Interviews
Episode 7: On Debt, Recessions, and Spending
Dr. Amir Sufi, Bruce Lindsay Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Chicago
"The inflexible mortgage is the dominant contract not because it is optimal, but because the government provides huge incentives for the financial system to produce it."
Episode 6: On Campus Free Speech at the University of Chicago
Dr. Geoffrey Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law & Former Provost, University of Chicago
"Universities and colleges that fail to live up to the demands of academic freedom are failing to meet their obligations to their faculty and their students... and their society."
Episode 5: On Classical Liberalism
Dr. Richard A. Epstein, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University School of Law, et al.
"A classical liberal starts with the libertarian position about the primacy of liberty but is willing to allow it to be overridden under certain very well, carefully-defined tests."
Dr. William G. Howell, Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics, University of Chicago
"The question is: does the president offer a unique voice in our politics? And the answer to that is undeniably yes, because presidents, by virtue of where they sit... have their attention cast on a national constituency and pay attention to longer-term considerations in ways that legislators do not."
Episode 3: On The End of Protest
Dr. Micah White, Co-creator, Occupy Wall Street
"Well, the core thing is that you have to capture sovereignty. And capturing sovereignty can happen in various ways, which have changed throughout human history, but right now, there are only two ways of capturing sovereignty; you can win wars, or you can win elections."
Dr. Alan J. Auerbach, Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law, UC Berkeley
"...[I]n order for a society to function, people have to be willing to participate. In a society where a lot of people feel that they are left out and that it is unfair to them, they may not take part in the daily functions of an economy that we really need for the economy to work."
Dr. Yaron Brook, Executive Director, Ayn Rand Institute
"While the founders were geniuses of political philosophy, they never built and then sustained a philosophical framework for which to defend the two fundamental ideas on which America was founded, in my view: individual freedom/individualism and the efficacy of reason."
Return every week to find new interviews with the leading thinkers of our time.