Hayek Program Podcast · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Inside the Moral and Political Economy Program at Johns Hopkins University with Burgin, Halliday, and Liu

November 26, 2025·1 hr 1 min·11 clips

The host opens by framing the conversation around intellectual history, a current shift in the social sciences, and the way those ideas show up in teaching. He asks how the Center for Economy and Society at Johns Hopkins came together, and how the new major in moral and political economy was built. The reply traces that work back to a Hewlett Foundation grant tied to the Beyond Neoliberalism initiative. That origin matters because it places the program inside a broader institutional effort, not just a one-off departmental project. The discussion then turns to economics itself. One of the main claims is that the discipline has changed a great deal over the last three or four decades, while the undergraduate curriculum has often stayed behind. The guests argue that political economy is coming back as a way to think about power and institutions, not just technical optimization. They treat that shift as part of a wider return to questions students are not always trained to ask. The conversation keeps drawing a line between narrow technical economics and the larger frame in which economic life actually sits. It then moves into a project meant to map the current landscape of political economy and PPE-type or similar programs across the United States. The point is not simply that there are more programs, but that student interest seems to be growing around them. The guests also connect this movement to related work in civic thought, civic leadership, and economics award programs. Those strands overlap, but they are still distinct, and that keeps the comparison grounded. A Florida example comes up, including the Hamilton School and its separate PPEL and great books majors. That example works as a stress test for how a new school can organize a broad intellectual agenda into different undergraduate tracks. The conversation notes that similar programs exist elsewhere, including Arizona State and other universities. Near the end, the tone gets more historical and anecdotal. One speaker tells a story about Sam Bowles and Milton Friedman, and about the possibility that Bowles might once have gone to Chicago. The anecdote matters because it points to how contingent academic paths and institutional formation can be. The exchange closes by circling back to the larger sense that political economy, curriculum, and university design are all being renegotiated at once.

As heard by us

A careful look at the Johns Hopkins Center for Economy and Society and its new moral and political economy major.

The discussion tracks the Johns Hopkins Center for Economy and Society and its new major in moral and political economy, presented as a Hewlett Foundation-backed effort from the Beyond Neoliberalism initiative.

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Why a new Hopkins major tracks economics' return to political economy.

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