Hayek Program Podcast

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Peter Boettke sits down with Don Boudreaux to mark the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Boudreaux reflects on his many years teaching a graduate seminar on Smith at George Mason University, the layers of insight he continues to discover on each re-read, and why so few professional economists ever read the book cover to cover despite its enduring relevance to questions of monopoly power, trade, taxation, and public debt. The conversation traces the relationship between The Wealth of Nations and Smith's earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments, dismantling the old "Adam Smith Problem" and explaining why markets need both bourgeois virtue and hard institutional discipline to function. Boudreaux and Boettke also celebrate George Mason's distinctive culture as a "books department" shaped by mentors such as Roger Garrison, Walter Williams, and James Buchanan.
Dr. Donald J. Boudreaux is a Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Professor of Economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He is the author of many books, including The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), The Essential Hayek (Fraser Institute, 2015), Hypocrites and Half-Wits: A Daily Dose of Sanity from Cafe Hayek (Free to Choose Press, 2012), and Globalization (Greenwood Press, 2007).
**This episode was recorded on May 28, 2026**
Show Notes:
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Liberty Fund, 1982)
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty Fund, 1982)
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Liberty Fund, 1896)
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory Of Employment, Interest, And Money (Harper Collins, 1965)
James M. Buchanan, What Should Economists Do? (Liberty Fund, 1979)
James M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes (Liberty Fund, 2000)
George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility (Grand Central Publishing, 2019)
Liberty Matters | “Deirdre McCloskey and Economists’ Ideas about Ideas”
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CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Paul Dragos Aligica delivers a keynote lecture at the 2024 Markets & Society conference on resilience as a research frontier in mainline political economy. He traces how resilience has been largely absent from comparative economic systems scholarship, only to explode as a topic in the last decade, mostly imported from ecology and complexity theory rather than economics.
He maps how three traditions at the core of the Mercatus research program—Austrian economics, public choice, and Ostromian institutionalism—each shape our understanding of resilience. Aligica also addresses claims that resilience thinking is merely a proxy for neoliberalism, closing with reflections on the normative stakes of self-governing societies.
Dr. Paul Dragos Aligica is a Senior Research Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, KPMG Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest, and a Senior Nonresident Scholar with the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. His many publications include Governing Differences: Social Diversity, Polycentric Political Economy and Modus Vivendi (Edward Elgar, 2025) coauthored with Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Public Governance and the Classical Liberal Perspective: Political Economy Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Public Entrepreneurship, Citizenship, and Self-Governance (Cambridge University Press 2018).
**This episode was recorded on October 11, 2024**
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
CC Music: Twisterium

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Bobbi Herzberg delivers a keynote lecture at the 2025 Markets & Society conference on Vincent Ostrom’s understanding of democracy and self-governance. Reflecting on Ostrom’s life, scholarship, and enduring influence, Herzberg explores four central themes in his work: the emergence of social order through shared beliefs and norms, the capacity of individuals to govern themselves, the importance of polycentric systems of governance, and the fragility of democratic institutions. Drawing on Ostrom’s collaborations with his wife, Elinor Ostrom, and his engagement with the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Herzberg argues that democracy is not a mechanism imposed from above but an ongoing practice of cooperation, deliberation, and mutual responsibility. She concludes by emphasizing Ostrom’s vision of democracy as a living experiment in self-government that must be renewed and sustained by each generation.
Dr. Roberta Herzberg is a Distinguished Senior Fellow and a Senior Research Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute.
**This episode was recorded on October 17, 2025**
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
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On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Emily Chamlee-Wright delivers a keynote lecture at the 2025 Markets & Society conference on the precarious state of liberalism and the cultural foundations necessary to sustain a free society. Drawing on the cultural economy framework she developed with Virgil Storr, Chamlee-Wright argues that liberalism faces not only overt constitutional threats but a deeper "soft tissue" problem: the erosion of the values, norms, and habits that make formal institutions work. Once degraded, she warns, no legislative remedy can restore them.
She walks through four dimensions of this cultural ecosystem, shared mental models, generalized norms, cultural tools, and social networks, and shows how they can either reinforce liberal resilience or spiral into vicious cycles of decay. She closes with an urgent call to action: liberal intellectuals and scholars must boldly deploy the cultural tools at their disposal, the stories, symbols, and founding ideals of a free society to decisively reverse the illiberal drift before it becomes irreversible.
Dr. Emily Chamlee-Wright is a senior affiliated scholar and Board Member at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She is the President and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies and the author of numerous books, including The Cultural Foundations of Economic Development (Routledge 1997) and Culture and Enterprise (Routledge 2000), co-authored with the late Don Lavoie.
**This episode was recorded October 19, 2025**
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
CC Music: Twisterium

Welcome to our new series, The Hayekian Triangle. This series will feature a range of conversations between our hosts: Virgil Storr, Chris Coyne, and Peter Boettke.
On this episode, the three sit down to mark the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations — and to ask a deceptively simple question: why are we still reading a book written a quarter-millennium ago?
From the invisible hand to the division of labor, Smith's ideas have become so embedded in how we think about markets and society that it's easy to forget just how radical they originally were. Virgil, Chris, and Pete dig into what Smith actually said, why the standard takes on laissez-faire and self-interest so often miss the mark, and what a Scottish moral philosopher writing in 1776 still has to teach us about wealth, poverty, and the institutions that make human flourishing possible.
Whether you're coming to Smith for the first time or returning to him with fresh eyes, this conversation is a reminder that the greatest works in political economy aren't monuments to be admired from a distance — they remain living inputs into the science of today.
**This episode was recorded on April 3, 2026**
Show Notes:
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Liberty Fund, 1982)
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Liberty Fund, 1982)
Kenneth Boulding, "After Samuelson, Who Needs Adam Smith?" (History of Political Economy, 1971)
Kenneth Boulding, "Economics as a Moral Science" (The American Economic Review, 1969)
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (Penguin Press, 2019)
Raghuram Rajan, The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind (Penguin Press, 2019)
Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce; Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World; Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2006, 2010, 2016)
Martha Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2019)
Ludwig von Mises, “Why Read Adam Smith Today?” (FEE, 2015)
Richard Ebeling, "Celebrating Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations at 250 Years" (Future of Freedom, 2026)
If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!
Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram
Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
CC Music: Twisterium