Hayek Program Podcast

Is our modern world the product of changing institutions or the result of shifting opinions about them? At a recent event hosted by the Hayek Program, Don Boudreaux and Deidre McCloskey explored this question in a fascinating discussion on the latest installment of Professor McCloskey’s Bourgeois Era Trilogy, 'Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World' (University of Chicago Press, 2016). This new volume challenges conventional wisdom about the causes of the wealth of nations and builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas – the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk – in creating the Great Enrichment from 1800 to today.

On Wednesday, April 25, 2012, the Hayek Program hosted a panel discussion on Hayek Program Distinguished Senior Fellow Lawrence H. White’s book, ‘The Clash of Economic Ideas: The Great Policy Debates and Experiments of the Last Hundred Years.’ This book interweaves the economic history of the last hundred years with the history of economic doctrines to understand how contrasting economic ideas have originated and developed over time to take their present forms. The discussion was chaired by Hayek Program Director Peter Boettke and included comments by Douglas Irwin, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, and Perry Mehrling, Professor of Economics at Barnard College. Professor White begins the panel with a discussion of the main contributions of his book, which is followed by comments from Professor Irwin and Professor Mehrling, respectively. Professor White concludes with a response to his commenters.

Mercatus Center Academic & Student Programs recently hosted the 2016 Advanced Austrian Seminar at which Dr. Israel M. Kirzner, Professor Emeritus of Economics at New York University, delivered the keynote lecture, “The History and Importance of the Austrian Theory of the Market Process.” In this talk, Professor Kirzner examines the history of thought in Austrian economics, specifically focusing on the developments in the 20th century, to develop a link between the Austrian theory of the market process and the notion of subjectivism as the central idea in Austrian economics.

On January 21, 2016, the Hayek Program hosted a book panel on Jacob Levy's 'Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom.' The panel included author Jacob Levy and panelists Peter Boettke, Alan Levine, and Richard Boyd. The panelists discussed whether the pressure between the rationalist suspicion of intermediate group power and the pluralist suspicion of the state can ever be reconciled in a liberal society.