A Data-Driven Conversation

Policy@McCombs

Policy@McCombs

A data-driven conversation on policy and economics. Policy@McCombs is produced by the Salem Center for Policy at The McCombs School of Business.

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George Walsh on Protestant Fundamentalism, Lecture 1: Theology and Epistemology

George Walsh (c.1923-2001) was one of those old-school professors who wrote little but read everything. These two lectures on Protestant Fundamentalism, delivered in the late-80s, distill decades of study of Protestant Fundamentalism with great insight and humor, handling the ideas with the same seriousness that intellectual historians normally reserve for the Great Thinkers of Western […]

May 8, 2023

George Smith: The Good, the Bad, and the Puritans

George Smith (1949-2022) was a learned and extraordinarily charismatic autodidact. A wunderkind, or close to it, Smith published his most famous book, *Atheism: The Case Against God* when he was only 25.  He once bragged that he dropped out of high school to start college, dropped out of college to start a Ph.D., and then […]

April 26, 2023

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 […]

January 19, 2023

“Academic Freedom”, the Midterm Elections, and the Net-Zero Debate

The Podcast of the Objectivism Program at the Salem Center in the University of Texas at Austin. Gregory Salmieri and others discuss issues of the day in light of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism, and capitalism.

November 30, 2022

Lecture #4 Marxist Polotics

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 […]

November 15, 2022

Lecture #3 Marxist Economics

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 […]

November 15, 2022

Lecture #2: Marxist Philosophy

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 […]

November 15, 2022

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 […]

November 15, 2022

Bryan Caplan Interviews Princeton Dissident Sergiu Klainerman

Sergiu Klainerman is Princeton University’s most vocal and articulate dissident professor. Find out what this famed mathematician, a refugee from Communist Romania, thinks about (a) how the Marxist-Leninism education of his youth compares to the woke education of today, (b) the decline of academic freedom and intellectual meritocracy at Princeton and higher ed generally, and […]

November 6, 2022

Policy@McCombs with Alex Tabarrok

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk to Richard Hanania about his involvement in Operation Warp Speed, a uniquely successful federal government project. Richard asks how broadly applicable its lessons are, whether or not we could do something similar for cancer, and why economists and […]

October 5, 2022
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