Events

Past Event

Re-empowering Human Agency: A Forum with Common Good

April 19, 2023
8:15 AM - 1:00 PM
Event time is displayed in your time zone.
Faculty House

Legacy bureaucracies have grown ever-denser over the past 70 years, not only in the United States but in virtually all developed countries. Public goals such as safe products, fair markets, infrastructure, and public services are widely accepted and uncontroversial. But government’s capacity to deliver those services effectively is compromised by paralytic processes. Needed choices are frozen by bureaucratic micromanagement and possible legal challenges.  

People at all levels of public responsibility in developed countries are unable to act on their best judgment. Nothing much about government works as it should, causing broad frustration at public ineptitude (poor schools, decrepit infrastructure), waste (high taxes), unresponsiveness (political and bureaucratic paralysis), and heavy-handed dictates (thick rulebooks, political correctness). 

This forum will explore the role of human agency in public choices. The judgments, tradeoffs, and adaptation needed to achieve most goals cannot be replaced by rigid systems. Human choice on the spot is essential to achievement, innovation, diversity, and dignity. Human flourishing requires individual choice and resourcefulness. 

This forum will also explore the need to simplify public structures to leave room for human responsibility and accountability. Confirmed panelists include economists Paul Romer, Richard Robb, and Edmund Phelps, historians Roosevelt Montás and Niall Ferguson, educator Eva Moskowitz, infrastructure expert Diana Mendes, public administration scholar Paul Light, political philosophers Yuval Levin and Christopher DeMuth, political scientists Jennifer Murtazashvili and Daniel DiSalvo, legal scholars Philip Bobbitt, David M. Schizer, and Philip Howard, management expert Christian Madsbjerg, and journalist Mene Ukueberuwa.