Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Seminar: Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy

One of my talks at Francisco Marroquín University was on making sense of our mixed economy–an unwieldy combination of market and socialist elements. The 28-minute talk integrates themes from my intellectual heroes–Smith, Mill, Mises, Hayek, Rand, Popper, Friedman, Buchanan, and Tullock–and connects market economics, politics, ethics, history, and public choice to explaining our semi-coherent mixed economy. The flowchart worked through is online here.

Related:
The above talk at UFM’s site.
The flowchart: Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess).
The previous talk referred to at the beginning: Seminar on entrepreneurial ethics.
Interview with UFM’s Luis Figueroa on Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility.

APEE talk on the mixed economy

At the APEE conference next month in Las Vegas, I will be presenting “The Evolution of the Mixed Economy - A Schematic Approach.”

My talk integrates themes from several major thinkers from whom I have learned a great deal: Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock.

The talk’s outline is based on this flow chart posted earlier under the title “Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess).”

For the conference I’ve also organized two other sessions: Ethics and the Financial Crisis and Reason in Hayek and Rand.

Here is the full conference schedule.

Rockford, Illinois and the free society

Good news comes in triplets.

I learned last week that Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976) received an honorary doctorate from Rockford College and was our commencement speaker in 1969.

Then I heard that Gordon Tullock (co-founder of Public Choice economics with James Buchanan, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1986) is a native of Rockford.

And I was charmed recently to find this bookplate in the Rockford College library’s copy of Richard Cobden’s Political Writings. Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1991.
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Dare I suggest it: Rockford, Illinois — intellectual center of the free world?

Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess)

Putting into one flowchart what I have learned from Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock.

The flowchart is in spreadsheet format: the short version and the long version in Excel 2007 or in Excel 97-2003. Update: DJ Dates has a cool, scalable Google maps version of the flowchart at his website.

Feel welcome to modify and add to as you wish.

I’m in the midst of discussing this material in my Business and Economic Ethics course, in a unit on business ethics in a mixed economy.

For reference purposes:

Academic title: “The Sociology of Dysfunctional Nonstandard Political-Economic Systems.”

Public Intellectual title: “The Evolution of the Mixed Economy.”

Casual title: “How We Got Into This Frackin’ Mess.”