer in Economics at King’s College London. His primary research and teaching fields are economic history and monetary economics, with secondary interests in macroeconomics and political economy. Prior to earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2014, he received his A.B. from Harvard, summa cum laude, in 2008, and from 2008-2009 was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. 

Goodspeed’s second book, Legislating Instability, examines the effects of unlimited liability and regulatory capture on financial stability in “free banking” Scotland.  He also has a recent book, Famine and Finance, on the market for small loans during the Great Famine of Ireland, as well as companion articles in the Journal of Development Economics and World Bank Economic Review.  Tyler’s current research focuses on British and North American economic history, with particular attention to informal banking and the political economy of financial regulation, as well as long-run economic development.  Previously, in his first book, Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution, he analyzed the debates between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, considering the relevance of those debates to contemporary monetary economics.  He is also an avid distance runner.

Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is currently the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Brennan writes about democratic theory, the ethics of voting, competence and power, freedom, and the moral foundations of commercial society. His work focuses on the intersection of normative political philosophy and the empirical social sciences, especially on questions about voter behavior, pathologies of democracy, and the consequences of freedom. He argues that most citizens have a moral obligation not to vote.

Dr. Charles Calomiris joins Dr. Scott Bauguess and Dr. Cesare Fracassi to discuss FinTech. 

Charles W. Calomiris is the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Business School and a Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He recently served as Chief Economist and Senior Deputy Comptroller at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Professor Calomiris is a member of the Financial Economists Roundtable, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he co-directed the Initiative on Regulation and the Rule of Law for many years. Professor Calomiris received a BA in economics from Yale and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. His research spans banking, monetary economics, corporate finance and financial history. His recent writings include studies using textual analysis to measure the consequences of risk for international equity markets, foreign exchange markets, regulatory costs, and monetary policy actions, studies of the consequences for investment and growth of capital inflows into emerging economies, and studies of the origins of banking crises and the role of government policies in magnifying or mitigating systemic risk, including his recent books, Fragile By Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (with Stephen Haber), Princeton, 2014, and Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank, Manhattan Institute, 2017, and two edited volumes, Rules for the Lender of Last Resort, Journal of Financial Intermediation, 2016, and Assessing Banking Regulation During the Obama Era, Journal of Financial Intermediation, 2018. He currently is working on a book entitled Useless History and the Future of Banking.

Three writers with different approaches to foreign policy reflect on 20 years of America’s military response to 9/11.

Speakers:

Peter Brookes, (Heritage Foundation) 

Senior Research Fellow, Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counter Proliferation, Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy

Elan Journo (Ayn Rand Institute)

Specializes in the application of Rand’s ethics of rational egoism to public policy issues, and his research and writing focus on American foreign policy.

Justin Logan (Cato Institute) 

Expert on U.S. grand strategy, international relations theory, and American foreign policy

Moderator: Gregory Salmieri (Salem Center)

Director of Program for Objectivity in Thought, Action, and Enterprise