Bruce Benson
Emeritus Professor of Economics
Florida State University

Prof. Benson's seminar focused on a selection of classic and contemporary readings on the theory and history of property rights from an economic perspective. The weekly meetings centered on several themes, including externalities, common pool resources, cooperation versus coercion, and government allocation of property rights.

Reading List

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics, History, English and Communication
University of Illinois Chicago

The Workshop in Applied Price Theory brought together current and prospective graduate students from Texas Tech University and other colleges and universities for lectures and breakout sessions focused on topics in price theory. Readings focused on selections from Prof. McCloskey's revised working manuscript for her textbook The Applied Theory of Price. In breakout sessions, participants completed exercises and discussion problems from The Applied Theory of Price and discussed their reasoning and solutions with Prof. McCloskey.

Rosolino Candela, Senior Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, also served as a facilitator, presenting a lecture on the price theory tradition developed at the University of California Los Angeles in the second half of the 20^th Century.

Reading List

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
Professor of Economics
San Jose State University

Prof. Hummel's seminar focused on the economics of American slavery with selections from his book Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War and other classic readings from that literature. The seminar also included discussions of post-U.S. Civil War monetary systems and critiques of modern economic growth theory from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics.

Reading List

Bruce Benson
Emeritus Professor of Economics
Florida State University

Prof. Benson's seminar served as a continuation of the Property Rights seminar he conducted during the Fall 2018 semester. The weekly meetings focused on selected topics in the law and economics of property rights including tribal justice, commerce in medieval Europe, and justice in American history.

Reading List

J.R. Clark
Scott L. Probasco, Jr. Distinguished Chair of Free Enterprise Emeritus
University of Tennessee Chattanooga

Prof. Clark's seminar addressed the tension between the benefits of market economies and the evolving conflicts with modern conceptions of morality, justice, and equality. It examined the development of market-based morality as it has evolved through mankind's ascent from small hunter-gather tribal bands to large-scale national and global economies.

This evolutionary analysis, and the tension it produces, was extended to many key areas of economic analysis including, but not limited to the following: specialization of labor, trade and exchange, prices, information communication, co-ordination, cooperation, capital accumulation, risk bearing, property rights, and law and economics. Participants also discussed applications to economic education, particularly approaches to exploring these debates through teaching Principles of Economics at the undergraduate level.

Reading List

Douglas Rasmussen
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
St. John's University

Prof. Rasmussen's seminar explored some basic issues concerning the foundations of economics, the nature of human good, and the justification for the basic, negative natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Special attention was given to the connection between a particular version of neo-Aristotelian-Thomistic thought (as advanced by Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl) and the approach to "Austrian" economics and classical liberalism taken by Murray N. Rothbard.

Reading List

Bruce Benson
Emeritus Professor of Economics
Florida State University

Prof. Benson's seminar served as a continuation of the Property Rights and Justice Without the State seminars he conducted during the Fall 2018 and Fall 2019 semesters. The weekly meetings focused on selected topics in the law and economics of property rights including polycentric law, monopolized law, commercial law, rent seeking, and common law.

Reading List

Nicolás Cachanosky
Associate Professor of Economics
Metropolitan State University of Denver

Prof. Cachanosky's seminar focused on two separate themes. The first addressed the history of capital theory with particular emphasis on the problem of the period of production. It emphasized recent applications of finance to the field of capital theory and explores potential areas of research that connect capital theory with other fields of research. The second focused on literature studying the recent rise of left-leaning populism in Latin America. Readings and discussion addressed the difficult task of defining populism and explored areas of research on the issue of 21st-century populism.

Capital Theory  Populism

Peter Boettke
University Professor of Economics and Philosophy
George Mason University

Prof. Boettke's seminar focused on his past and ongoing research on the relevance of F. A. Hayek's insights for tackling difficult questions in the social sciences. The seminar will feature selections from Prof. Boettke's book, F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy. Participants also read and discussed Prof. Boettke's working manuscript F. A. Hayek: A Very Short Introduction. This manuscript is intended to provide guidance to young scholars for progressive research programs in the social sciences. Through participation in the seminar, graduate fellows had a unique opportunity to provide their input to the working manuscript.

Reading List

Peter Calcagno
Professor of Economics
College of Charleston

Prof. Calcagno’s seminar examined classic articles from the public choice tradition of economic analysis with a particular focus on the empirical voting and rent-seeking literatures as illustrations of the versatility of the approach, highlighting the idea of the government as a special interest group.

Reading List

G.P. Manish
International Visiting Scholar
Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University

Dr. Manish’s seminar examined foundational readings from the Austrian School of Economics, focusing on several areas of inquiry, including (1) Prices, Equilibrium, and Coordination, (2) Competition and Monopoly, (3) Capital, Capital Goods, and Economic Growth, and (4) Interventionism and the Capital Structure.

Reading List