The Great Antidote

Send us Fan Mail  Today, I am excited to host Anna Claire Flowers to discuss F. A. Hayek and the mesocosmos. The mesocosmos is a fancy way to describe all the social groupings on the spectrum between the extremes of individualism and society. Think families, neighborhoods, farmers markets, firms, and universities.  We talk about the importance of characterizing this missing middle piece of social...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back! Happy New Year! Glad to be back! Come one, come all! Eric Leeper is the Paul Goodloe McIntire Professor in Economics at the University of Virginia. He also is a visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center at GMU. Today, we talk about inflation . He explains to us how inflation theory has evolved and how we forgot about the relationship between the fiscal and monetary sid...

Send us Fan Mail Not often do we find people who make the case for how race, liberty, and equality belong together. Even less often do we find them making arguments in the height of racially and economically troubled times. And EVEN LESS do we find audio clips of them doing so.  These people are inspiring. They stand up against the currents of the time to speak their minds, for the benefit of ever...

Send us Fan Mail Adam Smith was a man who read the Stoics. He liked them, too, talking them up in The Theory of Moral Sentiments , particularly in the section on grief.  Then he lost two of his closest relations (old timey, right?), David Hume and his mother. These world-shaking events caused him to reevaluate what he said about grief in TMS and change our interpretation of his commentary on grief...

Send us Fan Mail This year’s Nobel Prize winners in economics are Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, who wrote on the importance of inclusive institutions to economic growth . But what on earth are ‘inclusive institutions’ and how do they differ from exclusive ones? Inclusive institutions are norms, either written or unwritten, about things like property rights , democracy, and the...

Send us Fan Mail Picture a policy conversation, perhaps in Washington, about national security. Who’s sitting around the table? It might be the President, national security advisors, military personnel, or generals, but not economists. And yet, national security is often used as a reason to intervene into the economy.  At the mention of national security, it seems economists often shut their mouth...

Send us Fan Mail How do you teach about a man who does not fit neatly into a box? Hayek is one such man, and today, we tackle the difficult task of putting him in a box. We conclude that we cannot put someone like F. A. Hayek into boxes such as “economist” or “philosopher” or “political theorist”, because he did it all. How and when do you teach the ideas of a man who did it all?  I’m excited to w...

Send us Fan Mail It’s often said that if you want to get to know someone, you should look through their garbage. Now, I don’t recommend this method of getting to know someone (it’s kind of gross). But biographers often have the luck of getting to know the people they study by looking through their stuff- that stuff not being actual garbage.  For example, Bruce Caldwell spent time with Hayek’s skis...

Send us Fan Mail The title of this episode might confuse you: what on earth do Adam Smith and F. A. Hayek have to say about social justice? A surprising amount, given how much we talk about it! Smith makes a big point of critiquing men of pride and vanity. What happens when those ultimately negative aspects of humanity go too far, into the territory of what he calls “domineering”? What happens whe...

Send us Fan Mail The month of October 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of F. A. Hayek winning the Nobel Prize . Winning such a prize is obviously a big deal, but someone wins one every year, so what’s the big deal about this guy?  Well. Hayek’s contributions to the field of economics are significant because they spoke to more than simply economics. Spontaneous order, price signals as information, a...

Send us Fan Mail  Do you ever take a moment to think about the fact that Americans, the people of the land of the free, spent 13 years under Prohibition ? Did you know that Americans used to seriously “drink like a fish”? And no, I’m not talking about fraternity men in college. I’m talking about everyone, everywhere, from George Washington’s parties to lunchtimes in the manufacturing factories (un...

Send us Fan Mail What does it actually mean to run a think tank, to create harmony within an office building full of idea-confident folk? Some have called the think tank a monastery, some have called it an academic social club, and some have even called it a policy incubator. What truly is it and how on earth do you lead one?  Leading a think tank is a multifaceted job, because you have your own s...

Send us Fan Mail Even though I hope you’ve been avoiding the election news like I have (as you would the plague), admittedly, it’s hard to do. It’s like someone is blasting it outside your window at 5 AM. Or like a billboard outside your front door that you can’t help but see every time you step outside. Bummer.   Fortunately, AEI’s wonderful Yuval Levin joins us today to talk about the remedy to...

Send us Fan Mail Growth is essential to human life. Always has been, always will be. From the moment we are born, we grow, and we continue to throughout our lives, whether that is physically, mentally, or otherwise. Societies grow too. But what is growth? Real growth is replicable, durable, and sustainable (and not in the sense that immediately comes to mind). Your seven-year-old doesn’t shrink ba...

Send us Fan Mail Some questions are hard to ask. Some questions you don’t want to ask. Some questions are hard for you to hear the answers to. Like, how do you tell someone, politely, that they eat with their mouth open? Between a rock and a hard place, you know you gotta do it. You really don’t want to, but you know you can’t stand to watch it anymore either. Candace Smith is a wonderful teacher...

Send us Fan Mail What does it mean for something to be ESG when two of those words are adjectives and one is a noun? I mean think about it. “Environmental, social, and governance” doesn’t really describe anything. It’s also a good example of cacophony. So can someone please explain what it means?  Today, luckily, Paul Mueller , senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research...

Send us Fan Mail What’s in a price? Good question. How can you be “enslaved” to something like a price, to something that doesn’t eat, sleep, or breathe? Good question. What does it mean to wage a war against this inanimate enslaver? Good question.  Join me today with Ryan Bourne , the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato institute. Bourne paints a picture of...

Send us Fan Mail Michael Cannon is the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies and it is his third time on the podcast. He has been on The Washingtonian’s list of most influential people for four years in a row.  Today, we talk about why people think the American healthcare system is “free market” and the role of prices in determining health outcomes--- and how unfettered markets improv...

Send us Fan Mail Charles Noussair is the Eller Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona and the Director of the Economic Science Laboratory. He also serves as the President of the Economic Science Association. Today, we talk about experimental economics , how it complements other types of economic research, and how economic experiments are conducted. He tells us about a recent macro exp...

Send us Fan Mail Sandra Peart is a Distinguished Professor of Leadership Studies and the President of the Jepson Scholars Foundation at the University of Richmond, as well as a coauthor of Towards an Economics of Natural Equals: A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School , with David Levy. She is also a distinguished fellow of the history of economics society. Today we talk about the impor...

Send us Fan Mail Daniel Di Martino is a PhD candidate in Economics at Columbia University and a graduate fellow at the Manhattan Institute—where he focuses on high-skill immigration policy. He also founded the Dissident Project to teach high school students about the evils of socialist regimes. Today we talk about his life in Venezuela and the economic realities he faced growing up, particularly i...

Send us Fan Mail Anne Bradley is an economics professor at the Institute of World Politics and the Vice President of Academic Affairs at The Fund for American Studies. Today, we talk about the political economy of terrorism: what terrorism is, what makes a terrorist, and what the war on terror does to attempt to prevent terrorism. We talk about how economics is uniquely positioned to pose question...

Send us Fan Mail Craig Richardson is a professor of economics at Winston-Salem State University, and the director of the Center for the Study of Economic Mobility there. Today, we talk about a ton of things, from a breakdown of compelling narratives to magic. He tells us why Elizabeth Warren is more interesting to listen to than economists, although she doesn’t understand economics as well as econ...

Send us Fan Mail Dan Klein is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Today, He talks to us about another of Smith’s great ideas: self-command. We discuss what the difference between command and control is, and how its important in today’s society. He describes the prideful man and the vain man, including details such as their reactions to unwanted estimation (usually bad, not valuing...

Send us Fan Mail Katherine Mangu-Ward is the editor-in-chief of Reason: the Magazine for Free Minds and Free Markets . Today, we talk about what it is like to be an editor-in-chief and what that job description actually entails. She talks to us about the recent AI issue of Reason , in which they grapple with the big questions regarding the future of AI, what the valid concerns are, and what the le...