Circa 1990, the late great Milton Friedman gave this eloquent half-hour introduction to his views on economic policy. David Boaz, Cato’s executive vice-president, then moderates a free-wheeling policy conversation between Friedman, David Henderson of the Naval Post-Graduate School, Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute, and Hannes Gissurarson of the University of Iceland.
Lecture #1: The Precursors of Marxism
George Walsh (c.1923-2001) was one of those old-school professors who wrote little but read everything. These four lectures on Marxism, delivered in the mid-80s a few years before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, distill decades of study of Marxist ideas with great insight and humor. Lecture 1 covers the Marxism’s intellectual precursors; lecture 2 […]
Policy@McCombs Speaker List
Fossil Future: The Epstein/Caplan/Hanson Conversation
Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson interview – and challenge – Alex Epstein about his controversial new book, *Fossil Future*. How many “climate denialists” really exist – and what should they take away from Epstein’s book? How widespread is the view that “nature is sacred” – and what’s the best way to deal with it? Why […]
The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
Join us in person in the Crum Auditorium (in Rowling Hall 1.400) or via Zoom here Address: 300 W Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Austin, TX 78705 Parking: You can find paid parking in the Brazos Garage, the AT&T Hotel Garage, or any other garage or street parking. Dr. Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing […]
US Pandemic Policy: Failures, Successes, and Lessons
Dr. Tabarrok holds the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and is a professor of economics at George Mason University. You can find out more about his research interests in empirical law and economics (tort reform, bounty hunters, judicial electoral systems etc.), voting theory and alternative political institutions, health economics by browsing […]
Science and Politics: Three Principles, Three Fables
Dorian Abbot has an undergraduate degree in physics (2004, Harvard) and a PhD in applied math (2008, Harvard). He came to the University of Chicago as a Chamberlin Fellow in 2009 and stayed on as a faculty member in 2011. Abbot uses mathematical and computational models to understand and explain fundamental problems in Earth and […]
How Higher Education Betrayed the Public Interest
Between rising student debts, a dysfunctional employment market, and a sharp leftward shift in the ideological climate on campus, America’s university system is in peril of alienating the taxpaying public that sustains its basic operations. Using the tools of economic analysis, this lecture will examine what went wrong with American higher education and how we […]
How Will AI Change Ethics?
Please join the Salem Center as we welcome Pedro Domingos to discuss AI. The ethical issues surrounding AI have received a lot of attention lately, but unfortunately it’s all been about shoehorning AI into current Western ethical norms. But AI will dramatically change society and therefore ethics, as did previous technological revolutions (e.g., printing, the pill). This talk will examine how AI might change our views of what’s ethical and what’s not, and how […]
Robust policy making with finite-sample statistics: An example from the Covid-19 prevalence debate
Join the Salem Center and Panos Toulis (Chicago Booth). The main paradigm in statistics depends on asymptotics as a limit of an infinite sample. It is well known, however, that asymptotic inference is generally not robust to small samples or model misspecification but what else can be done? This talk is centered around the idea that […]