Paul Dragos Aligica — 2024 Markets and Society Conference Keynote

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Paul Dragos Aligica delivers a keynote lecture at the 2024 Markets & Society conference on resilience as a research frontier in mainline political economy. He traces how resilience has been largely absent from comparative economic systems scholarship, only to explode as a topic in the last decade, mostly imported from ecology and complexity theory rather than economics.

He maps how three traditions at the core of the Mercatus research program—Austrian economics, public choice, and Ostromian institutionalism—each shape our understanding of resilience. Aligica also addresses claims that resilience thinking is merely a proxy for neoliberalism, closing with reflections on the normative stakes of self-governing societies.

Dr. Paul Dragos Aligica is a Senior Research Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, KPMG Professor of Governance at the University of Bucharest, and a Senior Nonresident Scholar with the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh. His many publications include Governing Differences: Social Diversity, Polycentric Political Economy and Modus Vivendi (Edward Elgar, 2025) coauthored with Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Public Governance and the Classical Liberal Perspective: Political Economy Foundations (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Public Entrepreneurship, Citizenship, and Self-Governance (Cambridge University Press 2018).

**This episode was recorded on October 11, 2024**