Spring 2020 Free Market Institute Public Speaker Series – February 20
Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
The Free Market Institute and Rawls College of Business Administration welcome Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, to deliver the spring 2020 Public Speaker Series keynote lecture on Thursday, February 20, 2020. The lecture will take place from 5:30-6:30 PM in the Grand Auditorium (CR 105, First Floor) of the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University.
About the Program
We love to hate the 800-pound gorilla. Walmart and Amazon destroy communities and small businesses. Facebook turns us into addicts while putting our personal data at risk. From skeptical politicians like Bernie Sanders who, at a 2016 presidential campaign rally said, “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” to millennials, only 42 percent of whom support capitalism, belief in big business is at an all-time low. But are big companies inherently evil? If business is so bad, why does it remain so integral to the basic functioning of America? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen says our biggest problem is that we don’t love business enough.
Prof. Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society. He dismantles common misconceptions and untangles conflicting intuitions. According to a 2016 Gallup survey, only 12 percent of Americans trust big business “quite a lot,” and only 6 percent trust it “a great deal.” Yet Americans as a group are remarkably willing to trust businesses, whether in the form of buying a new phone on the day of its release or simply showing up to work in the expectation they will be paid. Prof. Cowen illuminates the crucial role businesses play in spurring innovation, rewarding talent and hard work, and creating the bounty on which we’ve all come to depend.
This program is free and open to all members of the Texas Tech University community and the general public.
Visitors to the university may park in Reserved Lot R-23 at the Rawls College starting at 5:00 PM.
About the Speaker
Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Prof. Alex Tabarrok, Prof. Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog, Marginal Revolution, and co-founder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.
A dedicated writer and communicator of economic ideas, Prof. Cowen is the author of several bestselling books and is widely published in academic journals and the popular media. His latest book is 'Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Antihero,' which Cass Sunstein described as "iconoclastic, charming, [and] wise" and as "essential reading."
For more information about this program visit www.events.fmi.ttu.edu or contact the Free Market Institute at free.market@ttu.edu or (806) 742-7138.