» Visiting Lecturers

Victor Gay

Lecture: "Weapons of Mass Production. World War I and the Modernization of the French Economy." (joint work with Anne Alonzo and Ronan Tallec).

May 9-10, 2024

Abstract: During the World War I, annual government spending in France reached unprecedented levels, accounting for 50 percent of GDP. A significant portion of this spending was allocated to support industrial warfare at a time when the country's industrial cradle in the North-East was unavailable for production. Using original archival data on war procurement contracts, we examine whether these large but temporary wartime industrial investments fostered the modernization of the French economy during the interwar period. We find that locations that received relatively more wartime industrial investment experienced a sustained postwar expansion of their manufacturing sector. This expansion was driven by an increased concentration of industrial firms together with sectoral shifts in the composition of the labor force within locations, rather than by a reallocation of labor across locations. In contrast, we find little evidence that the war induced capital deepening and technological change.

Bio: Victor Gay has been an assistant professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) since 2018. His research lies at the intersection of economic history, labor economics, and the economics of culture, with a focus on the economic history of France.

Andrew Smyth

In-Class Collaboration

ECON/ENG/PHIL 357

April 30 - May 2, 2024

Bio: Andrew Smyth is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boise State University.  His research interests lie in the fields of industrial organization and behavioral economics, and he is particularly interested in the economics of innovation. Before moving to Boise State, he taught at Marquette University, was a postdoc at the Economic Science Institute of Chapman University, and received his doctorate from Florida State University.

Sarah Quincy

Lecture: "The Great Depression Bank Deregulation Wave"

April 18 - 19, 2024

Lecture Flyer

Dan Friedman

Lecture: "Can the Flow Market Format Outperform the Continuous Double Auction?"

April 8 - April 12, 2024

Lecture Flyer

Abstract: New computer and telecommunications technology creates new opportunities (and new pitfalls) for creating and testing novel market formats. After a brief survey of recent innovations with special focus on financial markets and high frequency trading, I will present the first laboratory test of the Flow Market format recently proposed by Pete Kyle and Mina Lee. In a fairly basic `contracts' environment, I and my coauthors, Kristian Lopez Vargas and Yilin Li, find that  compared to the CDA, the Flow market exhibits fewer and larger orders. The two formats achieve similar price and allocative efficiency, but Flow Markets have lower price volatility and trade volume. Interestingly, period-to-period improvement in most performance metrics is faster in Flow markets than in CDA.

Bio: Daniel Friedman is now part-time Professor of Economics at University of Essex and full-time Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCSC Economics, where he served on the faculty since 1985 after starting at UCLA and UC Berkeley. He has broad research interests in applied economic theory, with emphasis on learning and evolution, laboratory experiments, and financial markets. He is coauthor of five academic books, fourteen NSF grants, and over 100 research articles. His popular book, Morals and Markets: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Modern World, was published by Palgrave-MacMillan in October 2008. A second paperback edition, co-authored with journalist Daniel McNeill, appeared in June 2013 with the subtitle: A Dangerous Balance.

Conference - Feminomics: Women and Market Economies

Feminomics Program

The participants will include:

Linda Scott, University of Oxford
Amy Louise Erickson, University of Cambridge
Jayme Lemke, Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Melissa Thomasson, Miami University
Magatte Wade, African Prosperity Activist and Entrepreneur
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago

Deirdre McCloskey

In-Class Collaboration & Feminomics Conference Lecture: "Women and the Great Enrichment"

ECON/ENG/PHIL 357

March 25-April 5, 2024

Bio: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty books and some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.”

Stelios Michalopoulos

Lecture: "Movies" (with Chris Rauh).

March 13-15, 2024

Lecture Flyer

Bio: Stelios Michalopoulos is the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University, a Research Associate at the NBER, and a Research Fellow of the CEPR. A native of Argos, Greece, Stelios holds a B.A. and MSc from the Athens University of Economics and Business and a Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University. In 2010-2011 he was the Deutsche Bank Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In the Spring of 2015, he was a visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, in 2016 a visiting Professor at INSEAD, and a Senior Scholar at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank in 2017. Stelios is the recipient of the 2015 Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the recipient of the 2019 Bodossaki Prize in the field of Social Sciences a biennial award bestowed to scientists of Greek origin up to 40 years of age.

His work has been funded by the NSF and DFID among others. His primary research interests lie in the intersection of political economy, culture, growth, and comparative development. He has published in leading peer-reviewed economic journals including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Shoshana Grossbard

Lecture: "Paying for Household Services within the Family."

Patricia Limerick

In-Class Collaboration

ECON/ENG/PHIL 357

Brad DeLong

Lecture

December 7 - December 8, 2023

Bio: Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches economic history, political economy, macroeconomies, and occasional other topics. He was a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton Administration.

He is a New York Times instant bestselling author (for Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>, called: “magisterial” by Paul Krugman, "required reading” by Larry Summers, “brilliant, important” by Robert Reich, “sweeping and detailed, learned and accessible, familiar and strange… justice-minded and tender hearted” by Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic, and “impressive… written with wit and style and a formidable command of detail” by Ryan Avent at The Economist.

And he has been too online since 1995.

At the moment, Google and Google Scholar say that the five pieces he has written that are the most influential and command the most attention are:

1. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century—The book tells the story of how an unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction <<ly/3pP3Krk>>
2. “Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets” (with Andrei Shleifer and Lawrence Summers of Harvard, and Robert Waldmann of the University of Rome)—how Milton Friedman’s claim that irrational investors must in equilibrium have no impact on market prices is simply, well, wrong <http://ms.mcmaster.ca/~grasselli/DeLongShleiferSummersWaldmann90.pdf>
3. “Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy” (with Lawrence Summers of Harvard)—how when inflation is as quiescent & interest rates as low as they have been since 2001, bond- & money-financed expansions of government purchases are, when properly hedged, truly a win-win free lunch that competent governments would pursue <https://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/bpea/papers/2012/fiscal-policy-depressed-economy-delong>
4. “Did J.P. Morgan’s Men Add Value?”—reputation, managerial competence, oversight, & the benefits to society of long-term greedy plutocratic investment banks <https://www.nber.org/chapters/c7182.pdf>
5. “Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow’s Economy” (with A. Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami)—how the “Smithian” image of the economy that we economists have held in the forefront of our minds since 1776 is obsolete <http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/spec.htm>

Mark Pickup

Lecture: "What is Racism?"

Bio: Mark Pickup is a Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. He is a specialist in Political Behaviour, Political Psychology and Political Methodology. Substantively, his research primarily falls into three areas: political identities and political decision-making; conditions of democratic responsiveness and accountability; and polls and electoral outcomes. His research focuses on political information, public opinion, political identities, norms, and election campaigns, within North American and European countries. His methodological interests concern the analysis of longitudinal data (time series, panel, network, etc.) with secondary interests in Bayesian analysis and survey/lab experiment design. His work has been published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science and Journal of Politics.

Eline de Rooij

Lecture: "Is Social Mobilization Gendered? Evidence from Spillover Experiments Across Three Democracies"

Bio: Eline de Rooij is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. She holds a D.Phil. in Sociology from the University of Oxford, and has been a postgraduate associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (Yale) and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford). She was an Instructor at the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research at the University of Michigan in 2018 and 2019.

Broadly, her research interests are in political mobilization, political attitudes and behavior. She is currently working on two main research projects. First, a study aimed at examining voter mobilization in intimate social networks (i.e., couples, households). Second, a SSHRC-funded project on the pre- and post-migration factors that shape immigrants’ political ideology, party preference and civic engagement.

Much of her work relies on the use of experiments, mostly field but also survey and lab experiments. She has published in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Political Behavior, and is an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

Sara Lowes

Lecture: "Fallow Lengths and the Structure of Property Rights"

Bio: Sara Lowes is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. In Spring 2023, she visited MIT as the Hal Varian Visiting Assistant Professor. She graduated from Harvard University in May 2017 with a Ph.D. from the Political Economy and Government program (Economics track). She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford King Center on Global Development and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. Her research interests are at the intersection of development economics, political economy, and economic history. Her research is supported by an NSF CAREER grant. Her dissertation received the Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics. 

She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an Affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar with the Institutions, Organizations & Growth research program, an Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and an Affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA).

John Hoffmann

Bio: John Hoffmann is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Marburg. He received his PhD in English from Johns Hopkins in 2018 and served as a visiting scholar at the University of Konstanz before moving to Marburg. His work focuses on German and Anglophone culture in the modernist period, and his articles have appeared in the journals Film History, Modernism/modernity, New Literary History, and diacritics. His research has also been supported by major grants from the German Research Foundation, the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought, and the Modernist Studies Association. He is currently finishing a book that studies the history of aesthetics and anthropology from the German Enlightenment to the Popular Front. 

Alexander Field

Bio: Alexander J. Field is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University. Over the past two decades his main research focus has been on U.S. productivity growth during the second quarter of the twentieth century. In 2011 he published A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth (Yale), selected that year as a Choice Outstanding Economic Title in the Economics Area. In 2012 it won the Alice Hansen Jones Biennial Book Prize as well as the Alpha Sigma Nu National Book Award in the Social Sciences. His new book, The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War was published by Yale in 2022. He has written on a wide range of other topics, including how we can better integrate the human sciences, as reflected in his 2001 book Altruistically Inclined? The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity, which won the 2003 Alpha Sigma Nu National Book Award in the Social Sciences. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2013-14 he was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.

He has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature, as Executive Director of the Economic History Association, and in a variety of other editorial and administrative capacities including Acting Academic Vice President and Acting Dean of the Business School at Santa Clara. He taught previously at Stanford University.

Nick Gillespie

Lecture: "Choice: An Inventory of Effects"

Bio:Nick Gillespie is an editor at large at Reason, where he writes articles, records podcasts, and makes video documentaries. He is the coauthor of The Declaration of Independents (2012), a former columnist for Time and The Daily Beast, and a two-time finalist for National Magazine Awards. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he wrote a dissertation titled Qualified Authority in American Fiction: Participant Observers and Market Orders (1996).  

Sarah Rose Siskind

Lecture and Film Forum Guest Speaker

Lecture: "Robotic Archetypes"

Bio:Sarah Rose Siskind is a science comedy writer, chatbot writer, and robot consultant. She founded Hello SciCom, an agency of creative consultants specializing in robotics and AI. They work with companies like Honda, Hanson Robotics, Singularity Net, Alethea AI, and many others. She has designed two different chatbots sold at Sotheby’s for $1.2 million, contributed to the Amazon Alexa prize, and written numerous academic papers with Honda Research Institute on topics ranging from humor to magic in chatbot design. She has hosted robotics talks in Tokyo and worked with a two billion dollar entertainment venue to staff their lobby with autonomous robots.

Previously, she worked as the lead personality writer for Sophia the Robot at Hanson Robotics where she learned chatbot development and basic operational engineering. She designed conversations with celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Tony Robbins as well as wrote speeches for Sophia at the UN and on TV. She is also a professional stand up comedian and previously served as head writer for Neil deGrasse Tyson's TV show StarTalk. She’s written comedy for the White House Press Correspondents' Dinner and her Harvard cum laude thesis on comedy.

Titus Techera

Lecture and Film Forum Guest Speaker

Lecture: "Technology as Neo-Culture"

Bio: Titus Techera, M.A. Political Science, & the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation & a culture critic for Liberty Fund, the Acton Institute, the Washington Free Beacon, & the Washington Examiner.

Chandran Kukathas

Bio: Chandran Kukathas holds the Lee Kong Chian Chair in Political Science at Singapore Management University, where he is Dean of the School of Social Sciences. He previously held chairs in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and the University of Utah. He is the author of several books including Hayek and Modern Liberalism, The Liberal Archipelago, and most recently, Immigration and Freedom.

Christine Henderson

Bio: Christine Dunn Henderson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University. She has published extensively on Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, French liberalism, and politics and literature. Her edition, as editor and translator, of Tocqueville’s Memoirs on Pauperism and Other Writings (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021) opens a window into Tocqueville’s thinking about economic inequality and the social question. Her most recent publications have focused on Tocqueville and race, the literary structure of Democracy in America, and Tocqueville and gender. She is presently writing a book about the dangers to freedom in the democratic age. 

Conference: Tolerance and Diversity in an Open Society 

April 20 - April 21, 2023

Although the idea of open society has had a foothold in public debates ever since the publication of Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies, there is renewed interest in it in academic debates after the publication of Gerald Gaus’s Tyranny of the Ideal and, most recently The Open Society and Its Complexities, both of which draw explicitly on both Popper’s and Hayek’s work. Neither Popper nor Gaus, however, give a systematic rendering of what it takes for a society to be open and how the open society compares to its contemporary rivals. Given this lacuna, there is a valuable debate about the commitment to an open society that engages a variety of political viewpoints that cuts across other debates in political philosophy.

The goal of this conference is to encourage some of the best political thinkers of our time to critically analyze the idea of the open society. We are interested in clarifying what features characterize the open society, why openness is valuable, and how the open society compares to alternative political orders. In particular, the conference will focus on the challenges of diversity and toleration that come in an open society. 

The participants will include:

Sahar Fard, Ohio State
Toby Handfield, Monash
Keith Hankins, Chapman
Royal Hansen, Google
Chandran Kukathas, Singapore Tech
Helene Landemore, Yale
Ryan Muldoon, Buffalo
Virginia Postrel, Chapman
Christof Royer, CEU
Robert Talisse, Vandebilt
John Thrasher, Chapman
Piers Turner, Ohio State
Chad van Schoelandt, Tulane

John Hoffmann

Bio: John Hoffmann is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Marburg. He received his PhD in English from Johns Hopkins in 2018 and served as a visiting scholar at the University of Konstanz before moving to Marburg. His work focuses on German and Anglophone culture in the modernist period, and his articles have appeared in the journals Film History,  Modernism/modernity, New Literary History, and diacritics. His research has also been supported by major grants from the German Research Foundation, the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought, and the Modernist Studies Association. He is currently finishing a book that studies the history of aesthetics and anthropology from the German Enlightenment to the Popular Front. 

Alexander "Sasha" Vostroknutov

Bio: Alexander “Sasha” Vostroknutov is an Associate Professor of Economics at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He received his PhD in Economics from University of Minnesota in 2008. Apart from Minnesota and Maastricht, he worked as a research fellow at University of Trento. He is interested in studying both strategic and non-strategic decision-making using the framework of behavioral economics with the toolbox of experimental and neuroeconomics, and recently field applications. Alexander’s main research interest is social norms and their role in economic decision-making. His recent work concentrates on the theoretical models of norm-driven behavior and evolutionary foundations of preferences, beliefs, and rationality.

Brandon Turner

Bio: Brandon Turner (Ph.D. UW-Madison, 2008) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Clemson University. His research focus is the history of Western political thought, particularly early modern thought. He has published work on a range of figures, from Augustine to Hobbes to John Stuart Mill, and his work has appeared in Political Theory, Polity, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing a manuscript on conservative political thought.

Billy Christmas

Bio: Billy Christmas is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Political Philosophy at King’s College London in the department of Political Economy. His research interests are in the nature of rights, particularly property rights, and their moral and institutional relationship with the modern state. He earned his PhD at the University of Manchester and was a post-doctoral Fellow at the NYU School of Law. He is the author of Property and Justice: A Liberal Theory of Natural Rights published with Routledge Press in 2021. He has also published articles in journals such as The Journal of Politics, Economics & Philosophy, Environmental Politics, and The Philosophical Quarterly.

Christopher "Kit" Heath Wellmon

Abstract: Morality would be cleaner and more straightforward if moral rights were the product of perfectly general and absolute moral rules, but most ethicists now affirm rights infringements--despite the manner in which they complicate moral theory--because doing so allows for the greatest fidelity to our moral convictions.  I believe that we should similarly embrace agent-relative prerogatives for their unique ability to vindicate three widely-held convictions that (1) a victim may permissibly use defensive force against a non-responsible threat, (2) third parties are not permitted to use defensive force against non-responsible threats, and (3) non-responsible threats are equally permitted to use defensive force against their potential victims,  I discuss a number of prominent scholars who write on this topic, but I frame this essay in terms Judith Jarvis Thomson’s pioneering work, in part because she was a leading advocate of rights infringements who subsequently denied the existence of agent-relative prerogatives, but also because affirming agent-centered permissions would have benefitted other prongs of her research agenda.

Bio: Christopher Heath Wellmon is a Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis.  He works in ethics, specializing in political and legal philosophy.  He is currently working on forfeiture.

Josiah Ober

Bio: Josiah Ober is Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Science, Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the founder and currently faculty director of the Stanford Civics Initiative (https://civics.stanford.edu/). Ober holds a BA in History from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. He joined the Stanford faculty in 2006, having previously taught at Princeton and Montana State Universities. Ober’s scholarship focuses on historical institutionalism and political theory, especially democratic theory and the contemporary relevance of the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world. He is the author of The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (2022), Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism (2017),The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015) and several other books, mostly published by Princeton University Press. He has also published about 100 articles and chapters. Work in progress includes a book co-authored with Brook Manville on the role of civic bargains in the emergence and persistence of democratic government. 

Deirdre McCloskey

Bio: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty books and some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.”

Conference: New Approaches to Social Contract Theory: Liberty, Equality, Diversity and the Open Society

Shaun Hargreaves Heap

Bio: Shaun Hargreaves Heap was an undergraduate at Oxford and did a PhD at UC Berkeley. He taught for many years at the University of East Anglia and has held visiting positions at Sydney University and Concordia in Montreal. He has been at King’s College, London, since 2013. His current research uses experiments to examine how the social context influences individual decision making. It has been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica and the Economic Journal. Another strand of his research is at the interface of philosophy and economics: e.g. an application of JS Mill’s no-harm principle to policy evaluation.

Harrison Frye

Abstract: A recent swathe of work criticizes the institution of the market as incompatible with the value of community. This paper seeks to systematize and evaluate the communal criticism of the market. I consider four versions of the criticism: the market elicits vicious motives, the market involves the instrumentalization of one another, the market creates contingent relationships, and the market excludes particular interests from consideration. I will argue that each of these challenges to the market fail. Either they depend on a faulty model of market life, or the normative force of the argument is not as strong as it appears. Ultimately, I concede there is a truth to the claim that the market is uncommunal, but it is not uncommunal in a way we should be too concerned about.

Bio: Professor Harrison Frye is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Georgia. He is a political theorist whose research interests include the ideal of freedom, the morality of the market, and the value of social norms. His recent research focuses on online shaming, arguing that it is often dysfunctional. His work appears in venues such as Journal of Political Philosophy and Economics and Philosophy.

Amanda Greene

Ken White

Lecture: "What To Do If The Police Stop You?"

November 30, 2021 • 5:30 PM • Wilkinson Hall 220 - 221

Practical advice for handling encounters with the police. Speaker Ken White is a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor. 

Omar Wasow

Lecture: "Do Protest Tactics Matter?"

November 16, 2021 • 5:30 PM • Wilkinson Hall 220 - 221

From Black Lives Matters marches to the January 6 Capitol Hill takeover, the past few years have been marked by political protests—violent, nonviolent, and in-between. How do marginalized groups advance their agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? What tactics work? Drawing on his research on the civil rights movement, Professor Wasow will explore the factors likely to make protests succeed or fail in achieving change.

Professor Omar Wasow is a Pomona college political scientist, co-founder of BlackPlanet.com and the Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School.

 Virginia Postrel interviewed by Professor Kyle Hampton

"Making Progress: A Conversation About Innovation"

November 9, 2021 • 5:30 PM • Wilkinson Hall 220 - 221

In this 'interview-style' talk, Professor Kyle Hampton will engage in dialogue with Smith Institute's visiting fellow, author and columnist Virgina Postrel about the importance of preserving economic and social dynamism and why someone known for her political commentary went on to write books on style, glamour, and textiles. 

A Conversation with Conor Friedersdorf

Lecture: "Can Free Inquiry Survive Our Polarized Politics?

November 2, 2021 • 5:30 PM • Wilkinson Hall 220 - 221

Conor Friedersdorf is a writer for The Atlantic and he will be interviewed by Visiting Professor Virginia Postrel. 

Gabriele Camera

Lecture: "The Cryptos are Coming: A Discussion about Crypto Currencies, Trust, and the Future of Money"

October 26, 2021 • 5:30 PM • Wilkinson Hall 220 - 221

In this talk, Professor Gabriele Camera will discuss the emergence of crypto currencies, trust, and the future of money.  

Gabriele Camera is Professor of Economics and Finance from the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University. His research spans several areas, including economic theory, experimental economics, industrial organization, labor economics, macroeconomics and monetary economics. His current research focuses on studying the role of institutions in supporting cooperation in society, especially in situations where decision makers may be tempted to behave opportunistically, may not trust each other, and are unable to form stable partnerships.

Susanne Sreedhar

Lecture: "Hobbes on Sex"

October 4, 2021 • 4:00 PM • Wilkinson Hall 221

This talk explores the views on gender and sexuality held by 17th century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. It argues that these views are central to Hobbes’s (in)famous political theory.

Dr. Susanne Sreedhar is an Associate Professor oh Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. Her current research focuses on the intersection of feminist philosophy and the history of political thought.

Teresa Bejan

Lecture: “Peers and Equals”

September 16, 2021 • 4:00 PM • Wilkinson Hall 220

This talk will consider how and why an ancient idea—that human beings are naturally “equal”—became suddenly and spectacularly effectual in the early modern England. It focuses on the theory and practice of the so-called Levellers and their contribution to the emergence of what contemporary political philosophers call “basic equality” as the defining premise of modern political thought.
Dr. Teresa M Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory and a Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (2017) and is currently completing her second monograph for Harvard University Press, tentatively entitled First Among Equals: Early Modern Equality in Theory and Practice. 

Virginia Postrel

Visiting Professor

In-Class Collaboration

Virginia Postrel is an award-winning journalist and the author of four books: The Fabric of Civilization (Basic Books, 2020), The Power of Glamour (Simon & Schuster, 2013), The Substance of Style (2003), and The Future and Its Enemies (1998). Her particular interest is the intersection of commerce, culture, and technology. She is currently a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and has previously been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. From July 1989 to January 2000, she served as the editor-in-chief of Reason. She began her career as a reporter in the Philadelphia bureau of The Wall Street Journal and then worked as a staff writer for Inc. in Boston before moving to Los Angeles and joining Reason as an assistant editor. She is a 1982 graduate of Princeton University, where she combined a major in English literature, emphasizing the Renaissance, with a heavy course load in economics.

For more of her work, visit her website at vpostrel.com

Eric Schliesser

January 6-29, 2020

In-class collaboration

Bio: Dr. E.S. Schliesser (1971) is a professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

Eric Schliesser's (PhD, The University of Chicago, 2002) research encompasses a variety of themes, ranging from economic statistics in classical Babylon, the history of the natural sciences and forgotten 18th-century feminists (both male and female) to political theory and the history of political theory and the assumptions used in mathematical economics. Schliesser's interest in the influence of Chicago school of economics has increasingly moved his research toward the study of the methodology and political role of economists as experts.

He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published prolifically on Newton, Huygens, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Adam Smith and Sophie De Grouchy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter alia) Newton and Empiricism (OUP, with Zvi Biener, 2014); Sympathy, a History of a Concept (OUP, 2015); Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (Oxford, 2017). Right now he is working on a translation and critical edition of Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy (together with Sandrine Berges). He keeps a daily blog Digressionsnimpressions.

Agnes Callard

February 10-21, 2020

Bio: Agnes Callard is Associate Professor and director of Undergraduate studies in the department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She received her MA in Classics and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics. Her book, Aspiration: the agency of becoming (OUP, 2018), argues for the existence of a practically rational process by which agents endeavor to learn to value new things. She is currently at work on a book about Socratic Refutation.

Workshop on Kinship and Social/Economic Behavior

March 7, 2020

The study of kinship has traditionally been the domain of anthropology, but there is growing interest in the topic among other social scientists. Bringing together speakers from economics and anthropology, our workshop aims to explore how kinship practices influence (and are influenced by) our social world with an interdisciplinary approach. We will bring together world-renowned scholars working at the cutting edge of kinship research. The intended audience of the workshop consists of faculty and students with interdisciplinary interests. The workshop provides a unique opportunity to explore how historical events and cultural and religious practices have interacted to create widely varying kin-based institutions across societies; and how kin-based institutions in turn impacted contemporary political and economic outcomes around the world. For more information, please contact the event organizer Professor Erik Kimbrough, ekimbrou@chapman.edu.

"Tank Man" Film Screening & Panel
30 Years After Tiananmen: Tank Man and the Struggle for Democracy in China

Reception at 7:00 PM

Panelists: Robert Anthony Peters (Actor, Director, and Writer), Michael Valdez Moses (Chapman University), Chaohua Wang (UCLA), Terril Jones (Claremont McKenna College)

Manuscript Workshop: Daniel Layman, Locke Among the Radicals

The Smith Institute will host a manuscript workshop centered around Daniel Layman’s forthcoming book Locke Among the Radicals. 

In addition to members of the Smith Institute, participants include:

• Daniel Layman (Davidson College);
• Eric MacGilvray (Ohio State University);
• Frank Lovett (Washington University, St. Louis).

Attendance is free. Participants will be expected to read Dr. Layman’s manuscript ahead of the event. The manuscript is available upon request. Please contact Professor Bas van der Vossen.

1st Annual Meeting of Locke Working Group

The Smith Institute will host the first ever meeting of a new working group focused on the political thought of John Locke. The working group brings together early to mid-career scholars from different countries with the aim to continue and develop Lockean political thought. Participants this year are: 

• Susanne Shreedhar (Boston University);
• Kathryn Tabb (Columbia University);
• Tim Stuart-Buttle (York University);
• Kei Numao (Keio University);
• Jesse Spafford (Graduate Center, CUNY);
• Johan Olsthoorn (University of Amsterdam);
• Billy Christmas (King’s College London);
• Daniel Layman (Davidson College);
• Bas van der Vossen (Chapman University).

Attendance is free. As this is a read-ahead workshop, participants should contact the event’s organizer Bas van der Vossen to obtain the readings.

Student Colloquium: Freedom, Oppression, and Marriage: Reading Locke and his Female Interlocutors

This student colloquium will investigate the political thought of John Locke and how this treats women’s rights and freedom. Many feminist authors have criticized Locke and liberalism on the grounds that these cannot treat women as truly free and equal persons. We will be reading part of Locke’s original text in conversation with a number of Locke’s female interlocutors, many of whom offered arguments about their rights, their freedom in marriage, often anticipating, using or critiquing Locke’s arguments. We’ll be asking whether we should be worried about Lockean liberalism in light of the oppression of women, or might use his theory to make sense of these problems

The event is organized by Professor Katharine Gillespie and Bas van der Vossen. Both will also moderate student discussion. The event is invitation only and is sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies.  

Marjorie Perloff, Ph.D., Presidential Fellow, Chapman University
Author of Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary
Lecture: The Strangeness of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—one of the great philosophy books of the 20th century—argues that philosophy is not a theory but a practice and that its key is an understanding of how language works. There are no grand overarching Platonic ideas—of beauty, goodness, justice, truth—but rather words that have meanings in very specific contexts. The Philosophical Investigations takes on—and refutes—the Augustinian theory of language which prevailed for centuries—the theory that WORDS represent specific THINGS. Dr. Perloff argues that what Wittgenstein teaches us above all else is to question large, meaningless generalizations, whether in politics or aesthetics or ethics. He helps us understand that there are no thoughts outside of language.

Marjorie Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into an assimilated Jewish family in Vienna. In the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, Gabriele, her parents, and older brother escaped to Switzerland and later emigrated to the United States. A prolific and groundbreaking scholar, Dr. Perloff has written more than a dozen books. A recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Prize, Dr. Perloff is Scholar-in-Residence and Florence Scott Professor of English Emerita, at USC, and Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita, at Stanford University. She is an elected Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American of Arts and Sciences.

Strategic Justice Conference

The Smith Institute will host a workshop on Peter Vanderschraaf's recent book, Strategic Justice: Convention and Problems of Balancing Divergent interests. The workshop will include papers from:

• Jerry Gaus (University of Arizona);
• Paul Weithman (Note Dame University);
• Michael Moehler (Virgina Tech);
• Justin Bruner (University of Arizona);
• John Thrasher (Chapman University).

In addition:

• Peter Vanderschraaf (Arizona);
• Brian Skyrms (Irvine);
• James Hanink (Loyola-Marymount University);

will also be attending. The narrow purpose of this event is to workshop commentary papers for various journals on PEter's book, but the larger purpose is to encourage thought and discussion about the ideas in the book more generally to foster ties between the participants and members of the Smith Institute and Chapman University. 

"Peter Vanderschraaf’s highly anticipated Strategic Justice is simultaneously the best book on conventions since David Lewis’s Convention, and one of the best systematic works on justice and political philosophy of the 21st Century so far. Like Lewis, Vanderschraaf makes advances in the technical study of conventions while at the same time using these ideas to solve core problems in moral and political philosophy. Vanderschraaf develops the thesis that justice is conventional—an idea shared by Epicurus, Hobbes, and Hume among others—with an unusual level of precision, rigor, and insight. Along the way, Strategic Justice addresses tough questions about the stability and attractiveness of a conventional theory of justice, as well as the hard problem of how the vulnerable will be treated in such a system. I suspect it will take many years for all of the insights here to be digested. Nevertheless, Strategic Justice should be required reading for serious students of conventions and political philosophy. There is much to learn here and those who take the time to join the ranks of the initiated will be rewarded for their time and effort" - Professor John Thrasher, Chapman University.

This event is organized by Professor John Thrasher. Please contact the organizer for specific details.

Eric Schliesser

January 2-30, 2019

In-class collaboration:
ECON/ENG/PHIL 357 "Topics in Humanomics: Milton's Paradise Lost and the Ethics and Economics of Wealth Creation"

Bio: Dr. E.S. Schliesser (1971) is a professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences.

Eric Schliesser's (PhD, The University of Chicago, 2002) research encompasses a variety of themes, ranging from economic statistics in classical Babylon, the history of the natural sciences and forgotten 18th-century feminists (both male and female) to political theory and the history of political theory and the assumptions used in mathematical economics. Schliesser's interest in the influence of Chicago school of economics has increasingly moved his research toward the study of the methodology and political role of economists as experts.

He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published prolifically on Newton, Huygens, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Adam Smith and Sophie De Grouchy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter alia) Newton and Empiricism (OUP, with Zvi Biener, 2014); Sympathy, a History of a Concept (OUP, 2015); Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (Oxford, 2017). Right now he is working on a translation and critical edition of Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy(together with Sandrine Berges). He keeps a daily blog Digressionsnimpressions.

Robert Sugden

Workshop: April 4• 9:00 AM

Bio: Robert Sugden is Professor of Economics at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. His research uses a combination of theoretical, experimental and philosophical methods to investigate issues in behavioural economics, normative economics, choice under uncertainty, the foundations of decision and game theory, the methodology of economics, and the evolution of social conventions. His current work focuses on the problem of reconciling behavioural and normative economics, and is synthesized in his recent book The Community of Advantage (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Jacqueline Broad & Karen Detlefsen

Lecture: "Women and Liberty, 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays"

April 23, 2019 • 5:00 - 6:30 PM • AF209C

Reception at 6:30 PM

Bio: Karen Detlefsen is Professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on early modern philosophy, including the history of philosophy of science, the history and philosophy of education, and women in the history of philosophy. She has published on a wide range of figures, including Astell, Cavendish, Conway, Descartes, Du Châtelet, Hobbes, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Wolff, covering topics in metaphysics, the natural sciences, ethics and political philosophy. She has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Society, the Australian Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

Bio: Jacqueline Broad is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her main area of expertise is early modern philosophy. Her recent books include The Philosophy of Mary Astell (Oxford University Press, 2015) and an edited volume (with Karen Detlefsen) Women and Liberty, 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is currently working on a two-volume edition of the correspondence of women philosophers of the early modern period, for publication with Oxford's New Histories of Philosophy series.

Deirdre McCloskey

October 15-18, 2018

In-class collaborations:
FFC 100 "Humanomics: Exchange and the Human Condition"
FFC 100 "Humanomics: The Ism Schism"
Econ 315 "Economics of Religion"

Bio: Deirdre N. McCloskey has been since 2000 UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written sixteen books and edited seven more, and has published some three hundred and sixty articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years in Economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself now as a "postmodern free-market quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian." Her latest books are How to be Human* *Though an Economist (University of Michigan Press 2001), Measurement and Meaning in Economics (S. Ziliak, ed.; Edward Elgar 2001), The Secret Sins of Economics (Prickly Paradigm Pamphlets, U. of Chicago Press, 2002), The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives [with Stephen Ziliak; University of Michigan Press, 2008], The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (U. of Chicago Press, 2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (U. of Chicago Press, 2010), and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (U. of Chicago Press, 2016). Before The Bourgeois Virtues her best-known books were The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1st ed. 1985, 2nd ed. 1998) and Crossing: A Memoir (U. of Chicago Press, 1999), which was a New York TimesNotable Book.

Her scientific work has been on economic history, especially British. Her recent book Bourgeois Equality is a study of Dutch and British economic and social history. She has written on British economic "failure" in the 19th century, trade and growth in the 19th century, open field agriculture in the middle ages, the Gold Standard, and the Industrial Revolution.

Her philosophical books include The Rhetoric of Economics (University of Wisconsin Press 1st ed. 1985; 2nd ed. 1998), If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise (University of Chicago Press 1990), and Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge 1994). They concern the maladies of social scientific positivism, the epistemological limits of a future social science, and the promise of a rhetorically sophisticated philosophy of science. In her later work she has turned to ethics and to a philosophical-historical apology for modern economies.

John Wallis

Lecture: October 19, 2018 • 3:00 p.m. • Wilkinson Hall 116

Bio: Professor Wallis received his PhD in economics from the University of Washington in 1981. After a post-doctoral fellowship at the University Chicago, he came to the University of Maryland Department of Economics in 1983. He has been a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1989.

Professor Wallis is an economic historian who specializes in the public finance of American governments, constitutional development, and more generally on the institutional development of governments and economies. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in American Economic History (Economics 611 and 311), an undergraduate course on Economic History and Modern Development (Economics 412) and a graduate class on the theory of the state (Economics 613).

Recent publications include "Constitutions, Corporations, and Corruption" in Journal of Economic History, March 2005, "The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History" in Glaeser and Goldin, eds. Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History, University of Chicago Press, 2006, and Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History, with Douglass North and Barry Weingast, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Michael Valdez Moses, Ph.D.

View the lecture video

Summary: While John Ford’s status as one of the founders of modern cinema has long been secure, his contribution to a “modernist” cinema remains very much in doubt.  While film historians have noted the influence of Murnau’s expressionist films, especially Sunrise (1927), on the cinema of Ford (both directors were working for Fox Studios in the mid-1920s), and many of the most distinguished directors of the European and international “new wave” (including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Wim Wenders, Akira Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray) acknowledged Ford’s influence on their art, a widespread critical perception remains that Ford’s most famous and popular movies, and most especially his Westerns, embody a socially conservative and relatively traditional Hollywood aesthetic. This characterization of his work fails to recognize that Ford was a key contributor to an innovative form of vernacular American modernism that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s, and that offered an alternative to the cosmopolitan and European varieties of high modernism associated with expatriate American artists such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Though the “grammar,” “lexicon,” and “idiom” of American vernacular modernism varied according to the particular medium or art in which it was developed, an overlapping set of subjects, motifs, and representational techniques cut across arts as diverse as American cinematography, painting, music, architecture, and dance. Moreover, Ford’s vernacular modernism of the late 1930s was self-consciously populist, critical, and allied with the politically progressive elements of the New Deal.

Focusing on Stagecoach (1939)...continue to explore the full summary.

Bio: Michael Valdez Moses is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Member of the Faculty in the Program of Literature at Duke University. Professor Moses grew up in Los Angeles and was educated at Harvard, New College, Oxford, and the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (Oxford UP, 1995), and editor/co-editor of A Modernist Cinema (forthcoming, Oxford UP), Modernism, Postcolonialism, Globalism: Anglophone Literature 1958 to Present (Oxford UP, 2018), Modernism and Cinema, (Edinburgh UP, 2010), Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1900-1939 (Duke UP, 2007), and The Writings of J. M. Coetzee (Duke UP, 1994. He is a founding co-editor of the journal, Modernist Cultures (published by Edinburg University Press). His main interests are in 20th-century comparative literature (especially British and Irish modernism), global postcolonial literature, the history of film, and the interdisciplinary study of literature, political philosophy, and economics.

Katharine Gillespie, Ph.D.

September 21, 2017 • 4 p.m.
Wilkinson Hall 116

"Shades of Representation: Lucy Hutchinson’s Ghost and the Politics of the Representative"

View the lecture video

Abstract: Mary Nyqvist’s and Margaret Ferguson’s groundbreaking essay collection, Re-Membering Milton (1987) called for critics to situate “Milton’s presentation of gender relations historically, including, now, in relation to the various women writers of the period who have recently been discovered” (xv). In “Shades of Representation: Lucy Hutchinson’s Ghost and the Politics of the Representative,” Katharine Gillespie heeds that call. She explores conceptions of liberty by placing Milton’s gendered analysis of idolatry in the household and the state in dialogue with Lucy Hutchinson’s more egalitarian exploration of personal and political idolatry in her writings honoring her husband, the republican war hero and regicide, John Hutchinson. Continuing her revision of earlier accounts of the supposedly adversarial relationship between feminism and liberalism, Gillespie’s exploration of emerging ideals of liberty deepens our understanding of the multiple uses and effects of this key Miltonic term.

Bio: Katharine Gillespie is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English and Colonial American Literature at Miami University. She specializes in writings by seventeenth-century women who were associated with religious and political dissent. She is the author of Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth-Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Women Writing the English Republic, 1625-1681 (Cambridge University Press, 2917). She is the editor of Writings by Katherine Chidley (Ashgate, 2009) ) and of The Prophetess and the Patriarch: The Visions of an Anti-Regicide in Seventeenth Century England (Writings by Elizabeth Poole) (forthcoming, The Other Voices Series, Iter Press, 2017). She is currently at work on a new monograph, Eve’s Economy: Capitalism and Female Agency in the English Restoration.

George Tsai, Ph.D.

October 16, 2017 • 10:30 a.m.
Argyros Forum 209A

"Respect and the Efficacy of Blame"

Abstract: What is the role of respect in enabling blame to be effective in changing the blamed's attitude and behavior? I argue that the interest in having another person's respect plays an important role in enabling blame to be effective. More specifically, I develop an account of blame’s operations in three different cases (standard, intermediate, and proleptic blame), and raise a normative worry: when blame achieves its desired effect in cases where the blamer and blamed are far apart in their moral understanding and motivations, blame begins to approximate manipulation and coercion, leaving a moral residue.

Bio: George Tsai is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii. His research interests are in moral and political philosophy. More specifically, his work focuses on the moral complexity of relationships and transactions in our personal and political lives. He has published articles in leading venues including Philosophy and Public Affairs, Journal of Political Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Social Theory and Practice, and Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.

Eric Schliesser, Ph.D.

October 23, 2017 • 8 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Sandhu Conference Center Suite E

Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker

Summary: This workshop brings together leading experts to explore the significance of Eric Schliesser's Adam Smith (OUP, 2017). The book is the product of two decades' reflection by the author on Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. The book treats Adam Smith as an exemplary public intellectual whose ideas successfully helped shape the foundations for a liberal society. A key presupposition of the book's argument is that liberal ideas can and need to be renewed in light of both our present challenges and, simultaneously, by reflection on the paths to the present.

Unique among treatments of Adam Smith, Schliesser's book treats him as a systematic philosopher. He places Smith's ideas in the context of a host of other philosophers, especially Hume, Rousseau, and Newton; and he draws on the reception of Smith's ideas by Sophie de Grouchy, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other philosophers and economists to sketch the elements of, and the detailed connections within, Smith's system.

Schliesser offers new interpretations of Smith's views on the invisible hand, the Wealth of Nations, his treatment of virtue, the nature of freedom, the individual's relationship to society, his account of the passions, the moral roles of religion, and his treatment of the role of mathematics in economics.

Brianne Wolf, Ph.D.

Brianne Wolf is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the political economy program at Ashland University, where she teaches courses on political economy and history of political thought. She completed her undergraduate work at Michigan State University, has an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her dissertation work on the relationship between freedom and aesthetic judgment in the modern age. She has published on both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. During summer 2018, Brianne will be a Smith Scholar in residence at Liberty Fund in Indianapolis.

M. Ali Kahn, Ph.D.

M. Ali Khan (Abram Hutzler Professor of Political Economy) obtained his B.Sc. (Econ) from the London School of Economics, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale in 1969, 1972 and 1973 respectively. He is interested in how economics stands in relation to mathematics and language as well as to issues of ethics and epistemology, and how these registers call the robustness of disciplinary boundaries of social sciences into question. This has led him to the "economics of the 18th century", and more generally to the language of commerce in a variety of texts that includes the Quran.

Eric Schliesser, Ph.D.

October 27, 2017 • 3 p.m.
Wilkinson Hall 116

"Rawls and the Economists on The Displacement of Knightian Uncertainty in Mathematical Economics."

Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to understand how and why (true) Knightian uncertainty was displaced during the so-called formal revolution in mathematical economics. I discuss a number of arguments that led to the sidelining of true uncertainty (associated with the ideas of Knight and Keynes) and I explore two displacement strategies associated with ideas of Arrow and Alchian. However, I frame my discussion by way of a debate between Arrow and Rawls. For, it turns out that Rawls accepted Knightian uncertainty. I propose a conceptual framework that can bring these foundational debates in mathematical economics, political economy, and political philosophy together.

Bio: Eric Schliesser (PhD in Philosophy, The University of Chicago) is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely in the history and philosophy of early modern science from Newton and Spinoza to Adam Smith, the history of forgotten feminists (especially Sophie de Grouchy), and recent philosophy of economics, especially on the rise and fall of Chicago Economics. In addition to his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker, he has edited volumes on Sympathy: History of a Concept, Ten Neglected Classics, Newton and Empiricism, The Oxford Handbook of Isaac Newton, and a forthcoming critical edition and translation of Sophie De Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy (all with Oxford University Press). Schliesser is a prolific blogger (at Digressionsnimpressions) and loves California.

Jim Marrone, Ph.D.

November 17, 2017 • 3 p.m.
Wilkinson Hall 116

"Linguistic and Cultural Assimilation as a Human Capital Process"

Abstract: I develop a learning-by-doing theory of cultural assimilation, in which an individual's cultural identity is determined by past investments in culture-specific social capital. The model incorporates several empirically relevant aspects of assimilation that have been difficult to explain in past models. The mechanism in my model yields two possible qualitative outcomes of the assimilation process, depending on the intertemporal complementarities of investment. The first, in which individuals become more homogeneous over time, has been used to explain immigrants' wage assimilation. The second, in which individuals become more heterogeneous as some assimilate and some do not, has vastly different implications for immigration and integration policies. Using detailed datasets from three immigrant destination countries, I provide a variety of evidence from linguistic, identity, and religiosity measures that cultural assimilation (in contrast to economic assimilation) most closely resembles the second type of process.

Bio: Jim Marrone is an economist at RAND Corporation in Washington, DC. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2017. His two research agendas focus on modeling and measuring cultural assimilation, and on measuring the size and scope of the black market for antiquities. In addition, Jim has designed and taught undergraduate courses in time series econometrics (for economics majors) and game theory (for humanities majors). In his free time he does improv and has developed/led a seminar using improv skills to help academics and researchers better communicate their work to non-specialists.