Presentation Topics & Areas of Expertise:

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• “What Explains the Great Enrichment? Two Institutions and One Attitude”

  • Right around the year 1800, we began to see a dramatic uptick in income and life expectancy, and in the last several decades in particular, abject poverty has plummeted from 40% of the world’s population to 10%. What explains these dramatic and exciting changes? Two institutions, private property and the rule of law, are wildly important, but can’t explain it all. The missing piece is our attitude toward business people and what they do for us.
     

• “A Classical Liberal Account of the Systemic Oppression of African-Americans”

  • Progressives lump ‘capitalism’ in with other forms of oppression, while conservatives are tempted to deny that ‘systemic oppression’ exists. Reviewing five major examples of violations of property rights and government blocks to asset accumulation in the African-American community, I argue that systemic oppression is real on conservatives’ own assumptions, while progressives should consider that it is exclusion from, not subjection to free markets that we should be worried about when we worry about the oppressed.
     

• “Dante, the Seven Vices, and the Seven Virtues”

  • Dante’s Divine Comedy has been praised as the greatest poem ever written. He organizes his fanciful journey through the after-life around the medieval lists of vices and virtues: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust are combatted by Faith, Hope, Love, Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance. In an age of few good habits and little introspection, Dante has much to teach us about how to live a good human life.
     

• “Mass Incarceration: Causes and Effects”

  • The incarcerated population of the United States has quintupled in the last 40 years, while crime remains low. Even the most retributive accounts of justice can’t account for it; meanwhile, the explosion of the prison system is busting budgets and devastating communities. Demographic issues converge with perverse incentives to make this snowball effect difficult to walk back, but in recent years, left and right have come together to reform the criminal justice system.