 Our guest this weekend is Professor William Boyce who teaches econ at Arizona State University and also founded the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty there. He is speaking at our Mises Circle event in Phoenix this weekend and if you're in the Phoenix area or you're free to watch online I really recommend you check out his speech. Some Austrians may not be so familiar with Professor Boyce but he gave a great speech at our AERC conference earlier this spring and he's one of those rare academics who's actually gotten more radical and more Rothbardian in age. Professor Boyce really makes a devastating case against academia and provides some great insights into what it's like being a free market or Austrian thinker in most econ departments today and he also makes really the larger and broader case against public education in general and calls for the outright abolition of public schools. So if you're interested in academia and what it's like being an Austrian economist in a world of Keynesian mathematical models stay tuned for a great interview with William Boyce. Professor Boyce you are the founder and the director of the Center for Economic Liberty at Arizona State. You know some of these free market centers have sprung up in the last 25 years around the country affiliated with various universities. Obviously there's a very large Mercatus Center at George Mason. There's a free market institute closer to us here at Troy University in Alabama. There is a newer center at Texas Tech under Benjamin Powell and there is of course your center at Arizona State. I want to play devil's advocate for a moment. There are some libertarians and Austrians who say we ought to bypass academia altogether. It's hopeless and therefore we ought to simply address our efforts at intelligent layperson audience. There are other people who say no, no, no. We need to reverse the tide of left wing and status academia and therefore we ought to be working within the system and promoting Austrian economics through these types of free market centers at universities. So that was a long winded question but let me just ask you, you know, what's your perspective on the best way to go about changing things in academia? I think our battle is a too plunge one. I think what the Mises Institute does with presenting their ideas often and broadly is really, really important. But I also think we've got to change education from gate 12 to universities to be more open to an Austrian approach or a free market approach. We don't see that at those levels. I think the centers, if they can create departments and programs can create free market economic thinkers and the more we put out there, the more impact that I have in the long run. And I also think that if we can do the same thing in K through 12, get rid of, get rid of the public education, create private education as a replacement and have a market for education, then I think we really have an impact. And I think all of us thinkers along those lines, I think we'll take any victory we can get. Tell me how the landscapes changed just for general free market thinking in academia. Do you feel like the environment is more favorable today than it was, let's say, when you were coming up in the 70s and 80s? When I was coming up in the 70s and 80s, the only thing that you were caught was still Keynesian. Very few had any free market stuff except maybe a few people out of Chicago or Virginia Tech or someplace like that. But today, I think there's more of a resistance by the mainstream profession to accept those free market ideas. And there's more of a dimension where I can become a Nobel Prize winner by coming up with another market failure approach to it. The research game has moved us in the direction not of policy and thinking, but in the direction of trying to figure the economy is a great big machine that we can engineer. So I'm kind of mixed whether I've seen a swing or not. I'm optimistic that we're going to move back in economics. I see the beginnings of some people thinking about non-mathematicizing econ, like Stanford University has moved in the direction of a more policy-oriented program. And I think we'll see more of that and we'll see the old quantitative stereotype in econ maybe lessened. Well, it's going to take a while. But I wonder from your perspective, do laypeople and prospective econ students today really understand the degree to which econ departments are completely based on math and modeling? And you have to do very high-level graduate-level math to even get into an econ department. I wonder if people understand the degree to which modeling and technical elements of econ have become basically the entire path to obtaining a PhD. You know, Jeff, you're exactly right. And I don't think they have realized that. They take some undergraduate economics and usually one professor gets some excited and that one professor might be Austrian, might be green market, might just be a good guy. But that one professor gets some excited, then they go to grad school and it's nothing but high-level mathematics and econometrics. And they're discouraged before they even get out. That's why you look at a lot of the programs today and they're actually a lot more comprised of foreign students because they can speak the mathematics a lot easier than they could speak the English. So a lot of the US PhD programs are becoming more and more foreign-dominated and less and less US-dominated. As a result of some of this mathematical emphasis, I think your own center and others have found a niche more in business schools than in econ departments. Can you talk about how free market thinking and Austrian thinking seems to fit better in B schools these days than in the more more abundant status thinking econ departments? Oh, that's a really good point. It does. Business schools are applied generally overall. They're looking for solutions to business problems, not universally, but overall. And so the business schools are pretty open to apply the economics or political econ or Austrian economics. The entrepreneurship research. Most management departments have people doing research like that. So the Austrian approach to entrepreneurship is looking at favorably in the liberal arts programs, where most of the econ departments are, they're really kind of out of touch with reality. They don't care that much about policy. They don't look at policy. They're the pure ivory-towered academics that are off doing their research quantitative work, which two or three people will read their article in some journal. And that's all they care about. I think the business schools are much, much more open to the kind of economics that we all like. And you're right, most centers are set up in business schools. And most of the business school programs are more applied and policy-oriented. You'll find that the one in the business school tends to be more oriented towards your current logical thinking rather than the current mathematical thinking. Well, if a young person came to you and said, gee was, I've discovered Mises, I've discovered Hayek, I've discovered Rothbard, this excites me. And I'd really like to make a career out of this. But they had a very traditional path in mind, which would entail getting a PhD in economics and then becoming a tenured university professor somewhere. What would you say to them about the pitfalls and whether they ought to do it at all? Well, it would really depend on a particular student. If I had a student come to me who is extremely good in mathematics and physics and had run across the Austrians and really loved them, I would say, go ahead to the best graduate school in terms of reputation you can be and just keep reading these other authors. And in fact, I'll put you in touch with some of the Austrians that you can use as mentors. Well, in general, there are the students who don't have the advanced mathematical physics quantitative approach. I don't encourage them to go on to a PhD program. Like I tell them, there are two or three PhD programs that you could think about. You could look at another field like, say, management and go into entrepreneurship, but don't go into a state econ program because you probably won't make it for one thing. And if you do, it's going to be doing nothing but mathematics for the next 15 years of your life. So I think I tend to be discouraging to most of the students who come to me like that. Well, when you were getting your PhD, was it far less math-oriented? Yes, it was far less, very quantitative except maybe for one professor. I didn't feel like I learned economics throughout my PhD program. I learned econometrics and mathematics and differential equations and set point theory and proofs and theorems. And then I got out. My first job was actually in investment banking. And the first meeting we had, they started asking me questions about what's going on in the economy. And I had no idea. I had to then start over again and try to educate myself about economics. And that's how I eventually ran across the Austrian school and realized that that's what my thinking was a sympathical with. But when I was in graduate school, it was nothing like that. I did linear programming for my first micro course. I did dynamic programming for my second macro course. I didn't know any micro or macro, unfortunately. At that time, that was a pretty standard approach. I mean, I looked at programs around the country thinking that I might like to transfer and most of them are the same line. So I said, if I'm going to go through I'm just going to finish this up and then go do what I want to do. Talk if you will about life in academia. In other words, the politics behind it. I wonder if young people aren't sometimes naive about what life is like in professional academic settings when so many of your colleagues and certainly the administrators are skewed heavily to the left. Do you feel that you personally felt a chill or suffered throughout your career as a result of your orientation? Yeah, I do. It's a good life. The academic lifestyle is very nice. You sit up and do your own thing and you know these students and you don't have to be in the office all the time. That's a great lifestyle. But being an Austrian or a free market individual in a university setting can be frustrating. I mean, I'd go to a meeting across campus, a meeting that had all kinds of different departments represented and it would be so left that I usually ended up saying something that offended people like I would count up. I would count up their salaries and the fact we spent an hour doing nothing and say, you know, the opportunity cost of this meeting has been $100,000. They didn't like to hear that. And I tried to implement some free market approaches on the campus and in budgeting and the university really got the backup over that. So today, academic institutions tend to be big, big bureaucracies, faculty left oriented, strongly left oriented. I think a recent survey said 97% of faculty donate to Democrats. So there's a very small portion that are not left dominated and I'm not sure they would be all be classified into another turning of free market either but it's a small group and it's gonna be a frustrating struggle. What you have to do is just change things and get people riled up and get them thinking about issues and sometimes that bites you. You might not get reward you want or you might not get recognized like you ought to be but probably worth it in the long run. If I was coming out of school today with my philosophy today, I don't know if I could go into academia. I don't think I would have the patience to go through it again. But I'm being very frustrated. Well, earlier you mentioned the research and publishing game as you termed it. Traditionally, most people don't go into academia to get rich. There are exceptions, you know, the Krugmans of the world managed to make a very good living coming out of an academic background. But well, what's the currency? What's the status that academics seek? Because we know that they do seek status. They do want to be important. They want their ideas to be read but it's generally not the most financially rewarding thing someone might do as opposed to let's say investment banking. So what's sort of the pecking order in most academic settings? Well, the pecking order is clearly within the academic circle. Very few academics care that their work is read by laymen or policy makers. Now, there are exceptions, of course, you know, like John Cochrane. He's at Hoover now but with Chicago. Somebody like that writes for lay people but most of the academics want their praise from the mother academics. So they go to a meeting where they present a paper and people speak about the papers and say, boy, that guy's really smart. He modeled this or did that. That's what they're looking for. That's the prestige they get. It's not getting it out of the public. And in terms of making money, you're right. I'd say you don't choose academia to make money but you can do okay. People like Kugman, obviously, if you write textbooks you might make some. If you speak, I have friends that do quite a bit of speaking and make good money. It's a possibility but it's not what you'd choose if you're going to make money go in the Wall Street or investment banking or something if you're an economist. You wouldn't go to academia. Professor Boyz, earlier you mentioned homeschooling. Obviously there's been a homeschooling revolution in this country over the past couple of decades. Tell me about how you see homeschooling fitting into revolutionizing education in this country, especially K through 12. And also give me your thoughts on how your colleagues view homeschoolers who often excel when they get out of K through eight homeschooling and then enter a traditional university setting. Yes, I think so. They tend to look at them as being kind of anti-social weird kids but I do also know quite a few of my colleagues who homeschool their kids. So I think it's probably along the philosophical lines of less than and free market, the homeschooling. I think most academics want their kids to get a private or a public institution, the private just being a more prestigious place to send their kids. I don't think they're wanting, most don't want to do homeschooling, it's too much work. And they really fear that the person coming out of there might be coming out with not the right ideas and education is an indoctrination process where you're supposed to come out and think like everybody else. So I think homeschooling is a way to get around that and like I say, that often in a classroom sets the homeschool kid up to be different or just sound different and may or may not cause any problems in the classroom. But homeschooling is a great way to go. It's the first step. It's the best step that parents have right now for controlling their kids' education. Charters are a reasonable move but they're not like a privatized system will be. Homeschooling is basically that, you buy your curricula or make up your curricula and give it to the kids as you wish and take them on trips as you wish and give them lots of experiences and then you can get the social interaction through homeschool organizations. So I think it's a, for me, it's a really exciting movement to see that. In the classroom, I loved it because those kids were independent thinkers but I do know a lot of faculty don't like it and thought they were smart alecky or they didn't wanna do the assignments the way they were told to do them. Well, I think there are some dimensions of discrimination maybe I guess I could put it against homeschool kids. Professor, we only have time for one more question. You are speaking at our upcoming Mises Circle in Phoenix. It's at the Hilton Close to Sky Harbor Airport this coming Saturday. I'd like to ask you to give us a preview of what you're gonna talk about at the conference if you would. I think if you look at the history of public education you understand why we have moved increasingly last and statist in the last 250 years. If we're gonna change that, we better change education. We don't just change it on the margin. I mean, we change it. We get rid of public schools and we transfer them or transition them into being private school profit schools. There's not been a lot of work on that. I saw Lou Rockwell did something back in 2008 where he suggested that a city or a state do that. I've been working on a couple of position papers arguing that there are certain steps we could take to do that and I'd like to talk about those at the upcoming conference and also talk about just the philosophy of what education is today and what it should be. So I'm looking forward to that. It ought to be a lot of fun. We're trying to say, okay, what do we need to do to move back, to move towards the freedom agenda away from the status agenda and it's just exciting to think about. Yeah, it ought to be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to it. Professor William Boyce, thanks so much for your time this weekend. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Phoenix. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.