Coordination Problem

Mont Pelerin Society in 2020

|Peter Boettke|

The Mont Pelerin Society continues to thrive and encourage research among liberal thinkers in the social sciences and the humanities.  Next week MPS will meet for a Special Meeting at the Hoover Institution on the theme "From the Past to the Future".

In September of this year, MPS will have its bi-annual General Meeting in Oslo, Norway.  There are two great opportunities for young scholars. First, MPS will conduct its F. A. Hayek essay contest.  Winning that contest in the early 1990s was how I attended my first MPS meeting in Cannes, France.  The essay contest is open to scholars under the age of 36.

In addition to the essay contest, for the past several years due to the initiative of Ben Powell, MPS has developed a excellent young scholars program.  Please consider applying to present a paper as part of this program, the deadline is May 15, 2020.

Hayek concluded his "Intellectuals and Socialism" arguing that:

The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. The intellectual revival of liberalism is already underway in many parts of the world. Will it be in time?

The challenges that the true liberal must confront today are both different and eerily similar to the ones that Hayek confronted in his lifetime, but the sense of urgency is just as strong.  These programs are designed to help discover the "liveliest minds" and encourage them to explore in depth "the philosophical foundations of a free society".  Please share this with all your friends and contacts throughout the intellectual universe you travel in.  We need more voices, new voices, and creative, clever and committed individuals to rise to the challenge Hayek put forth and to ultimately consider joining us in Hayek's 'academy'.

Economics as the Study of Peaceful Human Cooperation and Progress

Steven Horwitz

Earlier this month I was the recipient of one of the annual Prometheus Awards from the Greek liberal think tank KEFiM. My award was for my contributions to economic literacy. My keynote acceptance speech is now available here. I weave several themes of interest to CP readers, including Mises's emphasis on how specialization and exchange lead to social cooperation, and Hayek's point that exchange is about turning enemies into friends. Economics is a lot more than an explanation of material progress. It helps us understand the growth of civilization and social cooperation, and how we are able to turn our swords and spears into plowshares and pruning-hooks.

"The reality of the last two centuries is that we have beaten our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks as we’ve learned that the liberal institutions of property, contract, and voluntary exchange are superior to violence and war. An ever increasing share of humanity lives under its own increasingly fertile vines and fig trees. We’ve learned that the positive-sum game of the liberal order is better at producing the world of Micah’s vision than the zero- and negative-sum games of plunder, whether feudal or socialist. Or nationalist. An increased understanding of economics helped make this happen and has sustained it in the face of enemies, old and new.

Unfortunately, we are at a dangerous point of losing this learning these days thanks to the revival of the forces of nationalism and socialism. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I do think that liberals need to engage in some self-reflection about whether our own rhetoric and way of talking about economics and liberalism don’t bear some responsibility for our dilemma. How often do we speak of markets as sources of not just prosperity, but prosperity for the least well off? How often do we speak of markets as the cause of peace and social cooperation and mutual interdependence? How often to we talk about how markets have humanized us and reduced our propensity to violence, and turned strangers into honorary friends or kin? It’s important to stress the material wealth that markets produce, but the point of even that is enabling us to live lives of peace, cooperation, and security."

Working With Great People -- F. A. Hayek Program Academic Productivity 2010-2020

|Peter Boettke|

The F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus Center officially began in 2012, but unofficially had been in operation since 1998 when I moved to GMU, and worked with Karen Vaughn and Richard Wagner to revitalize the research and graduate education mission of market process economics and constitutional political economy.  BTW, while it may seem somewhat a product of youthful pretentiousness today, if you go back to my dissertation and first book, The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism:  The Formative Years, 1918-1928 (Kluwer, 1990) and look at the bibliography, I divide that into Primary and Secondary Sources on the Soviet Union and Politics, Philosophy, Economics and the History of Ideas.  I have envisioned my own research and teaching in PPE terms from the beginning, and this was reflected in my choice of terms when I organized the weekly seminar at GMU starting in 1998 for our group.  From the start it was Workshop in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and the term Workshop was chosen deliberately as well to signal the same set of commitments that Lin and Vincent Ostrom did with their choice of that word to organize their set of scholarly activities at IU.  So, while I was trying to revitalize the Center for the Study of Market Processes that I so much benefited from in the 1980s, the effort had its own twist from the start -- though I honestly believe it was a twist completely consistent with the research and graduate educational mission that Don Lavoie and Karen Vaughn communicated to me.

Through the first decade of the 2000s we had stellar graduate students go through our program such as Ed Stringham and Ben Powell, Scott Beaulier and Bob Subrick, and many others I am failing to mention.  I would be helped in building our program by Paul Aligica and Fred Sautet and Peter Lipsey.  Larry White joined our Department of Economics and contributed tremendously to our efforts, and the department wisely hired back 3 of my former PhD students: Pete Leeson, Chris Coyne and Virgil Storr and we were able to forge our informal arrangement into a formal one with the support of my department colleagues, and the administration at Mercatus and the GMU administration.  We also received a significant grant from the John Templeton Foundation, and other donors, which we gratefully acknowledge that allowed us to not only solidify our efforts but to expand them.  In 2015, we moved into our new offices in Buchanan Hall.  It has been a great start so far, but of course our focus is always on -- as Buchanan used to say -- "onward and upward". 

However, the turn of a decade invites a stocktaking.  One measure (not the only one by far) of our academic productivity is the number of books produced by the scholars associated with the Hayek program.  This stocktaking will miss journal articles, academic acclaim and honors, teaching effectiveness, and mentoring and advising -- all major components of what we do here.  I am also leaving out of the stocktaking journal editing and book series editing -- both are major activities that define our particular group as can be seen by a sampling of CVs. My measure is also biased in favor of folks beyond the PhD by 5 to 10 years, so some of our younger colleagues will be missed in the accounting, but will no doubt make major contributions in terms of books over the next decade.  I will just focus on the period 2010-2019, but I encourage you to look at the entire body of work of all my colleagues over their careers.  It is actually pretty easy to do for any one as CVs are available online, many papers are posted online at sites like SSRN, and Google Scholar can demonstrate citation impact as a quick measure though of course Web of Science can also be consulted.

 

Paul Aligica

2013. Institutional Diversity and Political Economy (Oxford University Press)

2015. Capitalist Alternatives, with Vlad Tarko (Routledge)

2018. Public Entrepreneurship, Citizenship, and Self-Governance (Cambridge University Press)

2018. Comparative Economic Systems, Eds. with Peter Boettke (Elgar)

2019. Public Administration and the Classical Liberal Perspective, with Peter Boettke and Vlad Tarko (Oxford University Press)

Neera K Badhwar

2014. Well Being: Happiness in a Worthwhile Life (Oxford University Press)

Donald J. Boudreaux

2012. Hypocrites and Half-Wits (Free to Choose Press)

2014. The Essential Hayek (Fraser)

Ginny Choi

2019. Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? with Virgil Storr (Palgrave/Macmillan)

Tyler Cowen

2011. The Great Stagnation (Penguin)

2013. An Economist Gets Lunch (Penguin)

2013. Average Is Over (Dutton)

2017. The Complacent Class (St Martin's)

2018. Stubborn Attachments (Stripe)

2019. Big Business (St Martin's)

Christopher Coyne

2019. In All Fairness: Equality, Liberty, and the Quest for Human Dignity, eds. with Robert Whales and Michael Munger (Independent Institute)

2019. Interdisciplinary Studies of the Political Order: New Applications of Public Choice Theory, Eds., with Donald Boudreaux and Bobbi Herzberg  (Rowman & Littlefield)

2018. Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism with Abigail Hall (Stanford University Press)

2018. Exploring the Political Economy & Social Philosophy of James M. Buchanan, Eds. with Paul Dragos Aligica and Stefanie Haeffele (Rowman & Littlefield)

2017. Interdisciplinary Studies of the Market Order: New Applications of Market Process Theory, Eds. with Peter Boettke and Virgil Storr (Rowman & Littlefield)

2016. Future: Economic Peril or Prosperity?, eds. with Robert Whales and Michael Munger (Independent Institute)

2015. Oxford Handbook on Austrian Economics, eds. with Peter Boettke (Oxford University Press)

2015. Flaws and Ceilings: Price Controls and the Damage They Cause, eds. with Rachel Coyne (Institute for Economic Affairs)

2014. Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (Stanford University Press)

2011. The Handbook on the Political Economy of War, eds. with Rachel Mathers (Elgar)

Rachel Coyne

2015. Flaws and Ceilings: Price Controls and the Damage They Cause, eds. with Chris Coyne (Institute for Economic Affairs)

2011. The Handbook on the Political Economy of War, eds. with Chris Coyne (Elgar)

Stefanie Haeffele

2019. The Need for Humility in Policymaking: Lessons from Regulatory Policy Eds. with Anne Hobson (Rowman & Little)

2019. Informing Public Policy: Analyzing Contemporary US and International Policy Issues Through the Lens of Market Process Economics Eds with Abigail Hall and Adam Millsap (Rowman & Little)

2018. Knowledge and Incentives in Policy: Using Public Choice and Market Process Theory to Analyze Public Policy Issues Ed. (Rowman & Little)

2018. Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of James M. Buchanan Eds. Paul Aligica and Christopher Coyne (Rowman & Little)

2016. Mainline Economics: Six Nobel Lectures in the Tradition of Adam Smith Eds with Peter Boettke and Virgil Storr (Mercatus Center)

2015. Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster: Lessons in Local Entrepreneurship with Virgil Henry Storr and Laura E. Grube (Palgrave Macmillan)

Roberta Q. Herzberg

2019. Ostrom Tensions Eds. with Paul Aligica and Peter Boettke (Mercatus Center).

2019. Interdisciplinary Studies of the Political Order: New Applications of Public Choice Theory, Eds., with Donald Boudreaux and Chris Coyne  (Rowman & Littlefield)

Mark Koyama

2019. Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom with Noel D. Johnson (Cambridge University Press)

Peter T. Leeson

2019. Legal Systems Very Different from Ours with D. Friedman and D. Skarbek (Independently published)

2017. WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird (Stanford University Press)

2015. The Economic Role of the State ed. with P. Boettke (Edward Elgar).

2014. Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better than You Think (Cambridge University Press)

2012. The Secrets of Pirate Management (Princeton University Press)

Jayme Lemke

2018. Exploring the Political Economy and Social Philosophy of F. A. Hayek, eds. with Peter J. Boettke and Virgil Henry Storr (Rowman & Littlefield)

Solomon Stein

2018. Buchanan's Tensions Eds. with Peter Boettke (Mercatus Center).

Virgil H. Storr

2019. Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? with G. Choi (Palgrave/Macmillan)

2017. The Austrian and Bloomington Schools of Political Economy (Advances in Austrian Economics Vol. 22) edited withPaul Aligica and Paul Lewis (Emerald)

2017. Interdisciplinary Studies of the Market Order edited with Peter J. Boettke and Christopher Coyne (Rowman & Littlefield)

2016. Revisiting Hayek’s Political Economy (Advances in Austrian Economics Vol. 21) edited with Peter J. Boettke (Emerald)

2016. Mainline Economics: Six Nobel Lectures in the Tradition of Adam Smith Eds with Peter Boettke and Stefanie Haeffele (Mercatus Center)

2015. Culture and Economic Action edited with Laura E. Grube (Edward Elgar)

2015. How We Came Back: Voices from Post-Katrina New Orleans edited with Nona Martin Storr and Emily Chamlee-Wright (Mercatus Center)

2015. New Thinking in Austrian Political Economy (Advances in Austrian Economics Vol. 19) edited with Christopher J. Coyne (Emerald)

2015. Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster: Lessons in Local Entrepreneurship with Stefanie Haeffele and Laura E. Grube (Palgrave Macmillan)

2012. Understanding the Culture of Markets (Routledge)

2010. The Political Economy of Hurricane Katrina and Community Rebound edited with Emily Chamlee-Wright (Edward Elgar Publishing)

Richard E. Wagner

2018. James M. Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy, ed. (Palgrave/Macmillan)

2018. Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy, with Giuseppe Eusepi (Edward Elgar)

2017. James M. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy: A Rational Reconstruction (Lexington)

2016. Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (Edward Elgar)

2012. Deficits, Debt, and Democracy: Wrestling with Tragedy on the Fiscal Commons (Edward Elgar)

2010. Mind, Society, and Human Action: Time and Knowledge in a Theory of Social Economy (Routledge)

Lawrence H. White

2015. Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution, Eds. with Viktor Vanberg and Ekkehard Kohler (Cato Institute)

2012. The Clash of Economic Ideas (Cambridge University Press)

Todd Zywicki

2018. Law and Economics: Public and Private, Eds. Max Stearns and Tom Miceli. (West Academic)

2017. Research Handbook on Austrian Law and Economics, Eds. with Peter Boettke (Edward Elgar)

2014. Consumer Credit and the American Economy, with Thomas Durkin, Gregory Elliehausen and Michael Staten (Oxford University Press) 

 

In addition to our faculty fellows in the Hayek Program located at GMU, we also are blessed with a distinguished list of affiliated scholars who visit with us regularly and contribute to the intellectual life here: Bruce Caldwell, Brian Kogelmann, Chandran Kukathas, Bryan Leonard, Paul Lewis, Deirdre McCloskey, Christina McRorie, David Schmidtz, and Chad Van Schoelandt.  Just look at the last decade of Deirdre McCloskey's output and impact she has had, which we were so fortunate to see throughout the various stages of production, one example of which was highlighted in a Chronicle of Higher Education profile on one aspect of our work. But just consider the following:

2019. Why Liberalism Works (Yale University Press)

2016. The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economics Ethics, Eds. with George DeMartino (Oxford University Press)

2016. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press)

2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press)

And, none of these scholars are close to being done as a list of books under contract and books currently slated for publication in the first months of 2020 would be on pace with past performance.  So the decade ahead is a promising one for economics, political economy and social philosophy for our group of scholars at the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.  It is my sincerest hope that we never rest of the past, always march forward, keep learning and improving, and communicating what we have learned in a way that demonstrates clarity of thought and clarity of exposition.  And, I hope that our students teaching throughout the academic world will exhibit the same, and outpace their teachers.

 

A Decade in Political Economy

|Peter Boettke|

As we left the 20th century and entered into the 21st century, political economy experienced a full renaissance within the broader disciplines of economics, political science, sociology and history.  No longer did the term convey a secret code for Marxism, nor did it signal a heterodox concern with institutions and history.  The collapse of communism and the transition period, as well as lingering problems with developing economies, led the mainstream of social science to take an institutional turn.  We can quibble about how this turn was conducted and the implications various scholars took from this move, but it would be silly to say that institutions continued to be ignored or that historical research continued to be discounted.  Nope the last 2 decades have been good for researchers interested in political, legal and social institutions, and in conducting historical research informed by social science.

I tried to come up with books since 2010 that I think communicate important lessons to be learned, or challenges that must be grappled with.  Let me go by year. (Important note: I am not listing the books by Deirdre McCloskey as I will discuss those in another post, but no list of political economy books in the 2000s should be discussed without due consideration of her brilliant trilogy)

2010

Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Princeton University Press.

 

2011 (nominating 2)

Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson, Pillars of Prosperity. Princeton University Press.

See this discussion on the political economy of development in fragile and weak states.

 

2011

Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City. Penguin.

 

2012

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail. Penguin.

 

2013

Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing. Princeton University Press.

 

2014 (picking 3 books)

Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen Haber, Fragile By Design. Princeton University Press.

 

William Easterly, Tyranny of Experts. Basic Books.

 

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century. Harvard University Press.

 

2015

George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Phishing for Phools. Princeton University Press.

 

2016

Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Princeton University Press.

Joel Mokyr, A Cultural of Growth. Princeton University Press.

 

2017

Douglas Irwin, Clashing over Commerce. University of Chicago Press.

 

2018

Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, Radical Markets. Princeton University Press.

 

2019

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor. Penguin.

 

 

I am sure to be missing some important works, such as Ragu Rajan's The Third Pillar (Penguin, 2019), which I also believe should be on reading list of every student of political economy, as well as intellectual history works in political economy, such as Eric Schliesser's Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (Oxford, 2017) and many others. But I think if you read those listed, you will get a good sense of the current conversation in the field.

A Decade of SDAE Presidential Address

|Peter Boettke|

The Society for the Development of Austrian Economics was founded in the 1990s, while I was still an assistant professor.  At the time when Karen Vaughn spearheaded the organizational effort, you could count about 20-25 professional academic economists who were self-identified and active in teaching and researching, and probably less than a handful were located in PhD granting institutions.  The location in PhD granting institutions matters greatly for any scientific or scholarly endeavor because it permits graduate students to work in their chosen area of research from the "Austrian" perspective.  Remember, "Austrian" in my use of the term has little to do with location, and even less to do with ideological conclusions, and everything to do with methodological principles and analytical approaches (which I think also impacts choice of empirical methods though that is more contested).

The SDAE over the last decade has highlighted the contribution of the emerging generation of scholars making contributions to the related but distinct disciplines of economics and political economy. Here are the Presidents listed chronologically.

Anthony M. Carilli (2010)

• "Qui docet discit," The Review of Austrian Economics, 24: 327-333 (2011)

Richard E. Wagner (2011)

• "Viennese kaleidics: Why it’s liberty more than policy that calms turbulence," The Review of Austrian Economics, 25(4): 283-297 (2012)

David A. Harper (2012)

• "Property rights as a complex adaptive system: how entrepreneurship transforms intellectual property structure," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 24(2): 335-355 (2014)

Lawrence H. White (2013)

• "'Austerian' economics: Does the Vienna school favor fiscal deficit reduction even in a subpar economy?" The Review of Austrian Economics, 27(4): 351-358 (2014)

Christopher J. Coyne (2014)

• "Lobotomizing the defense brain," The Review of Austrian Economics, 28(4): 371-396 (2015)

Benjamin Powell (2015)

• "The economics of immigration: An Austrian contribution," The Review of Austrian Economics, 29(4): 343-349 (2016)

Edward Stringham (2016)

• "The fable of the leeches, or: The single most unrealistic positive assumption of most economists," The Review of Austrian Economics, 30(4): 401-413 (2017)

Diana Thomas (2017)

• “A process perspective on regulation: Who bears the dispersed costs of regulation?,” The Review of Austrian Economics, 31(4): 395-402 (2018)

Andrew Young (2018)

• “How Austrians can contribute to constitutional political economy (and why they should),” The Review of Austrian Economics, 1-13 (online first October 2019)

Claudia Williamson (2019)

(will be published in 2020)

 

This provides a good sampling of where many of those interested in pursuing methodological individualism, subjectivism, and process theorizing found themselves in the past decade.  I am excited to see where the next decade of research brings us.  And also discover, not only honor the old teachers, or even the students of those teachers, or the students of those students of those teachers, the next generation of teachers, scholars, and intellectual entrepreneurs which will move this scientific tradition forward in the 21st century.

Your 2019 Nobel Prize Lectures for Economic Science

|Peter Boettke|

 

Watch Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer

Investment Trust Pricing and the Stock Market Crash of 1929

Steven Horwitz

My colleagues David Thomas, James Mcclure, and I have revised our paper "Efficient Derivative Pricing and Sequestered Capital: The Case of Investment Trust Pricing in 1929" once again and a new version is now available on SSRN.

We present evidence that undermines one of the heretofore best cases for the belief that irrational, speculative bubbles were an important cause of the 1929 stock market crash.

Abstract

The efficient market hypothesis implies that the price of a financial derivative should mirror the value of its underlying asset(s). This model is used to reconsider an historical anomaly—the large, allegedly irrational, premia on investment trusts that preceded the 1929 crash. First, we reexamine evidence—highly cited for decades—alleging anomalous premia on portfolio-publishing trusts preceding the crash. Our assessment, based on current information-gathering capabilities, shows no evidence of anomalous premia in the cases considered. Secondly, we test our model on a data set of over 3,000 price observations, using regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) designs. As expected, the prices of blind trusts quickly corrected with the disclosure of their underlying portfolios. Our findings suggest that sequestered capital, rather than irrational exuberance, was primarily responsible for the premia on trusts in 1929.

Is Economics Growth a Moral Imperative?

|Peter Boettke|

Tyler Cowen delivered the 2019 Ken Arrow Lecture at Stanford.  It is worth listening to every minute as it reflects the nimbleness of Tyler's mind and his ability to see different sides of an argument and to stimulate a discussion.

 

 

The difference between 2% and 3% growth is not 1% and other vexing puzzles of progress

|Peter Boettke|

George Will is the author of this particular challenge to the innumeracy and economic illiteracy of the political class.  "Washington," he states, "is run by people who think that there's a 1% difference between 2% growth and 3% growth." It reflects an inability to understand the critical importance of economic growth for the betterment of humanity.  My brilliant colleague Tyler Cowen this past summer published an article with Patrick Collison in The Atlantic making the case for the need for a science of progress.  Tyler's book Stubborn Attachments makes the argument that we should weight long term economic growth and progress more than what we currently do in public policy discourse.  Rosolino Candela and I have a paper in the political philosophy journal, Social Philosophy & Policy providing our own argument for the "Liberty of Progress."

One of the most important developments in the history of economic and political thought was the demonstration in the period between 1870-1930 that the processes of valuation, exchange and production cannot be separated from the processes of distribution.  We do not pick particular distributions of resources, but always choose among alternative sets of governing rules that engender the pattern of exchange, production and distribution. Much of the popular and professional discourse proceeds as if J. S. Mill's proclamations weren't corrected by subsequent developments in political economy, or that economists haven't worked through the logic of factor pricing and marginal productivity theory.  This should be the starting point for any analysis of the economic system and the discussion of justice.  If we want to make progress in political and economic thought, we must never forget the logic of choice, situational logic, and how alternative institutional arrangements will either hinder or facilitate the ability of individuals to pursue productive specialization and to realize peaceful social cooperation through exchange.  And, it is this adoption of those institutional arrangements that so significantly ease the costs of deepening the division of labor that results in the great material progress that serves as the foundation for generalized human betterment.  Yup, definitely we need Stubborn Attachments to long term growth, and to be blunt to see the sources of that growth in the expansion of trade and unleashing the creative impulse through entrepreneurship and technological innovation.

Watch this conversation between Mark Zukerberg, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison.

 

As a side note, check out roughly minute 31:30-33:00 for the case study of creative cultures of Vienna of Mises and Hayek and Edinburgh and Adam Smith.

Students of Society -- Looking forward to our visit with Viviana Zelizer

|Peter Boettke|

On October 17th at GMU, the renowned sociologist Viviana Zelizer will be delivering the 2019 Ostrom Lecture.  It has been 10 years since Elinor won the Nobel Prize. And we are thrilled that Professor Zelizer has agreed to speak in our lecture series, and to help us commemerate this anniversary, as well as help us continue to shape our self-understanding of the methodological, analytical and social philosophical implications of studying society from the bottom-up.  Professor Zelizer's lecture topic is "Why and How Do Social Relations Matter for Economic Lives?"

Watch this presentation on inequality (start at min 42:22) to get a sense of Professors Zelizer's depth of analysis of studying the phenomena, as it were, from the bottom up and impacting the everyday life of the actual people we are supposed to be studying to improve our understanding of social life and the human condition.

Professor Zeitzer also did an episode of EconTalk with Russ Roberts back in 2007.