Policy@McCombs: Recent Episodes
Salem Center for Policy
A data-driven conversation on policy and economics. Policy@McCombs is produced by the Salem Center for Policy at The McCombs School of Business.
Texas Podcast Network is brought to you by The University of Texas at Austin. Podcasts are produced by faculty members and staffers at UT Austin who work with University Communications to craft content that adheres to journalistic best practices. The University of Texas at Austin offers these podcasts at no charge. Podcasts appearing on the network and this webpage represent the views of the hosts, not of The University of Texas at Austin.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on Judaism and Christianity. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers the history and ideas of these two uber-influential religions. How did the most influential religion of all time spring out of the faith of a weak people on the periphery of the civilized world? What do the two religions still have in common? How – and when – did they diverge? Whatever your views, Walsh knows much that you do not.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on Judaism and Christianity. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers the history and ideas of these two uber-influential religions. How did the most influential religion of all time spring out of the faith of a weak people on the periphery of the civilized world? What do the two religions still have in common? How – and when – did they diverge? Whatever your views, Walsh knows much that you do not.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on Judaism and Christianity. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers the history and ideas of these two uber-influential religions. How did the most influential religion of all time spring out of the faith of a weak people on the periphery of the civilized world? What do the two religions still have in common? How – and when – did they diverge? Whatever your views, Walsh knows much that you do not.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on Judaism and Christianity. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers the history and ideas of these two uber-influential religions. How did the most influential religion of all time spring out of the faith of a weak people on the periphery of the civilized world? What do the two religions still have in common? How – and when – did they diverge? Whatever your views, Walsh knows much that you do not.
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.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on history’s most influential religions. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers so-called “primitive religion,” followed by Indian religion (Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism), Judaism and Christianity, and finally Islam.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on history’s most influential religions. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers so-called “primitive religion,” followed by Indian religion (Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism), Judaism and Christianity, and finally Islam.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on history’s most influential religions. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers so-called “primitive religion,” followed by Indian religion (Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism), Judaism and Christianity, and finally Islam.
Disclaimer: Please be aware the audio quality in this episode may not meet our usual standard due to damage to the age of source material before digitization.
In the late 1980s, philosopher George Walsh gave this six-hour course on history’s most influential religions. With his characteristic erudition and humor, he covers so-called “primitive religion,” followed by Indian religion (Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism), Judaism and Christianity, and finally Islam.
The John V. Roach Honors College at Texas Christian University sponsored this 2023 debate between Prof. Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and Prof. Scott Sehon of Bowdoin College.
In 2017, 8th graders Aidan and Tristan Caplan talked to their dad, Bryan Caplan, about their homeschooling experience in middle school. Spoiler: After three weeks of regular high school, they resumed homeschooling and are now at Vanderbilt University.
Brothers Hyrum Lewis (BYU – Idaho) and Verlan Lewis (Utah Valley University)’s new The Myth of Left and Right attacks the “essentialist” view that “left” and “right” are coherent political philosophies in favor of a “social” view that “left” and “right” are incoherent bundles of issue positions. In this interview, Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson find much common ground with the Lewis brothers, but still find some residual merit in the essentialist view. Hanson analogizes ideology to gender identity: Some features of gender are social, but are all of them?! Caplan maintains that the social theory is 85% true, but the authors stick with 100%.
Also: Should there be affirmative action for right-wing academics?
George Walsh (c.1923-2001) was one of those old-school professors who wrote little but read everything. This two-lecture series on Rousseau, delivered in the late 1980s, shines a spotlight on the great intellectual outlier of the Enlightenment. While Voltaire, the Physiocrats, Locke, Smith, and Hume promoted rationalism and individual freedom, Rousseau was a harsh, if sometimes veiled, critic of both. Walsh paints Rousseau as an early adopter of the Orwellian idea that “Freedom Is Slavery” – and the proto-totalitarian inspiration of not only the French Revolution, but the socialist and nationalist revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
George Walsh (c.1923-2001) was one of those old-school professors who wrote little but read everything. This two-lecture series on Rousseau, delivered in the late 1980s, shines a spotlight on the great intellectual outlier of the Enlightenment. While Voltaire, the Physiocrats, Locke, Smith, and Hume promoted rationalism and individual freedom, Rousseau was a harsh, if sometimes veiled, critic of both. Walsh paints Rousseau as an early adopter of the Orwellian idea that “Freedom Is Slavery” – and the proto-totalitarian inspiration of not only the French Revolution, but the socialist and nationalist revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
Historian and polymath Ralph Raico explores the classic criticisms and seminal critics of classical liberal thought.
Historian and polymath Ralph Raico explores the basic ideas and seminal thinkers of classical liberal thought.
George Walsh (c.1923-2001) was one of those old-school professors who wrote little but read everything. This lecture on the Enlightenment, delivered c.1992, gives a typically insightful and humorous intellectual tour of the Enlightenment. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
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 Philosophy. Lecture 1 covers fundamentalist theology and epistemology; lecture 2 delves into fundamentalist ethics and politics. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
Lecture 1: Theology and Epistemology, Lecture 2: Ethics and Politics
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 Philosophy. Lecture 1 covers fundamentalist theology and epistemology; lecture 2 delves into fundamentalist ethics and politics. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public. Warning: The first few minutes of Lecture 1 are sadly missing, and there are some sound problems on Lecture 2.
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 dropped out his Ph.D. program to become one of the most beloved Liberty and Society speakers for the Institute for Humane Studies. This lecture, delivered around 1990, promotes Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies, a book of essays. The intro is R-rated, but the body of the talk is a deep – and deeply-entertaining - intellectual history of the ethics and psychology of puritanism.
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 should we trust Epstein instead of most of the leading experts? Why did he write Fossil Future instead of Nuclear Future? And much more.
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 delves into Marxist philosophy; lecture 3 goes into Marxist economics; and lecture 4 finishes with Marxist politics. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
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 delves into Marxist philosophy; lecture 3 goes into Marxist economics; and lecture 4 finishes with Marxist politics. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
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 delves into Marxist philosophy; lecture 3 goes into Marxist economics; and lecture 4 finishes with Marxist politics. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
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 delves into Marxist philosophy; lecture 3 goes into Marxist economics; and lecture 4 finishes with Marxist politics. The Salem Center’s Bryan Caplan, who heard Walsh live in 1989, has plans to make all of Walsh’s “lost” lectures on the history of ideas once again available to the curious public.
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 (c) the best way to reverse this decline.
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 public health officials had such divergent opinions on the need to speed up the process of approving and distributing a vaccine.
Alex also discusses the Baumol effect, which he argues can explain much about rising costs in healthcare and education. Richard pushes back on the theory as a sufficient explanation, and asks whether a simple libertarian story better fits the facts, arguing that government support for these industries also plays a role.
The conversation then goes on to talk about the rise of crypto, why America is severely under-policed, and how recent years have seen the collapse of challenges to liberal democracy.
Part one of the conversation with Luigi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKwZqNOeGg4
Luigi Achilli's CV: https://me.eui.eu/luigi-achilli/publications-other/
Philippe Lemoine joins Salem Center visiting scholar Richard Hanania to discuss epidemiology in the US and across the globe.
Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works.
His TED talk "When Ideas Have Sex" has been viewed more than two million times.
He writes a weekly column in The Times (London) and writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal.
As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to the House of Lords in February 2013. He served on the science and technology select committee 2014-2017.
With BA and DPhil degrees from Oxford University, Matt Ridley worked for the Economist for nine years as science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman.
He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock plc and Northern 2 VCT plc.
He also commissioned the Northumberlandia landform sculpture and country park.
He founded the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010.
He won the Hayek Prize in 2011, the Julian Simon award in 2012 and the Free Enterprise Award from the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2014.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is honorary president of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle.
He has honorary doctorates from Buckingham University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and University Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala.
He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert.
They have two children and live in Northumberland in the north of England.
Bryan Caplan interviews Richard Hanania, head of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, on international relations, war, peace, sanctions, grand strategy (and the lack thereof), partisanship, ideology, wokeness, academia, discrimination, civil rights, legal reform, and Hanania’s unique career path
Jay Battacharya is a Professor of Economics and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University.
Dr. Tyler Goodspeed is the Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2020-21 he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President, having previously served as Member, Chief Economist for Macroeconomic Policy, and Senior Economist for public finance and macroeconomics. Before joining the Council, he was a Junior Fellow in Economics at the University of Oxford, and Lecturer in Economics at King’s College London. His primary research and teaching fields are economic history and monetary economics, with secondary interests in macroeconomics and political economy. Prior to earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2014, he received his A.B. from Harvard, summa cum laude, in 2008, and from 2008-2009 was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.
Goodspeed’s second book, Legislating Instability, examines the effects of unlimited liability and regulatory capture on financial stability in “free banking” Scotland. He also has a recent book, Famine and Finance, on the market for small loans during the Great Famine of Ireland, as well as companion articles in the Journal of Development Economics and World Bank Economic Review. Tyler’s current research focuses on British and North American economic history, with particular attention to informal banking and the political economy of financial regulation, as well as long-run economic development. Previously, in his first book, Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution, he analyzed the debates between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, considering the relevance of those debates to contemporary monetary economics. He is also an avid distance runner.
Jason F. Brennan is an American philosopher and business professor. He is currently the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Brennan writes about democratic theory, the ethics of voting, competence and power, freedom, and the moral foundations of commercial society. His work focuses on the intersection of normative political philosophy and the empirical social sciences, especially on questions about voter behavior, pathologies of democracy, and the consequences of freedom. He argues that most citizens have a moral obligation not to vote.
Dr. Charles Calomiris joins Dr. Scott Bauguess and Dr. Cesare Fracassi to discuss FinTech.
Charles W. Calomiris is the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Business School and a Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. He recently served as Chief Economist and Senior Deputy Comptroller at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Professor Calomiris is a member of the Financial Economists Roundtable, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he co-directed the Initiative on Regulation and the Rule of Law for many years. Professor Calomiris received a BA in economics from Yale and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. His research spans banking, monetary economics, corporate finance and financial history. His recent writings include studies using textual analysis to measure the consequences of risk for international equity markets, foreign exchange markets, regulatory costs, and monetary policy actions, studies of the consequences for investment and growth of capital inflows into emerging economies, and studies of the origins of banking crises and the role of government policies in magnifying or mitigating systemic risk, including his recent books, Fragile By Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit (with Stephen Haber), Princeton, 2014, and Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank, Manhattan Institute, 2017, and two edited volumes, Rules for the Lender of Last Resort, Journal of Financial Intermediation, 2016, and Assessing Banking Regulation During the Obama Era, Journal of Financial Intermediation, 2018. He currently is working on a book entitled Useless History and the Future of Banking.
Three writers with different approaches to foreign policy reflect on 20 years of America’s military response to 9/11.
Speakers:
Peter Brookes, (Heritage Foundation) Senior Research Fellow, Weapons of Mass Destruction and Counter Proliferation, Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy
Elan Journo (Ayn Rand Institute) Specializes in the application of Rand’s ethics of rational egoism to public policy issues, and his research and writing focus on American foreign policy.
Justin Logan (Cato Institute) Expert on U.S. grand strategy, international relations theory, and American foreign policy
Moderator: Gregory Salmieri (Salem Center) Director of Program for Objectivity in Thought, Action, and Enterprise
Valentin Bolotnyy is an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He works on topics across public and labor economics, often partnering with government agencies to improve public services and gain insight into social behavior.
Casey B. Mulligan is an American economist and author. He is a Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. From 2018 to 2019 he served as the chief economist of the Council of Economic Advisors at The White House.
Tom Gilligan is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a scholar in economics and political science
Tyler Cowan discusses the anti-hero of Big Business, how history can help businesses, and how we should prepare for the next pandemic.
Glenn Loury joined the Salem Center for Policy for this discussion during Free Speech Week.
Jennifer Doleac is an Economist at Texas A&M University. She is also the Director of the Justice Texas Tech Lab.
Dr. Jay Battacharya discusses how his research points to a new hypothesis on the severity and spread of COVID-19.
Dr. Adalja is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. His work is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity.
Dr. Adalja has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and as an external advisor to the New York City Health and Hospital Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program, as well as on a FEMA working group on nuclear disaster recovery. He is currently a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s (IDSA) Precision Medicine working group and is one of their media spokespersons; he previously served on their public health and diagnostics committees. Dr. Adalja is a member of the American College of Emergency Physicians Pennsylvania Chapter’s EMS & Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness Committee as well as the Allegheny County Medical Reserve Corps. He was formerly a member of the National Quality Forum’s Infectious Disease Standing Committee and the US Department of Health and Human Services’ National Disaster Medical System, with which he was deployed to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake; he was also selected for their mobile acute care strike team. Dr. Adalja’s expertise is frequently sought by international and national media.
Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate’s section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
Dr. Adalja is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American College of Physicians, and the American College of Emergency Physicians. He is a member of various medical societies, including the American Medical Association, the HIV Medicine Association, and the Society of Critical Care Medicine. He is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious diseases, and critical care medicine.
Dr. Adalja completed 2 fellowships at the University of Pittsburgh—one in infectious diseases, for which he served as chief fellow, and one in critical care medicine. He completed a combined residency in internal medicine and emergency medicine at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, where he served as chief resident and as a member of the infection control committee. He was a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine from 2010 through 2017 and is currently an adjunct assistant professor there.
He is a graduate of the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, and he obtained a bachelor of science degree in industrial management from Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Adalja is a native of Butler, Pennsylvania, and actively practices infectious disease, critical care, and emergency medicine in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, where he also serves on the City of Pittsburgh’s HIV Commission and on the advisory group of AIDS Free Pittsburgh.
Bryan Caplan is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. He specializes in public economics, public choice, psychology and economics, public opinion, economics of the family and education, genoeconomics, and Austrian economics.
Emily Oster is a Professor of Economics at Brown University. She holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard. Prior to being at Brown she was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School.
Scott W. Atlas, M.D.is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a Member of Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Health Care Policy.
Dr. Atlas investigates the impact of government and the private sector on access, quality, pricing, and innovation in health care and is a frequent policy advisor to government and industry leaders in these areas. During the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential campaigns, he was a Senior Advisor for Health Care to a number of candidates for President of the United States. He has also advised several members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives and testified to Congress on health care reform. His most recent book is entitled Restoring Quality Health Care: A Six‐Point Plan for Comprehensive Reform at Lower Cost (Hoover Press, 2016). Some of Dr. Atlas's previous health policy books include In Excellent Health: Setting the Record Straight on America’s Health Care System (Hoover Press, 2011), Reforming America’s Health Care System (Hoover Press, 2010), and Power to the Patient: Selected Health Care Issues and Policy Solutions (Hoover Press, 2005). Dr. Atlas had a Fulbright award to collaborate with academic leaders in China on structuring health care solutions for China, and also participated with leaders from government and academia on the World Bank’s Commission on Growth and Development. He has also advised leaders on health care and medical technology in several countries outside the US, including Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Dr. Atlas has published and been interviewed in a variety of media, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Fox News, London’s Financial Times, BBC Radio, The PBS News Hour, Bloomberg Radio, Brazil’s Correio Braziliense and Isto E, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, Argentina’s Diario La Nacion, and India’s The Hindu.
Dr. Atlas is also the editor of the leading textbook in the field, the best‐selling Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Spine, now in its 5th edition and officially translated from English into Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese. He has been editor, associate editor, and a member of the boards of numerous scientific journals and national and international scientific societies over the past three decades. His medical research centered on advanced applications of new MRI technologies in neurologic diseases. While Professor of Radiology and Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center from 1998 until 2012 and during his previous faculty positions, Dr. Atlas trained over 100 neuroradiology fellows, many of whom are now leaders in the field throughout the world.
He lectures on a variety of topics, most notably the role of government and the private sector in health care quality and access, global trends in health care innovation, and the key economic issues related to the future of technology‐based medical advances. In the private sector, Dr. Atlas is a frequent advisor to start‐up entrepreneurs and companies in the life sciences and medical technology.
Dr. Atlas has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of his leadership in the field. He is recognized internationally as a leader in both education and clinical research and had been on the Nominating Committee for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for several years. He has been named by his peers in The Best Doctors in America every year since its initial publication, as well as in regional listings, such as The Best Doctors in New York, Silicon Valley's Best Doctors, and other similar publications. He was honored to receive the 2011 Alumni Achievement Award, the highest career achievement honor for a distinguished alumnus from the University of Illinois in Urbana‐Champaign, his alma mater.
Dr. Atlas received a BS degree in biology from the University of Illinois in Urbana‐Champaign and an MD degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine.
Richard Hahn is an associate professor of Statistics at ASU. He develops probability models and computational techniques for applied data analysis, with a focus on the behavioral, social, and health sciences. His specific research interests include regression tree methods, causal inference from observational data, and foundations of statistics.
Phil Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is the author of numerous works on economic history, taxation, economic inequality, the history of slavery, and education policy in the United States.
Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program. His primary research focus is on the functioning of markets, regulation, and government institutions. He has taught at Dartmouth College, University of Texas, and University of North Carolina (where he was Director of the Master of Public Administration Program), as well as working as a staff economist at the Federal Trade Commission during the Reagan Administration. He is a past President of the Public Choice Society, an international academic society of political scientists and economists with members in 16 countries. He was North American Editor of the journal Public Choice for five years, and is now a Co-Editor of The Independent Review.
Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD, is a physician and health policy researcher whose primary research interests include assessing the cost-effectiveness of diagnostic technologies and reducing the population burden of cardiovascular disease. He is Associate Professor-in-Residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine and cares for hospitalized patients. Previously, he served as a faculty member in the Department of Population Health at NYU School of Medicine and as a Staff Fellow at the Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Ladapo's research program, funded by the NHLBI, NIMHD, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, focuses on (1) patient-centered approaches to improving the health of individuals evaluated for coronary artery disease, and (2) behavioral economic interventions to promote sustainable cardiovascular health, including among adults with HIV. He also leads the health economic and quality of life evaluation of multiple NIH-funded randomized trials focused on cardiovascular disease and tobacco cessation. His national honors include the Daniel Ford Award for health services and outcomes research, and he was also a regular columnist for the Harvard Focus during medical school and residency, where he discussed his experiences on the medical wards and perspectives on health policy issues.
Dr. Ladapo graduated from Wake Forest University and received his MD from Harvard Medical School and his PhD in Health Policy from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an adjunct scholar of the CATO Institute.
Before joining Hoover, Cochrane was a Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and earlier at its Economics Department. Cochrane earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at MIT and his PhD in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a junior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (1982–83).
Cochrane’s recent publications include the book Asset Pricing and articles on dynamics in stock and bond markets, the volatility of exchange rates, the term structure of interest rates, the returns to venture capital, liquidity premiums in stock prices, the relation between stock prices and business cycles, and option pricing when investors can’t perfectly hedge. His monetary economics publications include articles on the relationship between deficits and inflation, the effects of monetary policy, and the fiscal theory of the price level. He has also written articles on macroeconomics, health insurance, time-series econometrics, financial regulation, and other topics. He was a coauthor of The Squam Lake Report. His Asset Pricing PhD class is available online via Coursera.
Cochrane frequently contributes editorial opinion essays to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg.com, and other publications. He maintains the Grumpy Economist blog.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email. Tw | FB | LinkedIn
Alex Tabarrok is Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Along with Tyler Cowen, he is the co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of Marginal Revolution University. He is the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy, voting theory and other areas in political economy. He is co-author with Tyler of Modern Principles of Economics, a widely used introductory textbook. He gave a TED talk in 2009. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
Robert Lawson, director of the O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Cox School of Business join us to discuss his new book, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World.
Emily Fair Oster is an American economist and bestselling author of "Expecting Better" and "Cribsheet". Emily is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Brown University.
P. Richard Hahn also joins the show as a guest interviewer. He is an associate professor of Statistics at ASU. His specific research interests include regression tree methods, causal inference from observational data, and foundations of statistics.
Peter Arcidiacono joins us to talk about his work in identifying bias and discrimination in the Harvard admissions process.
Professor Arcidiacono specializes in research involving applied microeconomics, applied economics, and labor economics. His research primarily focuses on education and discrimination. His work focuses specifically on the exploration of a variety of subjects, such as structural estimation, affirmative action, minimum wages, teen sex, discrimination, higher education, and dynamic discrete choice models, among others. He recently received funding from a National Science Foundation Grant for his project, “CCP Estimation of Dynamic Discrete Choice Models with Unobserved Heterogeneity.” He has also been awarded grants from NICHD for his work entitled, “A Dynamic Model of Teen Sex, Abortion, and Childbearing;” and from the Smith Richardson Foundation for his study, “Does the River Spill Over? Race and Peer Effects in the College & Beyond” with Jacob Vigdor. Other recent studies of his include, “The Distributional Effects of Minimum Wage Increases when Both Labor Supply and Labor Demand are Endogenous” with Tom Ahm and Walter Wessles; “Explaining Cross-racial Differences in Teenage Labor Force Participation: Results from a General Equilibrium Search Model” with Alvin Murphy and Omari Swinton; and “The Effects of Gender Interactions in the Lab and in the Field” in collaboration with Kate Antonovics and Randy Walsh.
Enrico Moretti joins us to talk about America's most dynamic labor markets, the "brain hubs" and their impact in the U.S economy and society.
Enrico Moretti is the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He serves as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives and is a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge), Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn).
David Schmidtz is Kendrick Professor of Philosophy in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic in the Eller College of Management. He is editor-in-chief of Social Philosophy and Policy. He was founding Head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.
Avik Roy is the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREEOP). Avik joins Policy@McCombs to make the conservative case for universal health insurance.
Bryan Caplan is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. Bryan joins Policy@McCombs to discuss his recent book, The Case Against Education.
Ryan Streeter, Director of Domestic Policy for the American Enterprise Institute, joins us in studio to discuss localism.
Professor Larry Ball (Johns Hopkins) joins us in the studio to discuss his recent book, The Fed and Lehman Brothers.