In this week’s newsletter, I wanted to highlight our Academic and Student Programs (ASP) here at the Mercatus Center. ASP is in the talent business. Through these programs, we aim to identify, develop, cultivate, and encourage talent who understand, appreciate, and ultimately advance classical liberalism and mainline political economy.
Given the advance of illiberalism, authoritarianism, and battles over censorship and free speech, one might conclude that interest in classically liberal values is ebbing away. But that’s not what we see. This year, we saw a record number of applications to our ASP programs, over 3,700 unique applicants, almost doubling our applications from last year. Hunger for deeper knowledge of mainline economics, free association, free expression, and free markets is still strong.
ASP aims to advance these ideas in three main ways. First, we offer our multi-year training to cultivate the next generation of academics, policymakers, and change makers. These are our PhD and MA Fellows here at George Mason University, as well as the fellows who are engaged over multiple years in increasingly advanced ways from our external programs.
Second, we offer meaningful talent engagement to folks outside of George Mason. Examples include our Smith, Bastiat, and Ostrom fellowship programs, where fellows read and discuss texts that are key to mainline political economy and apply these ideas to the real world.
Third, we offer an introductory program that helps identify future talent. This includes our Don Levoie fellowship, an online offering which will include almost 400 students this upcoming year from all over the world.
So while the news would tell us that classically liberal ideas are falling away, we continue to see strong interest from young students across the country and the globe.
Matthew Mittelsteadt has updated his AI Policy Guide with the latest happenings in artificial intelligence. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
Relatedly, Dean Ball submitted a public interest comment to the National Institute of Standards of Technology's recent proposal on expanding guidelines for open-source AI.
Andrew Vollmer filed an amicus brief in Texas regarding the pending case against the Securities and Exchange Commission. He argues that the SEC doesn’t have statutory authority to create the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), and this is particularly concerning as the CAT has become a massive surveillance tool.
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