{"id":171,"date":"2026-05-14T15:49:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T19:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/?p=171"},"modified":"2026-06-02T15:05:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T19:05:04","slug":"institute-caps-a-busy-spring-semester-including-hosting-a-nobel-laureate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/2026\/05\/14\/institute-caps-a-busy-spring-semester-including-hosting-a-nobel-laureate\/","title":{"rendered":"Institute Caps a Busy Spring Semester\u2014Including Hosting a Nobel Laureate"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President Scott Feller (right) greets Vernon Smith, Nobel Laureate (left). Director Dan D’Amico (center) looks on.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Stephenson Institute for Classical Liberalism at Wabash College closed out a remarkable four-month run of programming this May, which notably included a keynote Ama-Gi Lecture from Nobel laureate Vernon Smith<\/a>. This was just one highlight of a semester that also took eleven Wabash students to Rio de Janeiro and brought six visiting scholars to Crawfordsville, whose lectures ranged from Federal Reserve policy to Major League Baseball.<\/p>\n

Our programming began just prior to classes starting, with Stephenson Institute staff taking eleven Wabash students on a week-long seminar on Classical Liberalism and International Trade to Rio de Janeiro. Students attended morning sessions led by an international roster of speakers, including Wabash\u2019s own Nicholas Snow on black markets and economist Peter Earle on the connection between trade and finance, before exploring the city in the afternoons. \u201cThe trip was a great mix of intellectual development while seeing a beautiful city,\u201d Tanner Turnpaugh \u201927 reflected. It was \u201ca meaningful blend of academic ideas and cultural immersion that broadened my perspective on global trade, classical liberalism, and the value of engaging with ideas well beyond the context of our own lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Back on campus, the Institute\u2019s lecture series kicked off on January 27 with historian Dr. Anthony Gregory of Stanford\u2019s Hoover Institution, who drew on his recent book New Deal Law and Order<\/em><\/a> to argue that Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s expansion of federal criminal authority was as foundational to the modern American state as his social welfare programs. \u201cThe New Deal war on crime legitimated national enforcement authority,\u201d Gregory told students. \u201cBy legitimating national authority, it built law and order in both the narrow sense and the broader sense and laid the foundations of modern government.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week later, Dr. Bryan Cutsinger of Florida Atlantic University took aim at the Federal Reserve\u2019s narrative about post-pandemic inflation<\/a>. Walking the audience through Fed Chair Jerome Powell\u2019s claims that the inflation surge was \u201cexogenous\u201d and that the Fed\u2019s framework was \u201cirrelevant,\u201d Cutsinger methodically dismantled each point. \u201cInflation\u2019s not exogenous,\u201d he concluded. \u201cThe Fed did not respond appropriately and aggressively.\u201d FAIT (Flexible Average Inflation Targeting, a monetary policy framework adopted by the Federal Reserve in August 2020), \u201ccertainly did play a role in contributing to the post-pandemic inflation.\u201d He urged the Fed to adopt a nominal GDP level target rather than its current approach.<\/p>\n

\"\"On February 17, Dr. Ryan Yonk of the American Institute for Economic Research came to discuss his book The China Dilemma<\/em><\/a>, applying public choice theory to U.S.\u2013China relations. Yonk pushed back against framings that treat China as a monolithic adversary, including a quote he attributed to a current U.S. senator: \u201cWestern businesses and financiers are selling the Chinese Communist Party the rope it will use to hang the United States.\u201d If that\u2019s where the analysis begins, Yonk argued, the policy options narrow dramatically. \u201cCountries don\u2019t have opinions. People have opinions,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cPeople then come to lead countries and they make decisions that are consistent with their interests.\u201d Asked at the end of the talk where hope might come from in dealing with authoritarian regimes, Yonk replied: \u201cThe single best thing the US could do is lose our obsession with immigration policy and instead have a proactive engagement with other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

The series took a lighter turn on March 31 when Dr. Tony Carilli of Hampden-Sydney College, a Division I baseball umpire as well as an economist, delivered a talk titled \u201cAgency, Attitudes and Outs: An Economic Analysis of Racial Bias in Umpire Ejections.\u201d<\/a> Working through a principal\u2013agent framework, Carilli argued that any racial bias in ejections should appear in the categories with the highest monitoring costs (private exchanges between umpire and player) rather than in clearly observable infractions. Along the way, he made a passionate pitch for the liberal arts. \u201cRead literature,\u201d he urged the students. \u201cIt\u2019ll help you. It\u2019ll help you get empathy and it\u2019ll make you a better writer and a better communicator.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Dr. Tony Carilli of Hampden-Sydney College<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A clear highlight of the semester came on April 1, when Professor Vernon Smith, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner in experimental economics, delivered this year\u2019s Ama-Gi Lecture at Wabash<\/a>. Smith, now 99, opened by telling students he wanted to talk about \u201cthe importance of being wrong,\u201d recounting three moments when he and his profession had taken wrong turns\u2014a key part of eventually finding new breakthroughs. Returning to his first market experiment at Purdue University in January 1956, a short drive from Crawfordsville, Smith recalled the astonishment of watching prices converge to equilibrium even though no participant had full information about supply or demand. \u201cI had discovered a law of nature,\u201d he said. \u201cYou didn\u2019t have to have complete information. People just had to have an opportunity for learning. They\u2019re not stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n

That discovery, Smith explained, sent him back to Adam Smith: first to Chapter 7 of The Wealth of Nations<\/em>, and then, more importantly, to The Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/em>. He argued that order in society emerges from the rules people develop to get along with one another, beginning in childhood. \u201cOur playmates are not as indulgent as our parents,\u201d he said, paraphrasing Smith. \u201cIf we do something they don\u2019t like, they let us know.\u201d Justice, for Adam Smith, \u201chas only to do with one thing, and that\u2019s security from injury,\u201d Vernon Smith noted, distinguishing this from beneficence, the good things people do for each other voluntarily. He closed by tying experimental results on trust games back to a proposition Smith had written over two centuries ago: \u201cHere he is writing in 1759. He\u2019s got a proposition that predicts this, the outcome of this experiment. That\u2019s why you need to read Adam Smith.\u201d<\/p>\n

The series concluded on April 28 with Dr. Claudia Williamson Kramer of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who returned to themes Vernon Smith had opened just days earlier. Drawing on her West Virginia roots and her research on economic freedom and gender, Kramer argued that capitalism, properly understood as a system of private property rights enabling rational economic calculation, has done more for human flourishing, including for women, than any alternative. \u201cIf wealth is better than poverty, if life is better than death, if knowledge is better than ignorance, and liberty is better than oppression,\u201d she concluded, \u201cthen capitalism deserves a defense.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Stephenson Institute for Classical Liberalism at Wabash College closed out a remarkable four-month run of programming this May, which notably included a keynote Ama-Gi Lecture from Nobel laureate Vernon Smith. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":201,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/49\/2026\/05\/smith-feller-damico-edited1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}