Buchanan Speaker Series
Title: Buchanan Speaker Series: Education, Inequality, and Incentives Date: December 10, 2015 from 4:30 – 6:00 pm Location: Center for the Arts, Concert Hall Grand Tier III, George Mason University Please join the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics for the inaugural Buchanan Speaker Series event on “Education, Inequality, and Incentives” with Roland G. Fryer, Jr., the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and faculty director of the Education Innovation Laboratory. Professor Fryer was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal—given by the American Economic Association to the best American Economist under age 40. Among other honors, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Calvó-Armengol Prize and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. At age 30, he became the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard. Professor Fryer's research combines economic theory, empirical evidence, and randomized experiments to help design more effective government policies. His work on education, inequality, and race has been widely cited in media outlets and Congressional testimony. His current research focuses on education reform, social interactions, and police use of force. The lecture will be followed by a reception from 6:00 to 7:30 PM in the new offices of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center in Mason Hall, Suite D101 on the George Mason University Fairfax campus. Questions about this event? Please contact Jen Campbell at [email protected] or (703) 9934967.
About the Buchanan Speaker Series The Buchanan Speaker Series promotes Nobel laureate James Buchanan’s intellectual legacy by applying Buchanan’s ideas to the pressing matters of our time. James Buchanan moved to George Mason University in the early 1980s. His influence on the developing agenda at the Mercatus Center has been important in at least two ways. One is how it fostered a broad research and educational vision that seeks to embrace both political economy and social philosophy. As Buchanan once put it when establishing his first academic center at the University of Virginia in the late 1950s—the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy—the faculty will “strive to carry on the honorable tradition of ‘political economy’—the study of what makes for a ‘good society.’ Political economists stress the technical economic principles that one must understand in order to assess alternative arrangements for promoting peaceful cooperation and productive specialization among free men. Yet political economists go further and frankly try to bring out into the open the philosophical issues that necessarily underlie all discussions of the appropriate functions of government and all proposed economic policy measures.” Buchanan’s other lasting influence is his motto “dare to be different.” Mercatus is grounded in the intellectual traditions best exemplified by F. A. Hayek, but our scholars also draw from the best work in contemporary social science and the humanities. As Buchanan noted in a 1979 essay honoring Hayek, “The diverse approaches of the intersecting ‘schools’ must be the bases for conciliation, not conflict. We must marry the property-rights, law-and-economics, public-choice, Austrian subjectivist approaches.” At George Mason and the Mercatus Center this intellectual marriage has taken place.
About the Buchanan Speaker Series The Buchanan Speaker Series promotes Nobel laureate James Buchanan’s intellectual legacy by applying Buchanan’s ideas to the pressing matters of our time. James Buchanan moved to George Mason University in the early 1980s. His influence on the developing agenda at the Mercatus Center has been important in at least two ways. One is how it fostered a broad research and educational vision that seeks to embrace both political economy and social philosophy. As Buchanan once put it when establishing his first academic center at the University of Virginia in the late 1950s—the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy—the faculty will “strive to carry on the honorable tradition of ‘political economy’—the study of what makes for a ‘good society.’ Political economists stress the technical economic principles that one must understand in order to assess alternative arrangements for promoting peaceful cooperation and productive specialization among free men. Yet political economists go further and frankly try to bring out into the open the philosophical issues that necessarily underlie all discussions of the appropriate functions of government and all proposed economic policy measures.” Buchanan’s other lasting influence is his motto “dare to be different.” Mercatus is grounded in the intellectual traditions best exemplified by F. A. Hayek, but our scholars also draw from the best work in contemporary social science and the humanities. As Buchanan noted in a 1979 essay honoring Hayek, “The diverse approaches of the intersecting ‘schools’ must be the bases for conciliation, not conflict. We must marry the property-rights, law-and-economics, public-choice, Austrian subjectivist approaches.” At George Mason and the Mercatus Center this intellectual marriage has taken place.
