Weekend Report: IHS Edition

September 2022

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|Peter Boettke|

As I said in my last post, I am currently at an IHS seminar. I have been doing IHS seminars as a student and faculty since the early 1980s, so this is part of my summer ritual. At one point I actually did multiple IHS seminars per summer. It is an intense intellectual experience as the faculty and students interact with each other literally from day break to midnight (sometimes beyond). And the conversations range from the profound to the trivial, but it is always amazing to meet the eager young minds committed to liberty and to truth in the social sciences and humanities.

The seminar I am currently at is primarily PhD students. Among the student presentations yesterday I heard a presentation by a student from U of Chicago on entrepreneurship, and another by a student from MIT on world welfare. Both presentations were sophisticated discussions of the state of play in the profession on these topics.

The faculty presentations have been outstanding as well. David Schmidtz led off on Sunday night with a discussion of property and justice, in which he used the metaphor of property rights as traffic lights that I found very useful for the discussion of the role of property rights in allowing people to live better together and to realize the gains from social cooperation under the division of labor. It is always amazing for me to see Dave talk as I learn from him even on topics I think I know (another John Wooden wisdom, it is what you learn after you know it all that matters most). We have know each other since we were summer fellows at IHS in the mid 1980s, and I find David to be among the most amazing minds in the classical liberal movement. My favorite book of his is Rational Choice and Moral Agency, but I have taught several times from his Elements of Justice as well. But this paper on property and justice will make my syllabus next academic year for sure.

David Beito (someone else I have known as a fellow student of IHS back in the 1980s) gave a wonderful talk on his work on mutual aid societies. Beito's work on mutual aid societies has been one of the most important developments in classical liberal and libertarian thought since the 1980s, demonstrating with careful scholarship and analytically acute argument that the voluntary sector can indeed provide for the least advantaged in society in the critical areas of health and human services.

Mario Rizzo (who while not a fellow student from the 1980s, was one of the lecturers at the first IHS seminar I ever went to in the early 1980s) gave a penetrating discussion of the New Paternalism, which Rizzo has written several papers on (with Glen Whitman) and which they are writing a book on at the moment.

Then after dinner and discussion groups (I led a discussion of Hayek's "Individualism: True and False"), Mike Munger gave perhaps the best lecture on public choice for this sort of audience I have ever heard. I didn't meet Mike at IHS in the 1980s, but I did get tremendous help from in the early 1980s; Mike had just finished his PhD, I was co-authoring a paper with Bob Tollison on the Voluntary Restraint Agreement with Japan, and Mike was working at the FTC, he knew about this issue, and both Bob and Kevin Grier told me to contact him, and he provided me with some data, and some studies from the Center for the Study of American Business at Wash U related to this topic, etc. as I started my research under Bob's direction. Anyway, MIke summarized his introduction to public choice with five problems: (1) Information Problems; (2) Problem of Democratic Coherence; (3) The Problem of the Constitutional Paradox; (4) The Collective Action Problem; and (5) The Rent Seeking Problem.

Munger's discussion of the problem of democratic coherence was perhaps the best presentation of the central problem that I have ever seen in 20 plus years of hearing various individuals go over voting paradoxes, etc. In fact, I would probably rank Munger among the best teachers of economics and political economy I have ever seen at work.

Anyway, the faculty have set the bar very high, so high in fact that I am a bit nervous about my own lectures (which kick off this morning) which is a good thing. I hope I can rise to the standard set in terms of substance and delivery. We will see.