To Cafe Hayek’s very much appreciated patrons:
Every year at this time I – like many others – impose on your generosity. I do so by asking you to consider including the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in your end-of-year giving plans. A financial contribution to the Mercatus Center at GMU helps not only to maintain, but to strengthen, the great bastion of sound economic thinking, teaching, research, scholarship, and public engagement that is uniquely GMU Econ. It helps also to support Mercatus’s stalwart efforts to translate this research into public-policy proposals that make the economy freer and, hence, more productive of mass prosperity.
We rely heavily, and gratefully, upon your generosity.
More than 90 percent of all funding for our graduate-student scholarships and stipends – and almost 100 percent of the funding for faculty and grad-student research expenses – comes not from the state but instead from annual private donations. Mercatus now supports a total of 255 students – three more than last academic year (which itself was five more than the previous year). Forty-six of these students are enrolled in GMU’s graduate economics program.
Among the activities that are privately funded are:
– our weekly Philosophy, Politics, & Economics Workshop which brings top scholars from other institutions to visit GMU throughout the academic year to mix with our faculty and students.
– the Adam Smith Fellows Program, in which students from institutions other than George Mason University meet regularly over extended weekends with GMU Econ and Mercatus Center faculty in order to discuss Austrian economics, public-choice economics, and the Bloomington School of economics founded by the late Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. Because student interest in this program continues to grown impressively, in 2019 we maintained the expansion started in 2016 of this Program to sites other than GMU: in addition to multiple weekend seminars near our Fairfax campus, we also now do seminars in Arizona and in London.
Other privately funded ventures at GMU Econ, often in partnership with the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, MRUniversity, outreach efforts to policymakers in government, and of course our blogging – blogging not only at Café Hayek, but also at Alt-M, Coordination Problem, EconLog, Marginal Revolution, and Overcoming Bias. (Not all of these blogs, I point out, are housed at GMU or Mercatus, but each is one at which some of my colleagues are regular contributors.) Just FYI, almost all of the work that my colleagues and I do on these projects is uncompensated; we do this work as part of our way of contributing to the causes of sound economic education and a free society. And I hardly need add – but I will – that none of these efforts receives a cent of government aid.
On the program side, of particular interest to me is Mercatus’s Trade and Immigration Project (TIP). Directed by Dan Griswold and me, this program challenges the economically uninformed and dangerous embrace of economic nationalism – an embrace offered today by those on the political right no less than by those on the political left.
An excellent example of just some of the output of this program is this superb new paper by my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy. (Vero, by the way, continues to be a thorn in the side of supporters of the cronyist U.S. Export-Import Bank – including with this recent op-ed in the New York Times. She is also an incessant opponent of profligate government spending and of those who wish to interfere in the labor market.)
And Vero, Dan Griswold, and many other of my colleagues are near-daily voices and faces in the media – radio, t.v., podcasts, you name it – defending economic openness, permissionless innovation, budgetary sanity, and other free-market policies with intelligence and clarity against the economic nationalism that now looms so frighteningly on the Potomac.
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GMU Econ is decidedly outside of the mainstream of modern economics, despite the fact that two of our faculty members won Nobel Prizes since 1986 – the late Jim Buchanan in 1986 and Vernon Smith, now emeritus at George Mason (and currently teaching at Chapman University), in 2002. The reason we are outside of the mainstream is that we do not approach economics as if it is a branch of applied mathematics or a training ground for social engineers. We also reject the increasingly common claim (among economists) that the best economic knowledge is that which is gotten through empirical studies. While our students are trained in appropriate mathematical and econometric methods, we at GMU Econ understand that economics is much more than those techniques.
The typical GMU economist – Arnold Kling calls us “Masonomists” – is a student of society. He or she knows not only cutting-edge economic research, but also the full tradition of economics dating back to before the time of Adam Smith. (We even have an entire field of specialization in the economics of Adam Smith, in which students and faculty members – including me – study carefully and discuss critically large swathes of Smith’s writings.) The GMU economist – unlike the typical modern economist – is thoroughly steeped in history, jurisprudence, political science, and philosophy. This broader understanding of society promotes skepticism of the social-engineering schemes that are forever pouring out of towers of ivory and from buildings of marble. Simultaneously, it promotes also a great appreciation of – indeed, a sense of wonder at – the stupendous coordinating and creative powers of free markets and free people.
Economics at George Mason University is intellectually alive and exciting. The world’s finest students – such as Rosolino Candela, who joined Mercatus after doing post-doctoral research at Brown University – who want to study economics in the rich tradition that is still honored at GMU Econ apply every year to our program; they apply either for entry into our PhD program or our Masters program. We accommodate many of them, but (resources being scarce!) we can’t accommodate all.
A contribution from you will increase our capacity to teach and mentor more students. It will also help us to better serve the cause of sound economic education in other ways, such as by enabling us to extend summer funding to more undergrad students who wish to work with our faculty between academic years, and by enabling us to more fruitfully experiment with alternative media as we search for ways to communicate both with other scholars and with the general public about economics.
This last point is especially important. No other economics program is as active in the public discussion and debate as is GMU Econ; certainly no other program is as staunch a champion of free and depoliticized markets as is GMU Econ. Our faculty includes some of the world’s top economics bloggers, such as Peter Boettke, Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and Alex Tabarrok. These and other Masonomists – including, of course, the great Walter Williams – also frequently write in the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other popular outlets. And we are also often interviewed on radio and television and in podcasts. It’s our passion not only to better understand the logic and the workings of the economy, but to explain to non-economists the countless unseen or underappreciated ways that free markets coordinate human activities peacefully and productively.
If you like what you read here at Cafe Hayek, please consider helping the larger effort of which this blog is a small part – that larger effort is better and more widespread economic education. You can do so by making a tax-deductible contribution to GMU Econ through the Mercatus Center. (Those of you who contribute by mailing in a check might mention Cafe Hayek in a cover note. That snailmail address is the one available at the link or: Donald J. Boudreaux, Department of Economics, 114 Mason Hall, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030)
I thank you all for honoring me by reading this blog. And I wish you the happiest of holidays and a 2020 that is filled with prosperity, peace, freedom, and a reinvigorated invisible hand.
Many thanks!
Don
