4 p.m. in Kirby B02.

Dr. Dean Stansel is a Senior Research Fellow at the O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom, Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University.

Economic policies vary widely across countries, states, and localities. About 35 years ago Milton Friedman and other economists and policy researchers developed a numeric measure of the degree to which policies in those areas live up to Adam Smith’s idea of the “System of Natural Liberty.” Stansel will discuss those “economic freedom” indexes, two of which he authors. He’ll also summarize the hundreds of independent research papers using those indexes, the vast majority of which have found that areas with higher economic freedom tend to have better outcomes on a wide variety of measures.