George Washington Forum News and Events

Brianne Wolf

Brianne Wolf is Assistant Professor of Political Theory and Constitutional Democracy and Director of the Political Economy minor at Michigan State University’s James Madison College. Trained in the history of political thought, her research and teaching reflect on questions about the interaction between economics and politics, liberalism, and moral judgment. Each theme relates to a central concern as a scholar: understanding the proper relationship between the individual and society. Dr. Wolf is broadly interested in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially the work of the Scottish and French Enlightenment thinkers.

Derek K. Yonai

Derek K. Yonai is the Peter and Sue Freytag Associate Professor of Economics in the School of Business at Flagler College and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics.

With a focus on the Philosophy of Business and the social aspects of entrepreneurship, Dr. Yonai has led several academic centers including at Campbell University, Florida Southern College, Southern Methodist University, and Emporia State University. His published research discusses the economic role of property rights and the law and his popular writings deal with the importance of economic freedom.

Dr. Yonai earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from the University of California at Irvine and graduated with honors from Whittier College School of Law. Additionally, he earned a Master of Arts in economics and a Ph.D. from George Mason University.

Jared Rubin (Chapman University)

JARED RUBIN is an economic historian interested in the political and religious economies of the Middle East and Western Europe. His research focuses on historical relationships between political and religious institutions and their role in economic development. His book, Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores the role that Islam and Christianity played in the long-run “reversal of fortunes” between the economies of the Middle East and Western Europe. It was awarded the Douglass North Best Book Award for the best research in institutional and organizational economics published during the previous two years, awarded by the Society of Institutional and Organizational Economics. Rubin’s work has appeared in journals such as Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economics & Statistics, Economic Journal, Management Science and many others. He is the Co-Director of Chapman University’s Institute for the Study of Religion, Economics and Society (IRES) and the President of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC). He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Economic History, Journal of Comparative Economics, Explorations in Economic History and Essays in Economic and Business History. He has been awarded over $1 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation for his work in the economics of religion. He graduated with a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2007 and a B.A. from the University of Virginia in 2002.

Andrew Wilkins (GWF Postdoctoral Scholar in History)

Andrew Wilkins is the George Washington Forum’s Postdoctoral Scholar in History. He specializes in British and Irish Economic History, the emergence of social, economic, and political modernity, empire, industrialization, and the Anthropocene. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from the University of Chicago.

Wilkins will analyze why Smith undertook an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in Eighteenth Century Scotland. Why did he make, in his words, a “very violent attack…upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain?” Ultimately these concerns were part of a broader attempt to construct a “Science of Man,” a prototypical social science, based upon David Hume’s radical assault upon the whole philosophical system of Europe. To understand those prior questions, Wilkins argues that we must understand that science. This talk seeks to answer the question of what the “Science of Man” was, what was Smith’s goal in constructing it, and how did it relate to the pressing political questions of his day? Only in doing so can not only the Wealth of Nations, but Smith’s wider project, be understood. Moreover, only in doing so can we see how Smith’s context lay at the very core of his work, and what that context means for our readings of Smith today.

William Easterly (NYU)

WILLIAM EASTERLY is Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-director of the NYU Development Research Institute, which won the 2009 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in Development Cooperation Award. He is the author of three books: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (March 2014), The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), which won the FA Hayek Award from the Manhattan Institute, and The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001).

He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed academic articles, and has written columns and reviews for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Review of Books, and Washington Post. He has served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics and as Director of the blog Aid Watch. He is a Research Associate of NBER, and senior fellow at BREAD. Foreign Policy Magazine named him among the Top 100 Global Public Intellectuals in 2008 and 2009, and Thomson Reuters listed him as one of Highly Cited Researchers of 2014. He is also the 11th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio.

Ginny Seung Choi (Mercatus Center)

GINNY CHOI  is a Program Director of Academic & Student Programs, a Senior Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She holds a PhD in Economics from George Mason University (Fairfax, VA, USA), an MA in Economics from New York University (New York, NY, USA), and a BA in Economics from Emory University (Atlanta, GA, USA). She has also attended the General Course at the London School of Economics and Political Science (London, UK).

Ginny specializes in Austrian and experimental economics, with a particular focus on the moral and social aspects of markets. Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? (with Virgil Storr), published by Palgrave Macmillan (2019), explores whether or not engaging in market activities is morally corrupting and invites us to reassess the claim that markets corrupt our morals. Her work in political economy has been published in academic journals and other scholarly outlets, including PLOS ONE, Journal of Institutional Economics, Public Choice, and Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review.

Before joining Mercatus, Ginny was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government at Saint Vincent College (Latrobe, PA, USA). Originally from South Korea, she spent most of her formative years in Jakarta, Indonesia.