Faculty

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Howard Baetjer

Howard Baetjer Jr. is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches courses in microeconomics, comparative economic systems, and money and banking. He is currently working on a book explaining why fully free markets would work better for everybody than our current mixed economy.  Dr. Baetjer is also a frequent faculty member at IHS Summer Seminars.

Dr. Baetjer earned a B.A. in psychology from Princeton in 1974, an M.Litt. in English literature from the University of Edinburgh in 1980, an M.A. in political science from Boston College in 1984, and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University in 1993. His dissertation, written under the direction of Professor Don Lavoie, was published as Software as Capital: an Economic Perspective on Software Engineering by IEEE Computer Society in 1998.

Baetjer is also a founding trustee of Children's Scholarship Fund Baltimore, which, since 1999, has provided partial scholarships to more than 6100 low-income Baltimore children, to help them attend private and parochial schools their parents choose.

Dr. Baetjer's favorite recreational activities are skiing and sailing. He lives in Baltimore with his wife Susan, an attorney.

Harvey Brightman

Harvey J. Brightman is Regents Professor Emeritus of Management and Decision Sciences at Georgia State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Management Science in 1970. In 1984 the College of Business Administration (CBA) named Dr. Brightman an Alumni Distinguished Professor.  He has received awards for teaching both from the CBA and from the University System of Georgia, which selected him to receive the statewide Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award in 1998. He has served as teaching mentor for the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University from 1999 to the present. 

Dr. Brightman is widely published in the fields of problem solving, computer-based model building, decision support systems, and teaching for critical thinking. He has consulted with Armco Steel, ARCO, The Institute for Management Studies, IBM, Georgia Power, and the Centers for Disease Control among others.  Dr. Brightman is also the author of five books including Problem Solving: A Logical and Creative Approach (the Macmillan Executive Book Selection in the summer of 1981), three books on the use of statistics, and Group Problem Solving: An Improved Managerial Approach. His Master Teacher Program has helped faculty at more than one hundred colleges and universities worldwide.

Antony Davies

Antony Davies is an Associate Professor of Economics at Duquesne University, Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and is also a faculty member at IHS Summer Seminars and lecturer on LearnLiberty.org. 

Dr. Davies earned his BS in economics from Saint Vincent College, and PhD in economics from the State University of New York at Albany. His areas of research include forecasting and rational expectations, consumer behavior, international economics, and mathematical economics. Dr. Davies has lectured at numerous venues including the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the American Psychological Association, the International Conference on Panel Data, the International Forecasting Symposium, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and the U.S. Congress.

John Hasnas

John Hasnas is an associate professor of business at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and a visiting associate professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC, where he teaches courses in ethics and law. His scholarship concerns ethics and white collar crime, jurisprudence, and legal history. His book Trapped: When Acting Ethically Is Against the Law is available from the Cato Institute. >

Professor Hasnas taught at Georgetown University Law Center and Duke University School of Law full-time during the 2008-09 academic year and has held previous appointments as associate professor of law at George Mason University School of Law, visiting associate professor of law at the Washington College of Law at American University, and Law and Humanities Fellow at Temple University School of Law. Professor Hasnas has also been a visiting scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics in Washington, DC and the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio. Between 1997 and 1999, Professor Hasnas served as assistant general counsel to Koch Industries, Inc. in Wichita, Kansas.  

He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Lafayette College, his J.D. and Ph.D. in Legal Philosophy from Duke University, and his LL.M. in Legal Education from Temple Law School. 

Dirk Mateer

Dirk Mateer is a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Undergraduate Program in Economics at Penn State University. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Florida State University in 1991, and is a frequent presenter at teaching workshops and conferences. His research has appeared in the Journal of Economic Education as well as other journals and focuses on media-enriched learning. He is the author of Economics in the Movies and he is currently working on a principles of economics textbook, tentatively titled, The Economics Encounter, for Norton Publishers. 

Dirk is also an award-winning instructor. Most notably, he has been featured in the "Great Teachers in Economics" series put out by the Stavros Economic Education Center. He was also the inaugural winner of the Economic Communicator Contest sponsored by the Association of Private Enterprise Education. At Penn State, he has received special recognition as an influential first-year instructor, served on the faculty homecoming court, been recognized by the Department of Economics for outstanding teaching in four separate courses, earned the College of Liberal Arts award for outstanding teaching, and voted the best overall teacher in the Smeal College.

James Stacey Taylor

James Stacey Taylor is currently an associate professor at The College of New Jersey. He spends a lot of time thinking and writing about autonomy - an area of philosophy that helps us understand when individuals are truly motivated by their own concerns, hopes, desires, and wills.

A transplant from Scotland to the United States, he earned his PhD from Bowling Green State University. Professor Taylor has amassed an enviable publishing record in the Journal of Value Inquiry, Philosophical Quarterly, and Eidos.

He is editor of Personal Autonomy: New essays (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and author of Stakes and Kidneys: Why markets in human body parts are morally imperative (Ashgate, 2005), monograph on the moral and ethical implications of kidney sales.

Taylor also works in an area of ethics which seeks to apply moral and ethical lessons from philosophy to real world questions. For instance, his work on autonomy helps physicians understand when patients' decisions about their own care are truly their own and ought to be respected.

Professor Taylor benefited from a range of IHS programs during his graduate school years - funding helped him attend various academic conferences where he was able to network with leading philosophers and present his own work, scholarship money helped Taylor complete his Ph.D. more quickly, and discussion colloquia and seminars helped him think through ideas related to his research. Taylor frequently teaches at IHS Summer Seminars and lectures on LearnLiberty.org.