Reputation and Civic Religion

Wednesday, October 6th at 4:00 PM CDT

A Policy@McCombs event with Dr. Chris Phelan

How important is it for a country to have “good” leaders?

To John Adams, our constitution “made only for a moral and religious people” and  “inadequate” for any other.  

To Milton Friedman, however, what mattered most was to “establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”
 
In this talk, the speaker considers the adequacy of reputation (and its possible loss) as a means of getting “bad” politicians to do the right thing, versus the role of civic religion (the purposeful inculcation of “good” values on the political class.)