Re-empowering Human Agency
A forum to explore structural overhauls to liberate initiative and responsibility

Co-hosts
Center on Capitalism and Society
Common Good

Wednesday, April 19, 2023
9:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Registration and light breakfast at 8:15 AM

Legacy bureaucracies have grown ever-denser over the past 70 years, not only in the United States but in virtually all developed countries. Public goals such as safe products, fair markets, infrastructure, and public services are widely accepted and uncontroversial. But government’s capacity to deliver those services effectively is compromised by paralytic processes. Needed choices are frozen by bureaucratic micromanagement and possible legal challenges.

People at all levels of public responsibility in developed countries are unable to act on their best judgment. Nothing much about government works as it should, causing broad frustration at public ineptitude (poor schools, decrepit infrastructure), waste (high taxes), unresponsiveness (political and bureaucratic paralysis), and heavy-handed dictates (thick rulebooks, political correctness).

This forum will explore the role of human agency in public choices. The judgments, tradeoffs, and adaptation needed to achieve most goals cannot be replaced by rigid systems. Human choice on the spot is essential to achievement, innovation, diversity, and dignity. Human flourishing requires individual choice and resourcefulness.

This forum will explore the need to simplify public structures to leave room for human responsibility and accountability.

Confirmed Participants

Emily S. Bolton
Executive Vice President, The Volcker Alliance

Troyen Brennan, MD
Adjunct Professor, Health Policy and Management, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Daniel DiSalvo
Chair, Political Science, Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, The City College of New York

Niall Ferguson
Milbank Family Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Philip K. Howard
Chair, Common Good

Yuval Levin
Director, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies, American Enterprise Institute

Paul Light
Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service, NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

Christian Madsbjerg
Management Consultant; Author, Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World (July 2023)

Diana C. Mendes
Corporate President, Infrastructure and Mobility Equity, HNTB

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili
Founding Director, Center for Governance and Markets, University of Pittsburgh

Jennifer Pahlka
Founder, Code for America; Author, Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better (June 2023)

Edmund Phelps
Director, Center on Capitalism and Society, Columbia University; winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics

Richard Robb
Professor, Professional Practice in International Finance, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs

Paul Romer
University Professor, Economics, New York University; winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics

David M. Schizer
Harvey R. Miller Professor of Law and Economics and Dean Emeritus, Columbia Law School

Mene Ukueberuwa
Editorial Board Member, The Wall Street Journal

Event Details