The pace of modern life is often dizzying, in almost all areas of human endeavor. Astonishing advances in science and technology rush towards the future alongside global threats of war, pandemic, climate change, and scarcity.
 
But there’s been almost no focus on how things work on the ground. Modernizing infrastructure, fixing lousy schools, reducing red tape in healthcare, and cutting waste in government are largely matters of execution, not policy.

Why can’t we do these things? Experts talk about failure of “state capacity.” But there’s a more basic flaw: People in charge have been disempowered. Almost without our noticing, bureaucracy got ever-denser and suffocated the ability of people to roll up their sleeves and make things work.
 
Next Wednesday, April 19, leading thinkers are gathering at Columbia University, including two Nobel laureates in economics, to discuss the need to remake legacy bureaucracies to re-empower human responsibility. Please come if you would like to see what these thinkers believe should happen. There will be audience participation. C-SPAN is taping it.

Here’s the invitation:
 
Re-empowering Human Agency
Wednesday, April 19, 2023
9:00 AM to 1:00 PM (registration and light breakfast beginning at 8:15 AM)
 
Faculty House
3rd Floor
Columbia University
64 Morningside Drive
New York, NY 10027
 
Confirmed participants:

• 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
  Co-Founder, ReD Associates; Author, Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm

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

• Roosevelt Montás
  Senior Lecturer, American Studies and English, Columbia University

• Eva Moskowitz
  Founder and CEO, Success Academy Charter Schools

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

• 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

To register, please email your name and affiliation to RSVP@commongood.org. Please contact Andrew Park with any questions: apark@commongood.org. More background on the event can be found here.