Hayek For Our Time

Friedrich Hayek is a hero and an inspiration to conservatives all over the world, but in one of his sharpest essays, he explained why he is not a conservative. He urged that while conservatives seek to impose a salutary brake on change, they do not tell us where to go. He argued that conservatives do not sufficiently respect freedom and that they are far too willing to override it. He believed that conservatives do not make enough space for pluralism. He claimed that they are wrongly opposed to novelty as such and fall prey to "obscurantism," particularly in rejecting science. He vigorously objected to conservative nationalism and saw it as a precursor to collectivism. Although he agreed with conservatives on many things, including the importance of traditions and incremental change, he insisted that they have something in common with socialists, and that liberals of his distinctive kind offer a different and better path. 

Speakers:

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He has served as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom. 
 
Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech. 
 
He served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration, where he focused on resilience against weather-related risks (such as flooding and extreme heat) and on reduction of administration burdens; he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department’s highest civilian honor, in 2024. 

Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught economic theory and urban economics since 1992. He also leads the Urban Economics Working Group at the National Bureau of Economics Research, co-leads the Cities Programme of the International Growth Centre, and co-edits the Journal of Urban Economics. He has written hundreds of papers on cities, infrastructure and other topics, and written, co-written and co-edited many books including Triumph of the City, Survival of the City (with David Cutler) and Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference (with Alberto Alesina). He has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Chair of Harvard’s Economics Department. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Econometric Society, and he received the Albert O. Hirschman prize from the Social Science Research Council. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1992.