Speaker Series: "Markets and Morals"

Anne Rathbone Bradley is the George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the academic director at The Fund for American Studies (TFAS), and also delivers lectures around the country and oversees curriculum development and evaluation for economics courses. In addition, Bradley continues to teach economics courses to TFAS students and consistently receives outstanding marks in students’ post-program evaluations.

Previously, Bradley served as the vice president of economic initiatives at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, where she continues research on a systematic biblical theology of economic freedom. In addition, she is a professor of economics at the Institute for World Politics and Grove City College and a visiting professor at George Mason University, and has previously taught at Georgetown University and Charles University in Prague. She is currently an Acton Affiliate scholar and a visiting scholar at the Bernard Center for Women, Politics & Public Policy. She is also a lecturer for the Institute for Humane Studies and the Foundation for Economic Education.

Bradley is coeditor and author of Counting the Cost: Christian Perspectives on Capitalism, For the Least of These: A Biblical Answer to Poverty, and Be Fruitful and Multiply: Why Economics Is Necessary for Making God-Pleasing Decisions.

Bradley served as the associate director for the Program in Economics, Politics, and the Law at the James M. Buchanan Center at George Mason University. Her academic work includes the question of income inequality and economic freedom as well as the political economy of terrorism, with specific emphasis on the industrial organization of al-Qaeda. Her academic research has been published in scholarly journals and edited volumes. Bradley is currently working on a book that analyzes the political economy of al-Qaeda post-9/11. Based on her academic research, she also worked as an economic analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Terrorism Analysis.

Bradley received her PhD in economics from George Mason University in 2006, during which time she was a James M. Buchanan Scholar.

Talks:

TBD

Antony Davies is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and associate professor of economics at Duquesne University. Davies cohosts Words & Numbers, a weekly podcast on economics and policy, and is coauthor of Cooperation & Coercion (ISI Books, 2020), both with James R. Harrigan. He has written books on statistics, economics, and public policy, and has coauthored hundreds of op-eds for, among others, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. In addition to his academic work, Davies was associate producer at the Moving Pictures Institute, CFO at Parabon Computation, and founded several technology companies. Davies earned his BS in economics from Saint Vincent College and a PhD in economics from the State University of New York at Albany.

Talks:

“Government Debt and Deficit: The Collision of Politics, Economics, and Mathematics”

“Modern Monetary Theory: What It Is and What It Can and Cannot Achieve”

“Who Benefits and Who Loses from the Minimum Wage”

“How the Estate Tax Benefits the Rich and Harms the Poor”

“The World Is Becoming a Better Place”

“Opportunity, Diversity, and Inequality”

“The Rise and Fall of Social Security”

“The Economic Benefits of Immigration”

“Public Choice Economics: Humans Are Humans, No Matter Where They Work”

James R. Harrigan is managing director of the Center for Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona, and the F.A. Hayek Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also cohost of the Words & Numbers podcast and coauthor of Cooperation & Coercion (ISI Books, 2020), both with Antony Davies. Harrigan was previously dean of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, and later served as director of academic programs at the Institute for Humane Studies and Strata, where he was also Senior Research Fellow. He has written extensively for the popular press, with articles appearing in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and a host of other outlets. His current work focuses on the intersections between political economy, public policy, and political philosophy.

Talks:

“The Importance of Rights”

“The Founding Era”

“The Federalist”

“The Anti-Federalist Writings”

“The Pre-Revolutionary Period: 1760–1776”

“The United States Constitution”

“Political Philosophy: Plato to Nietzsche”

“Pop Culture”

Talks:

“Cooperation and Coercion”

“Socialism, Capitalism, and Transferism”

“The Importance of Arguing Principles Instead of Outcomes”

“Central Planning and Spontaneous Order”

“Regulation and Unintended Consequences: Be Careful What You Wish For”

“How Americans’ Concept of Government Has Changed”

Dan Hammond is Hultquist Family Professor of Economics (emeritus) at Wake Forest University. He spent his entire career at Wake Forest. He taught a variety of courses in areas such as monetary finance, international trade, and natural-resource economics. But his bread-and-butter course was introductory economics. Dan collaborated on the two economics courses in the ISI Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) program. He has also been a frequent faculty member in the ISI Honors Program.

Talks:

“Adam Smith, Commercial Society, and the American Founding”

This talk introduces students to Adam Smith and the ideas found in The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It considers the nature of commerce and of a society organized chiefly through trading, the primary theme of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The talk concludes with discussion of the influence Adam Smith had on the American Founders.

“Markets and Culture”

This talk focuses on the relationship between markets and culture. Critics of markets and commerce, and of economists for their endorsement of markets, often charge that markets corrupt culture. Are the arguments sound? Are there sound arguments on the other side, that markets support healthy culture? We consider and weigh arguments on both sides, drawing on sources such as Patrick Deneen, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk.

“Economists and Liberty: A Friendly Critique”

The focus of this talk is the meaning and value of liberty as understood by the two most prominent classical-liberal economists of the 20th century—F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. We evaluate Hayek’s and Friedman’s ideas on liberty in light of the traditional understanding of liberty in the writings of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Popes Leo XIII and John Paul II.

“How the Dismal Science Got Its Name”

Is economics a “dismal science”? This talk on the history of 19th-century economics draws on David Levy’s book by the same title. The story of how economics was first labeled “the dismal science” is not well known. Nor is the meaning that was first attached to this label well understood. “Dismal science” did not refer to economists’ claim that there are no free lunches—that everything has a cost. This talk exposes the surprising true story of how economics came to be given this label.

Jay W. Richards is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012). He is also the author of Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; and coauthor of The Privileged Planet with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. His most recent book, coauthored with Jonathan Witt, is The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that J.R.R. Tolkien Got and the West Forgot.

Richards is research assistant professor in the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, and executive editor of The Stream. In recent years he has been Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, contributing editor of The American at the American Enterprise Institute, Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and Research Fellow and director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute.

Richards’s articles and essays have been published in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the Washington Post, Forbes, the Daily Caller, Investor’s Business Daily, the Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Huffington Post, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and a wide variety of other publications. He is a regular contributor to National Review Online, the Christian Research Journal, and the Imaginative Conservative. His topics range from culture, economics, and public policy to natural science, technology, and the environment.

He is also creator and executive producer of several documentaries, including three that appeared widely on PBS—The Call of the Entrepreneur, The Birth of Freedom, and The Privileged Planet.

Richards’s work has been covered in the New York Times (front page news, science news, and editorial), the Washington Post (news and editorial), the Wall Street Journal, Nature, Science, Astronomy, Physics Today, Reuters, the Chronicle of Higher Education, American Enterprise, Congressional Quarterly Researcher, and many others.

An experienced public speaker, Richards has appeared on several hundred radio and television programs, including Larry King Live, Huckabee, Fox and Friends, Studio B with Shepard Smith, Yahoo Finance, Life Today, and many others.

He has lectured at conferences sponsored by organizations as diverse as the Western Economic Association, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Evangelical Theological Society; on dozens of college and university campuses; at think tanks, including the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the New America Foundation, and the Heritage Foundation; at numerous public policy meetings, such as the Heritage Resource Bank, the Council for National Policy, and the Atlas Freedom Forum; in Christian forums such as Legatus and Catholic Professionals; and on several occasions to members of the U.S. Congress and U.S. congressional staff. In January 2008, his debate with the late Christopher Hitchens at Stanford University, moderated by Ben Stein and Michael Cromartie, was broadcast live to several hundred North American churches.

Richards has a PhD, with honors, in philosophy and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. He also has an MDiv , a ThM, and a BA with majors in political science and religion. He lives with his family in the Washington, DC, metro area.

Talks:

“The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe”

“Socialism: What It Is and Why It’s Bad”

“Artificial Intelligence and the Myth of Materialism”

“Happiness, Economics, and the Good Life”

Joseph Pearce is director of book publishing at the Augustine Institute and editor of the St. Austin Review (www.staustinreview.org), series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions (www.ignatiuscriticaleditions.com), senior instructor with Homeschool Connections (www.homeschoolconnectionsonline.com), and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative. His personal website is jpearce.co.

Pearce is the internationally acclaimed author of many books, including such popular titles as The Quest for Shakespeare, Tolkien: Man and Myth, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, C.S. Lewis and The Catholic Church, Literary Converts, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. His books have been published and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Croatian, and Polish.

Pearce has hosted two 13-part television series about Shakespeare on EWTN and has also written and presented documentaries on EWTN on the Catholicism of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. He has participated and lectured at a wide variety of international and literary events at major colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Europe, Africa, and South America.

Talks:

“Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered”

The modern world lurches blindly into an uncertain future. Will humanity continue on its present path, its foot on the accelerator, in pursuit of the bigger and faster—and ultimate disaster? Or might the scale and cultural prerogatives of the family shape the economic and sociopolitical future of our communities? There is a better and safer way forward. Bigger is not always best, and small is still beautiful.

“Solzhenitsyn: One Man’s Triumph over Big Government and Secular Fundamentalism”

The great Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn defied the might of the communist empire and played a crucial role alongside John Paul II in ending Marxist tyranny in Eastern Europe. Pearce met Solzhenitsyn in Moscow and wrote a bestselling biography of the great Russian Nobel Prize winner. Pearce explains why Solzhenitsyn’s life and work provide priceless lessons for today’s beleaguered culture.

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE) in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Before becoming FEE’s president, Reed served for 21 years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

A champion for liberty, Reed has written more than 1,500 newspaper columns and articles and dozens of articles in magazines and journals in the United States and abroad. He has visited 83 countries.

Talks:

“Adam Smith and the Birth of Economics”

How Smith changed the world with his devastating critique of mercantilism and advocacy of free trade and free markets.

“Free Trade vs. Protectionism”

The case for free trade from basic, free-market principles and responses to protectionist arguments.

“Great Myths of the Great Depression”

Why it happened, how the government prolonged it, and policies to avoid so it won’t happen again.

Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, The Big Ripoff, and Obamanomics.

Talks:

“Shuttered Factory, Shuttered Church, Shattered Community: How Economics Relates to the Good Life”

“Crony Capitalism: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money”

“The Revolving Door and the Swamp: How Beltway Insiders Enrich Themselves at the Expense of the Country”