Hayek Program Podcast · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

David Schmidtz — 2024 Markets and Society Conference Keynote

·42 min·2 clips

When scholarship becomes a team sport, the academy starts to rot.

1. Hayek Program Podcast features David Schmitz’s 2024 Markets and Society Conference keynote on self-governance and mission-driven institutions. 2. David Schmitz, the Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University and editor-in-chief of Social Philosophy and Policy, speaks as a philosopher of markets and institutions. 3. The talk asks how people and institutions choose purposes, set limits, and make later decisions intelligible. 4. Schmitz says economics often treats choice as maximizing utility under a budget constraint, but real life usually does not supply enough constraint. 5. He uses lodging, a new job on Monday at 9 a.m., and a casino night to show why people create their own compartments for decision-making. 6. He contrasts optimizing with satisficing by asking whether a screwdriver is the best one available or simply "will this do?" 7. He argues that self-governance includes knowing when to stop searching because the project has been completed. 8. Schmitz extends the same framework to corporations, where debt, maintenance, cash flow, and mission all depend on chosen rather than given limits. 9. He says public choice is not mainly a cynical theory of selfish officials but an insight that politicians are agents inside arenas of decision-making. 10. He asks whether universities serve students, the broader community, truth, or faculty, and he tests each answer against governance. 11. On the student-as-customer model, he says universities must keep students physically safe while not making them safe from growth. 12. He gives a Yale student-newspaper editorial about spiked drinks and rape to show how words that seem commonsense at one time can be reinterpreted decades later. 13. On the truth model, he says there are infinitely many truths, but not all truths are worth saying without criteria of relevance. 14. On the faculty-as-club model, he invokes the Royal Society of London and says universities cannot justify themselves as vehicles for pedestrian faculty to be pedestrian. 15. Schmitz argues that mission statements often become vanilla compromises designed to offend no one. 16. He says a university’s purposiveness should be understood as a flow, not a stock, because yesterday’s purpose does not necessarily govern tomorrow. 17. He links healthy self-governance to plasticity, specialization, and the ability to change shape when a community’s needs change. 18. The talk turns sharply when he says scholarship becomes dangerous when it turns into team colors, side-taking, and winning instead of deserving to win. 19. The tone is lecture-like and conversational, with jokes about left-foot sneakers, repeated lines, and direct questions to the audience. 20. Listeners who care about universities, ethics, public choice, and institutional mission will get the most from it; listeners wanting light entertainment probably will not.

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