Upcoming Events
Debating Democracy: Do We Need More or Less?
Presented by Jason Brennan, Ph.D.
1:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022
at MTSU Student Union Ballroom
Free event.
Professor and author Jason Brennan will be at MTSU to discuss topics from his latest book, Debating Democracy. Democracy does not convert popular opinion into power. Instead, for most voters, politics is less about policy than it is about signaling their loyalty to their peer groups. Democracy makes people mean and stupid because being mean and stupid sends a strong signal of loyalty. Democracy may be the best system we have so far, but making democracy work means acknowledging its systematic flaws, keeping democracy in its place, and being willing to look for methods of overcoming its problems.
About the Speaker: Jason Brennan, Ph.D., is Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He specializes in politics, philosophy, and economics. He is the editor of Public Affairs Quarterly and an associate editor of Social Philosophy and Policy. He is currently overseeing a $2.1 million project on "Markets, Social Entrepreneurship, and Effective Altruism," funded by the Templeton Foundation.
He is the author of 15 books: Debating Democracy, with Hélène Landemore (Oxford University Press, 2021), Business Ethics for Better Behavior, with William English, John Hasnas, and Peter Jaworski (Oxford University Press, 2021),
Why It's OK to Want to Be Rich (Routledge Press 2020), Good Work if You Can Get It (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); Injustice for All: America's Dysfunctional Criminal Justice System and How to Fix
It, with Christopher Surprenant (Routledge, 2019); Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, with Phil Magness (Oxford University Press, 2019); When All Else Fails: Resistance, Violence, and State Injustice (Princeton University Press, 2018); In Defense of Openness: Global Justice as Global Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2018), with Bas van der Vossen; Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016); Markets without Limits, with Peter Jaworski (Routledge Press, 2016); Compulsory Voting: For and Against, with Lisa Hill (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Why Not Capitalism? (Routledge Press, 2014); Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2011); and, with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is co-editor, along with David Schmidtz and Bas Van der
Vossen, of the Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism (Routledge, 2017).
Partner Events
AIER Bastiat Society: “My Escape from North Korea and the Importance of Freedom” with Songmi Han
Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022 | 6 p.m. | Richland Country Club, 1 Club Dr, Nashville, TN
About the Event: AIER’s Bastiat Society program in Nashville, in partnership with the PERI at MTSU, will host an in-person event with North Korean refugee author, Songmi Han. Songmi is co-author of the recently released book Greenlight to Freedom: A North Korean daughter’s search for her mother and herself.
Raised in the countryside of North Korea, Songmi lived in the part of North Korea that the totalitarian regime hides from the world. She gives an amazing glimpse of the soul crushing reality of daily life in North Korea. Songmi will discuss her daily life in North Korea, “the moment” that triggered her escape, and her dramatic escape to freedom. Songmi will be joined onstage by co-author Casey Lartigue Jr., the co-president and co-founder of Freedom Speakers International (FSI) in South Korea.
About the speakers:
Songmi Han was born in Geumya-gun, Bongsan-ri in the center of North Korea about 240 kilometers (150 miles) from the capital of Pyongyang. She escaped from North Korea in 2011 and settled in South Korea later that year. She is now a college student studying social welfare at a university outside of Seoul, a keynote speaker and special assistant at Freedom Speakers International, and is happy to be living in freedom.
Casey Lartigue Jr. is the co-founder and co-president of Freedom Speakers International in Seoul, Korea.
He is a former education policy analyst at the Cato Institute and co-editor of the
Cato Institute book Educational Freedom in Urban America: Brown v. Board after Half a Century. He has a bachelor’s degree from the Harvard University Extension School and a master’s
degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
AIER Bastiat Society: “Why It's OK to Want to Be Rich" with Jason Brennan
Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022 | 6 p.m. | Richland Country Club, 1 Club Dr, Nashville, TN
Registration Coming Soon
About the Event: Finger-wagging moralizers say the love of money is the root of all evil. They assume that making a lot of money requires exploiting others, and that the best way to wash off the resulting stain is to give a lot of it away. In Why It’s OK to Want to Be Rich, Jason Brennan shows that the moralizers have it backwards. He argues that, in general, the more money you make, the more you already do for others, and that even an average wage earner is productively “giving back” to society just by doing her job. In addition, wealth liberates us to have the best chance of leading a life that’s authentically our own.
About the Speaker: Jason Brennan (Ph.D., 2007, University of Arizona) is Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He specializes in politics, philosophy, and economics. He is the editor of Public Affairs Quarterly and an associate editor of Social Philosophy and Policy. He is currently overseeing a $2.1 million project on "Markets, Social Entrepreneurship, and Effective Altruism," funded by the Templeton Foundation. He serves on the Virginia Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, chairs the Designing the Future(s) Committee at Georgetown, and serves on the Georgetown Faculty Senate.
