Bridging Theory and Practice for Long-Run Impact

The work of preserving, cultivating, and advancing liberty is a long-term game. Fads come and go, but the principles underlying a free society are fixed. And for decades, one of the shining stars in the constellation of liberty has been the Mercatus Center. Mercatus was founded in 1980 and has grown into a talent cultivator, idea incubator, policy influencer, and all around force for free-market ideas. Its aim is to bridge the gap between ideas and real-world problems while investing in the long-term infrastructure for liberty.

In fact, Mercatus does so much and does it so effectively, the organization can be tricky to pin down in your mind. On this episode of Giving Ventures, Mercatus Center Executive Director Ben Klutsey sits down with Peter to explore the history, vision, and scope of Mercatus.

Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.
Peter Lipsett: I’ve known Mercatus since I came into the liberty movement in 2005, and yet, as I was thinking about this conversation, part of the reason I wanted to have it is that as much as I know Mercatus — and of course I know it does all these things: academic work, a talent pipeline, research, and it’s engaged in neat initiatives like Emergent Ventures, which I’m sure we’ll talk about — boiling that down to one simple idea is actually pretty complicated. So I’m curious, from your perspective: how do you boil that down? What’s the unifying theory of the Mercatus Center?

Ben Klutsey: That’s a great question. Mercatus is involved firmly in the ideas business — or you might say the ideas industry — and that’s why we talk about bridging the gap between theory and practice. In that industry, we care a lot about liberty and the ideas connected to it.

But it’s not enough to just talk about ideas. We can talk about the ideas that emerged from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith, as we like to say — wonderful economists. But the question is, so what? What does that mean for people’s lives? What does it mean for people going through all kinds of things in the world, whether they’re starting a business, launching some kind of endeavor, or innovating? What do these ideas mean for them? The way we think about what we do is that talent is the conveyor of those ideas into real-world problems. That’s where our logo comes from — a bridge connecting theory and practice, the world of ideas and real-world problems.

Talented people are the most important asset we have when it comes to conveying ideas and bridging that gap. So we like to invest in ideas by investing in people. I like to say that we train and equip classical liberal change-makers to win the competition for ideas.

Peter Lipsett: You know, thinking about that bridge — a few weeks ago I was talking to Sam Gregg of AIER, who similarly wants to take ideas out to the masses. I think they’d say they’re building bridges to the common man, essentially; that’s long been their goal. Is that the goal here too, or is it a little more high-minded, particularly given that you’re affiliated with a university, which we should talk about as well? Who is the audience for that bridge? Who’s on the other side of it?

Ben Klutsey: It’s a good question. There are a few audiences. Academia is one — our scholars are talking to their peers in the academy, because we believe we need the intellectual raw material for how change happens, and those engagements happen in academia. So we want to make sure we’re talking to our peers there.

The policy environment is also important. Policymakers are often struggling to figure out what kinds of policy ideas make sense, or even to critique which policies might be helpful or detrimental, and we want to be available to people who want to learn about those things.

And our audiences include students within the university. We engage students a lot, and we want to make sure that as they’re coming up through their educational programs, they understand these ideas and think about ways they can make a difference in the real world. So we speak to multiple audiences, and our goal is to continue doing that.

Peter Lipsett: The policy piece — how much of a focus is that? Because that kind of puts you more in think-tank territory, and I don’t think of Mercatus as a think tank. We could go back years and talk about the structure of production, the ideas level, the policy level, and the action level, but how much of that policy work does Mercatus really do? Is it more like a tertiary audience compared to the longer-term work with academia and students?

Ben Klutsey: To the extent that we do policy work, I think of it as educational. It’s really part of the effort to make academic ideas real. Being in a university setting means we spend a lot of time thinking about theory — what did Adam Smith mean by the division of labor? What does it mean to make trade-offs? Those are important questions, but people also need to understand how these ideas make an impact on the ground. So our role is to continue being educators, not only when people are in school, but when they’re trying to make policy or make a difference in the world.

Sometimes the terminology isn’t the most helpful, but I think we’re engaged in the ideas business and the education business, really trying to help people understand. Hayek has a wonderful quote — the curious task of economics, he said, is to demonstrate to people how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. A lot of the time, we play the role of helping people understand that they need to be a lot more humble about what they think they can design when it comes to policy and the economy. We really need a lot of humility.

Peter Lipsett: We need a lot of humility, especially with DC about to get a Democratic Socialist mayor, and with one already in New York and one in Seattle — there’s a lot of lack of humility in the political class right now. But to put it another way — not the humility piece, but the policy piece — if there’s a housing reform bill before Congress, Mercatus’s interest isn’t in that bill per se. It’s in making sure the broader ideas behind why you’d create such a bill in the first place are being focused on. Is that fair?

Ben Klutsey: That’s right. We don’t lobby — we’re not an advocacy organization — but we want to make sure people are connecting the dots on what it really means to advance human flourishing. As long as it leads to people living freer, more flourishing lives, we think that’s positive. But we’re not in the business of writing bills. We produce research, we engage in discussing and debating ideas, and our goal is to help people understand the real-world impact of what they’re trying to accomplish.

Peter Lipsett: We’ll get into some of those real-world impacts, but first let’s tickle the fancy of the folks who are keen on economics and wonky stuff. I’ve always kind of thought of Mercatus as part of the Austrian school, which I know comes out of that same broad tradition as the University of Chicago and that kind of thinking. I’m no expert in exactly how to define the Austrian school, but talk to us about the intellectual DNA of Mercatus. “Free market” is a pretty broad label, since there are different flavors even within it. How would you put it? Who’s on the Mount Rushmore of the Mercatus pantheon?

Ben Klutsey: We like to think of it as a framework — a toolkit — for working through these kinds of questions, and the Austrian school is one leg of that toolkit. I used to think the Austrian school meant you had to go to Austria to study it, but it turns out there’s a set of economists who came from Austria and were really focused on ideas related to liberty. Friedrich Hayek is one of them — he was taught by Ludwig von Mises — but there were others too, like Carl Menger, who spent a lot of time thinking about classical liberalism broadly and the role freedom plays in advancing human flourishing.

A lot of these ideas also come from Adam Smith, so there’s a long tradition behind them. That’s one leg, especially when we’re talking about markets — the reason Mercatus is called Mercatus is that it’s Latin for markets, and we care about understanding how markets advance human innovation and flourishing.

Over time, though, we’ve deepened our thinking around markets and learned that institutions matter too. When James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in the 1990s, he was at Mercatus, and that’s when we developed the public choice school, which helps you understand institutions in the public policy arena — the role of policymakers acting as self-interested individuals. That’s important if you want to understand how you go from ideas to real-world impact.

The third leg of the stool is the Bloomington School — Elinor Ostrom, the political scientist who became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. She also studied institutions, but what she called polycentric institutions — local, bottom-up ways of solving problems across communities and societies. That’s a set of institutions we spend a lot of time thinking about and studying.

If you boil it all down, it’s about the promise of markets, the limits of the state and of government, and the promise and opportunity of bottom-up solutions to problems. Pull all of that together, and we think of it as the mainline political economy tradition — the toolkit. It’s partly Austrian economics, but it’s also the Virginia School, or the Buchanan school, and it’s also partly the Bloomington School, or the Ostrom school.

Peter Lipsett: That’s actually very enlightening for a non-wonk like me — seeing that there’s the wonky piece of the Austrian school, but coupled with the importance of institutions, how things get done, and then, through the bottom-up Ostrom school, by what means those things happen. Combine those together and you get a theory of change. Okay, well, we’re done here — I get it, I understand.

Ben Klutsey: I’m glad you mentioned generation, because I think that’s—

Peter Lipsett: Let’s talk about the talent pipeline. You do a lot with students — I don’t know that you do as much directly with academics, though I generally think of that group as feeding into the talent pipeline. I think you yourself came up through one of those programs, right? So talk to me about the work you’re doing to create the next generation — one that isn’t Mamdani and isn’t the mayor of Seattle.

Ben Klutsey: That’s really what we worry about. Tyler calls the current moment a period of the Great Forgetting.

Peter Lipsett: Tyler Cowen, for those who don’t know him — although I imagine everyone listening probably does.

Ben Klutsey: Right — the Great Forgetting. People are forgetting the ideas that inform the founding of this country, the ideas that inform how markets lead to human flourishing, the value of trade, and all these other things that are so critical to advancing human prosperity. It’s really remarkable to think that just over two hundred and fifty years ago — and we’re about to mark America’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary — about ninety percent of the world’s population lived on less than two dollars a day. Now that’s flipped: only about ten percent or less of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, and it’s because of these ideas.

But we’re going through the Great Forgetting. People have taken these things for granted, and we’re one organization that I think is uniquely positioned to ask this question systematically: how can we play an important role in forming the young generation coming up? It’s not a question of the quick policy brief or the working paper — it’s about how we, over time, develop the kinds of people who are foundationally grounded in these ideas and can make the case and become change-makers across our society.

That’s the majority of the work we do — training students from the undergraduate level to the PhD level. We’re also training non-traditional people who aren’t necessarily in an academic program, apprenticing them through our research and policy work to help them develop these ideas and become great communicators, great scholars. It varies and depends on the talent — some people who come through Mercatus programs end up becoming professors at universities in different parts of the country or the world, some become entrepreneurs, and some go into policy.

Peter Lipsett: And is the training aimed just at creating a bunch of economics teachers, or what fields do you hope these people go into? Where are they headed?

Ben Klutsey: Some become scholars and policy analysts, some end up working for the government. But regardless of which institution they end up touching, the goal is that they have a solid sense of the foundational ideas — the toolkit — that will help them, and hopefully make them a lot more humble about what they think they can design when it comes to these systems. Adam Smith talks about the “man of system,” who thinks he can regulate everything. We want people to be a lot more humble than that. When you’ve come through Mercatus programs and training, you come out stronger and more multifaceted — that’s the way I like to think about it.

Peter Lipsett: How much do you talk about — you’ve alluded to some American values, but when I think of Mercatus, I think economics — I think of Smith and Mises, people who aren’t even necessarily Americans.

Ben Klutsey: Yeah, no — we do spend a lot of time—

Peter Lipsett: You’ve referenced the Great Forgetting, these times we’re in. How much, in these training programs, do you actually talk about the Americanness of this versus the economic-ness of it?

Ben Klutsey: We do talk about that a lot. Our training programs have people study Tocqueville, for instance, who spent a lot of time traveling across American cities and states, talking about what’s unique about America. So we certainly have lots of conversations about what’s happening in America right now, but it’s not removed from what’s happening globally either. We take lessons from the Mont Pelerin Society, which was formed in 1947 by thirty-nine people, including Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, and others, who recognized that in the aftermath of World War Two, the world was grappling with fascism and socialism and all the other “isms” that are detrimental to advancing a liberal society. They decided to pull together a group of smart, proactive, entrepreneurial people who cared about ideas and started working on how to build things back up.

So oftentimes when we talk to people here, we say this is an important tradition — America is an important part of it, but it’s really a global effort, and we have to think about the larger context as well. Obviously, what happens in America informs what happens across the world, so it’s really both.

Peter Lipsett: And the economic system is part of what makes America so great — part of the experiment that was so critical, which is easy to overlook. There are lots of great organizations, particularly this year, talking about the American founding, but I think a lot of them give short shrift to the economic portions of it that mattered and informed Jefferson, Adams, and the rest.

So I’m curious, just from a generational-change standpoint — you went through one of these programs what, fifteen, twenty years ago?

Ben Klutsey: About twenty years ago — yeah, I went through a public policy program.

Peter Lipsett: About twenty years — which is basically a generation. How different is it now? Obviously, when we were younger everything was better, but how different is it from when you went through it, in terms of the kids coming through today? A lot of people worry about Gen Z, Gen Alpha rising up. What differences are you seeing? Or are you seeing things that actually make you optimistic?

Ben Klutsey: There are reasons to be optimistic, and there are reasons to be worried. This generation has seen a number of issues and crises — the financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and going further back, the War on Terror and a whole host of things that have made them very skeptical when we talk about free markets and things like that.

We say, look, it’s important to know that freedom matters and that we have to work as hard as possible to preserve the freedoms we have in America. But they also sometimes think government can address a lot of these problems, even though government has created so many of them. There are ways they push in both directions — the challenge is when people say we need government to be stronger, because it wasn’t robust enough, so it needs more power. That’s the challenge we face. But I think every generation goes through these things.

Peter Lipsett: So I think that skepticism can work both ways, right? It can actually work in our favor, because they’re skeptical of government too — or of pat answers generally.

Ben Klutsey: There’s a lot of opportunity there, because I think entrepreneurship is a pathway. What I see with young people, with the innovations in technology we have now, is that you can be a solopreneur, and I see a lot of them taking advantage of that opportunity with AI and these new tools. You can run your own business, be as entrepreneurial as possible. I think that’s a path for us to have some serious conversations with a lot of young people about how we can build a stronger society.

Peter Lipsett: Speaking of a stronger society and people coming together — you actually started a program here on pluralism and civil society before you stepped into the executive director role; you created that program yourself. This is a hot topic right now — bridging divides, figuring out how to get different sides to talk to each other. Sometimes I think people boil that down to something kind of mushy. Why is that idea of pluralism important to the work of Mercatus? And, frankly, broadly speaking — I think there are actually a lot of more conservative donors who are skeptical of some of this bridge-building, not because they don’t want a civil Thanksgiving, but because they wonder: what’s the end goal here?

Ben Klutsey: A lot of it was almost like a demonstration effect — we wanted to show that it was possible to have difficult conversations even from a free-market, classical-liberal perspective. But we got really frustrated going into late 2019 and early 2020, when the pandemic was emerging and all these protests were happening, because what we saw was just labeling and dismissing people, even when they had good ideas worth discussing. Mercatus is Latin for markets, and we care about the marketplace for goods and services, but the marketplace of ideas is even more important — that’s where innovation comes from. To the extent that the marketplace of ideas had become oriented toward conflict and discord, we thought there was a role for classical liberalism to help reorient things back toward civility, mutual engagement, and mutual forbearance.

It was very interesting — we learned a great deal, and that continues to inform how we engage with people across divides and differences. We learned that you can actually engage people with respect, with authenticity, and with curiosity, and once you’re willing to do that, you can get some really productive engagement going.

Peter Lipsett: When you say you “learned a great deal,” though — that could also be a euphemism for “we didn’t solve it.” So I’m guessing you didn’t solve it.

Ben Klutsey: No, it’s not a problem any one organization can solve, but looking at the number of organizations now stepping forward to get involved in this issue of polarization, I’m filled with a lot of hope. One thing we realized from doing this work is that we’re actually overestimating how extreme the other side is — the true extremes on both sides are no more than about fourteen percent of the population. Most Americans want to be able to have good conversations and work together; they’re part of what More in Common calls the “exhausted majority.”

We went across the country, from Pittsburgh to Phoenix to Atlanta, having conversations with regular Americans — from free-market ideas to pushback from more socialist perspectives, and so on. It’s possible to have these conversations, and sometimes you can actually draw people to your side when you’re not trying to convince them.

Peter Lipsett: Right — nobody likes to be convinced. But they like to be talked to like normal people.

Ben Klutsey: We did the same across campuses, from Fargo, North Dakota to Tallahassee, Florida, and you have students who say, “You know what, I think markets are useful, I think capitalism is fairly positive, because I want to pursue some entrepreneurial endeavors” — and we help them think through ways a regulatory apparatus can sometimes restrain that. Those end up being incredibly powerful conversations. That’s what makes me hopeful.

Peter Lipsett: Hopeful — and not just the campus piece. Some of those other conversations were documented in a film called Undivide Us, which you did with State Policy Network. I saw it, and some of those conversations aren’t pleasant — they’re hard conversations. But I don’t think anybody decked anybody. You got through it, even in the moments where you were sitting there uncomfortable.

Ben Klutsey: Yeah, there were certainly some very tense moments. But the parts that surprised me most were at the end, when the cameras were off and we’d stopped facilitating — people didn’t want to stop the conversations. They were exchanging emails and phone numbers, because it was almost a cathartic experience; they’d never had the chance to talk to people across differences before. That’s the challenge we face — we’re so siloed into our own echo chambers and camps. Once you begin to break that down, it leads to some really positive outcomes.

Peter Lipsett: I’m curious — you have a fascinating personal history, and if I can indulge in touching on it for a second, because I wonder how much of it fed into your interest here. For the listeners: you grew up in Ghana, in an authoritarian era, when your father would say, “Don’t talk outside these walls about politics” — not because it was impolite, but because it was actually dangerous. And then, in a scenario so few people get to experience, that just flipped, and suddenly you’re in a market economy where you can talk freely and have freedoms you didn’t have before.

When that switch flipped, did you suddenly find yourself in these kinds of pluralistic conversations, thinking, “Well, I never really believed that”? What were those conversations like, and how did they influence you?

Ben Klutsey: First of all, it was just a lot of ideas that I’d had but never had the chance to really engage with or have conversations about — I now began to do that. You learn a lot. John Stuart Mill says that a lot of the ideas we hold most dearly become dead dogma if we don’t challenge them and get pushback, and that’s how we learn more about why we hold on to them. So it was a process — being in an academic setting where professors and teachers encouraged you to get into what he called “bull sessions,” where you argue and discuss, and that’s how you truly learn.

For me, it was a process, and when I go across campuses and talk to students, I often say: you have something really special here in America, and you have to work really hard so you don’t lose it, because liberty is the kind of thing you take for granted until it’s gone. Having lived in both societies — one where you don’t have free speech or economic freedoms, and one where you have everything in spades but have to work really hard to preserve it — I think that’s part of the Great Forgetting challenge we face.

My goal, and the ethos within Mercatus across the board, is that all of our scholars and everyone involved in training students and running our fellowship programs engage with students who may not have encountered any of these ideas before, in very respectful ways, because that’s how people learn. You engage them with ideas, show them it’s okay to challenge and be curious, but it’s also important to be authentic. It’s been great.

Peter Lipsett: Switching gears slightly — George Mason has always been a very important piece of this. In fact, your money used to flow through the university; now you have your own 501(c)(3). What does that relationship do for you?

Ben Klutsey: We’ve been incredibly fortunate to be partnered with George Mason University, and in fact our growth has kind of tracked together — we’ve grown as George Mason has grown. We benefit from great credibility being within the university; we have access to remarkable scholars and researchers, and to great students who participate in our programs and fellowships, from the graduate level to the PhD level.

Being part of George Mason also helps us live out this liberal ethos, where the university is a place where you get to disagree together. We’re an environment that requires viewpoint diversity and engagement across differences, and that’s been really helpful. George Mason is one of the most diverse universities in the country, so you really learn to navigate this amazing institution with different perspectives and backgrounds. I think it’s made us a much stronger organization than we would have been otherwise.

Peter Lipsett: That’s interesting. Okay — before we wrap up, I want to make sure we talk about some of the more practical things you all do. Student training is practical, but it’s long-term. There’s also this program called Emergent Ventures that came around in the COVID era, I believe, that gets money to entrepreneurs very fast.

Ben Klutsey: I think that’s a great way to describe it. And — you’ll remember I mentioned that talent is the best asset

Peter Lipsett: How does it tie into what you’re doing here? Give a better description than the one I just gave.

Ben Klutsey: — we have when it comes to the marketplace of ideas and the competition of ideas. The way Emergent Ventures works is to identify high-agency, proactive, entrepreneurial people who are engaged in projects ranging from starting a nonprofit to doing research — to the extent that their work has high value in advancing social change in a positive way, we want to support it. It’s a really important way for us to identify great talent, because there’s so much more talent out there than our current networks can access. Emergent Ventures gives us that opportunity and latitude to engage great talent across the board. We don’t discriminate at all in terms of the interests of the talent.

Peter Lipsett: And what kind of — those are entrepreneurs, people starting companies or nonprofits, and across the world too, right?

Ben Klutsey: Yes, exactly. They have to be pursuing a project they care deeply about, one they think can create real change. Sometimes it’s research, sometimes it’s starting a nonprofit, sometimes it’s starting a think tank. We find that’s sort of the best way — it leans into that bottom-up way of addressing social change. As I mentioned, it’s the Ostromian approach — bottom-up. You find and support talent that way.

Peter Lipsett: Do you have a metric for success there? Do you follow up with people? Is it kind of like venture capital, where you expect sixty percent to fail but the forty percent that succeed are going to be awesome?

Ben Klutsey: That’s the approach. We believe that when they’re successful, you hear about them. They do have to send us a short annual written update about what they’re doing — it’s very brief, so it’s not overly taxing. But you hear about them. You hear about people like Dwarkesh Patel, who has probably the most important podcast on AI, where he’s brought on people like Mark Zuckerberg and some of the most influential people in AI to have important conversations about its impact. There’s a whole host of people doing phenomenal work — someone starting a podcast, someone doing research, someone starting a nonprofit. It varies widely, and I understand that can be confusing, but it’s all in the effort of identifying incredible talent. What happens with that identification is that it raises people’s aspirations — the sense that there’s something special they could do. With that support, they become part of a network — the Mercatus network — connected to great classical liberal scholars who can help them in their ideas formation.

Peter Lipsett: So even though it’s something that seems like a fast kind of deal — the money goes out fast — it’s still a long-term bet. It still fits into that marathon-not-a-sprint idea, because you’re seeding this bit of talent. Even the ones that fail, I suppose, right?

Ben Klutsey: Failure is the best way for us to learn. We shouldn’t expect to succeed every single time. We believe in markets, and we believe markets are a good way to learn whether what we’re doing is succeeding or not. Sometimes people start a project and it changes into something else entirely from what they set out to do.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, no, this is good. DonorsTrust just announced a new initiative — you know, so many donors think, and it sounds negative, I don’t mean it this way, but they tend to think in the short term. They get pulled into the political environment; that’s the noise they’re hearing. They need to see wins — we all want to see wins. But your product is a much longer-term gain. You’re saying we’re going to win in thirty years, twenty years — ten years can feel too far away already. How do you talk about that to donors? How do you help them really appreciate the need to invest in these long-term, long-time-horizon, idea-generating things that Mercatus does?

Ben Klutsey: Yeah, and I get it — we all want to see results very quickly, and sometimes the volatility and how sensationally the news reports things make it seem like everything is dire, and that we need to react very, very quickly. My caution is this: we ask the question, who’s going to be the next Hayek, the next Friedman, the next Walter Williams? And if you look at the talent pipeline, we see the challenges — it’s thinning out, and we have to double our efforts to replenish it. So the question we ask isn’t just about the next five years, which matters too, but about the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. We need people who are trained and developed in the foundational ideas of what a free society is and how it’s sustained, and that requires time.

You can’t produce talent the way you produce a product — talent has to be cultivated and engaged, and sometimes it remains dormant for a while until you begin to see remarkable work. That’s what we’re encouraging people to think about with Mercatus — that it requires patient capital, supporting people from the early stages of their careers as scholars, thinkers, and academics, because they’re going to be the ones making an impact twenty years down the road. And they do make a difference now, too — sometimes we just don’t hear the noise about what they’re doing. But they make a difference when they’re called up to a briefing or a conversation, and some of them are teaching students right now who, ten years from now, will carry forward the lessons those professors taught them.

Peter Lipsett: Or just a political wind shift, right? Look at the Overton window — look at your home country of Ghana. People needed others to jump in and articulate, even when they weren’t expecting to, how these free-market ideas work.

Ben Klutsey: I need to incorporate these ideas in the way I’m building policy, or developing my organization, or whatever it is. If we’re really thinking about the long-term sustainability of these ideas for human flourishing, we need to spend time, effort, and resources developing that next generation. Sometimes we have to resist the discouragement that comes from looking at what’s happening around the world right now, and instead say: we’re doing something that will make sure things are sustainable in the long term. Thanks for having me — it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Peter Lipsett: Well put. Ben Klutsey, thank you so much.

I appreciate Ben joining me and helping me better understand the Mercatus Center. As I said at the top, I’ve known Mercatus a long time, but it does so many things that it’s hard to get your head around all of it — other than knowing it’s a long-term game. It’s really about thinking through how we get these economic principles to outlast us, outlast this generation, and continue carrying forward. His description of that three-legged stool — economic theory coming together with institutions, and then bottom-up action — really helped solidify my understanding of what it means to build these bridges. It’s fascinating stuff, important stuff, long-term stuff that’s hard to focus on and yet so needed, because when the moment comes, we have to have these ideas ready to go.

I appreciate you tuning in for this. Whether you’re watching on YouTube or listening, we’ll be back with another great episode soon. But if we can help you in the meantime at DonorsTrust, we’re always happy to do that, whether you care about ideas over the long term or the short term.

Bridging Theory and Practice for Long-Run Impact

The work of preserving, cultivating, and advancing liberty is a long-term game. Fads come and go, but the principles underlying a free society are fixed. And for decades, one of the shining stars in the constellation of liberty has been the Mercatus Center. Mercatus was founded in 1980 and has grown into a talent cultivator, idea incubator, policy influencer, and all around force for free-market ideas. Its aim is to bridge the gap between ideas and real-world problems while investing in the long-term infrastructure for liberty.

In fact, Mercatus does so much and does it so effectively, the organization can be tricky to pin down in your mind. On this episode of Giving Ventures, Mercatus Center Executive Director Ben Klutsey sits down with Peter to explore the history, vision, and scope of Mercatus.

Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.
Peter Lipsett: I’ve known Mercatus since I came into the liberty movement in 2005, and yet, as I was thinking about this conversation, part of the reason I wanted to have it is that as much as I know Mercatus — and of course I know it does all these things: academic work, a talent pipeline, research, and it’s engaged in neat initiatives like Emergent Ventures, which I’m sure we’ll talk about — boiling that down to one simple idea is actually pretty complicated. So I’m curious, from your perspective: how do you boil that down? What’s the unifying theory of the Mercatus Center?

Ben Klutsey: That’s a great question. Mercatus is involved firmly in the ideas business — or you might say the ideas industry — and that’s why we talk about bridging the gap between theory and practice. In that industry, we care a lot about liberty and the ideas connected to it.

But it’s not enough to just talk about ideas. We can talk about the ideas that emerged from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith, as we like to say — wonderful economists. But the question is, so what? What does that mean for people’s lives? What does it mean for people going through all kinds of things in the world, whether they’re starting a business, launching some kind of endeavor, or innovating? What do these ideas mean for them? The way we think about what we do is that talent is the conveyor of those ideas into real-world problems. That’s where our logo comes from — a bridge connecting theory and practice, the world of ideas and real-world problems.

Talented people are the most important asset we have when it comes to conveying ideas and bridging that gap. So we like to invest in ideas by investing in people. I like to say that we train and equip classical liberal change-makers to win the competition for ideas.

Peter Lipsett: You know, thinking about that bridge — a few weeks ago I was talking to Sam Gregg of AIER, who similarly wants to take ideas out to the masses. I think they’d say they’re building bridges to the common man, essentially; that’s long been their goal. Is that the goal here too, or is it a little more high-minded, particularly given that you’re affiliated with a university, which we should talk about as well? Who is the audience for that bridge? Who’s on the other side of it?

Ben Klutsey: It’s a good question. There are a few audiences. Academia is one — our scholars are talking to their peers in the academy, because we believe we need the intellectual raw material for how change happens, and those engagements happen in academia. So we want to make sure we’re talking to our peers there.

The policy environment is also important. Policymakers are often struggling to figure out what kinds of policy ideas make sense, or even to critique which policies might be helpful or detrimental, and we want to be available to people who want to learn about those things.

And our audiences include students within the university. We engage students a lot, and we want to make sure that as they’re coming up through their educational programs, they understand these ideas and think about ways they can make a difference in the real world. So we speak to multiple audiences, and our goal is to continue doing that.

Peter Lipsett: The policy piece — how much of a focus is that? Because that kind of puts you more in think-tank territory, and I don’t think of Mercatus as a think tank. We could go back years and talk about the structure of production, the ideas level, the policy level, and the action level, but how much of that policy work does Mercatus really do? Is it more like a tertiary audience compared to the longer-term work with academia and students?

Ben Klutsey: To the extent that we do policy work, I think of it as educational. It’s really part of the effort to make academic ideas real. Being in a university setting means we spend a lot of time thinking about theory — what did Adam Smith mean by the division of labor? What does it mean to make trade-offs? Those are important questions, but people also need to understand how these ideas make an impact on the ground. So our role is to continue being educators, not only when people are in school, but when they’re trying to make policy or make a difference in the world.

Sometimes the terminology isn’t the most helpful, but I think we’re engaged in the ideas business and the education business, really trying to help people understand. Hayek has a wonderful quote — the curious task of economics, he said, is to demonstrate to people how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. A lot of the time, we play the role of helping people understand that they need to be a lot more humble about what they think they can design when it comes to policy and the economy. We really need a lot of humility.

Peter Lipsett: We need a lot of humility, especially with DC about to get a Democratic Socialist mayor, and with one already in New York and one in Seattle — there’s a lot of lack of humility in the political class right now. But to put it another way — not the humility piece, but the policy piece — if there’s a housing reform bill before Congress, Mercatus’s interest isn’t in that bill per se. It’s in making sure the broader ideas behind why you’d create such a bill in the first place are being focused on. Is that fair?

Ben Klutsey: That’s right. We don’t lobby — we’re not an advocacy organization — but we want to make sure people are connecting the dots on what it really means to advance human flourishing. As long as it leads to people living freer, more flourishing lives, we think that’s positive. But we’re not in the business of writing bills. We produce research, we engage in discussing and debating ideas, and our goal is to help people understand the real-world impact of what they’re trying to accomplish.

Peter Lipsett: We’ll get into some of those real-world impacts, but first let’s tickle the fancy of the folks who are keen on economics and wonky stuff. I’ve always kind of thought of Mercatus as part of the Austrian school, which I know comes out of that same broad tradition as the University of Chicago and that kind of thinking. I’m no expert in exactly how to define the Austrian school, but talk to us about the intellectual DNA of Mercatus. “Free market” is a pretty broad label, since there are different flavors even within it. How would you put it? Who’s on the Mount Rushmore of the Mercatus pantheon?

Ben Klutsey: We like to think of it as a framework — a toolkit — for working through these kinds of questions, and the Austrian school is one leg of that toolkit. I used to think the Austrian school meant you had to go to Austria to study it, but it turns out there’s a set of economists who came from Austria and were really focused on ideas related to liberty. Friedrich Hayek is one of them — he was taught by Ludwig von Mises — but there were others too, like Carl Menger, who spent a lot of time thinking about classical liberalism broadly and the role freedom plays in advancing human flourishing.

A lot of these ideas also come from Adam Smith, so there’s a long tradition behind them. That’s one leg, especially when we’re talking about markets — the reason Mercatus is called Mercatus is that it’s Latin for markets, and we care about understanding how markets advance human innovation and flourishing.

Over time, though, we’ve deepened our thinking around markets and learned that institutions matter too. When James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in the 1990s, he was at Mercatus, and that’s when we developed the public choice school, which helps you understand institutions in the public policy arena — the role of policymakers acting as self-interested individuals. That’s important if you want to understand how you go from ideas to real-world impact.

The third leg of the stool is the Bloomington School — Elinor Ostrom, the political scientist who became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. She also studied institutions, but what she called polycentric institutions — local, bottom-up ways of solving problems across communities and societies. That’s a set of institutions we spend a lot of time thinking about and studying.

If you boil it all down, it’s about the promise of markets, the limits of the state and of government, and the promise and opportunity of bottom-up solutions to problems. Pull all of that together, and we think of it as the mainline political economy tradition — the toolkit. It’s partly Austrian economics, but it’s also the Virginia School, or the Buchanan school, and it’s also partly the Bloomington School, or the Ostrom school.

Peter Lipsett: That’s actually very enlightening for a non-wonk like me — seeing that there’s the wonky piece of the Austrian school, but coupled with the importance of institutions, how things get done, and then, through the bottom-up Ostrom school, by what means those things happen. Combine those together and you get a theory of change. Okay, well, we’re done here — I get it, I understand.

Ben Klutsey: I’m glad you mentioned generation, because I think that’s—

Peter Lipsett: Let’s talk about the talent pipeline. You do a lot with students — I don’t know that you do as much directly with academics, though I generally think of that group as feeding into the talent pipeline. I think you yourself came up through one of those programs, right? So talk to me about the work you’re doing to create the next generation — one that isn’t Mamdani and isn’t the mayor of Seattle.

Ben Klutsey: That’s really what we worry about. Tyler calls the current moment a period of the Great Forgetting.

Peter Lipsett: Tyler Cowen, for those who don’t know him — although I imagine everyone listening probably does.

Ben Klutsey: Right — the Great Forgetting. People are forgetting the ideas that inform the founding of this country, the ideas that inform how markets lead to human flourishing, the value of trade, and all these other things that are so critical to advancing human prosperity. It’s really remarkable to think that just over two hundred and fifty years ago — and we’re about to mark America’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary — about ninety percent of the world’s population lived on less than two dollars a day. Now that’s flipped: only about ten percent or less of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, and it’s because of these ideas.

But we’re going through the Great Forgetting. People have taken these things for granted, and we’re one organization that I think is uniquely positioned to ask this question systematically: how can we play an important role in forming the young generation coming up? It’s not a question of the quick policy brief or the working paper — it’s about how we, over time, develop the kinds of people who are foundationally grounded in these ideas and can make the case and become change-makers across our society.

That’s the majority of the work we do — training students from the undergraduate level to the PhD level. We’re also training non-traditional people who aren’t necessarily in an academic program, apprenticing them through our research and policy work to help them develop these ideas and become great communicators, great scholars. It varies and depends on the talent — some people who come through Mercatus programs end up becoming professors at universities in different parts of the country or the world, some become entrepreneurs, and some go into policy.

Peter Lipsett: And is the training aimed just at creating a bunch of economics teachers, or what fields do you hope these people go into? Where are they headed?

Ben Klutsey: Some become scholars and policy analysts, some end up working for the government. But regardless of which institution they end up touching, the goal is that they have a solid sense of the foundational ideas — the toolkit — that will help them, and hopefully make them a lot more humble about what they think they can design when it comes to these systems. Adam Smith talks about the “man of system,” who thinks he can regulate everything. We want people to be a lot more humble than that. When you’ve come through Mercatus programs and training, you come out stronger and more multifaceted — that’s the way I like to think about it.

Peter Lipsett: How much do you talk about — you’ve alluded to some American values, but when I think of Mercatus, I think economics — I think of Smith and Mises, people who aren’t even necessarily Americans.

Ben Klutsey: Yeah, no — we do spend a lot of time—

Peter Lipsett: You’ve referenced the Great Forgetting, these times we’re in. How much, in these training programs, do you actually talk about the Americanness of this versus the economic-ness of it?

Ben Klutsey: We do talk about that a lot. Our training programs have people study Tocqueville, for instance, who spent a lot of time traveling across American cities and states, talking about what’s unique about America. So we certainly have lots of conversations about what’s happening in America right now, but it’s not removed from what’s happening globally either. We take lessons from the Mont Pelerin Society, which was formed in 1947 by thirty-nine people, including Mises, Hayek, Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, and others, who recognized that in the aftermath of World War Two, the world was grappling with fascism and socialism and all the other “isms” that are detrimental to advancing a liberal society. They decided to pull together a group of smart, proactive, entrepreneurial people who cared about ideas and started working on how to build things back up.

So oftentimes when we talk to people here, we say this is an important tradition — America is an important part of it, but it’s really a global effort, and we have to think about the larger context as well. Obviously, what happens in America informs what happens across the world, so it’s really both.

Peter Lipsett: And the economic system is part of what makes America so great — part of the experiment that was so critical, which is easy to overlook. There are lots of great organizations, particularly this year, talking about the American founding, but I think a lot of them give short shrift to the economic portions of it that mattered and informed Jefferson, Adams, and the rest.

So I’m curious, just from a generational-change standpoint — you went through one of these programs what, fifteen, twenty years ago?

Ben Klutsey: About twenty years ago — yeah, I went through a public policy program.

Peter Lipsett: About twenty years — which is basically a generation. How different is it now? Obviously, when we were younger everything was better, but how different is it from when you went through it, in terms of the kids coming through today? A lot of people worry about Gen Z, Gen Alpha rising up. What differences are you seeing? Or are you seeing things that actually make you optimistic?

Ben Klutsey: There are reasons to be optimistic, and there are reasons to be worried. This generation has seen a number of issues and crises — the financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and going further back, the War on Terror and a whole host of things that have made them very skeptical when we talk about free markets and things like that.

We say, look, it’s important to know that freedom matters and that we have to work as hard as possible to preserve the freedoms we have in America. But they also sometimes think government can address a lot of these problems, even though government has created so many of them. There are ways they push in both directions — the challenge is when people say we need government to be stronger, because it wasn’t robust enough, so it needs more power. That’s the challenge we face. But I think every generation goes through these things.

Peter Lipsett: So I think that skepticism can work both ways, right? It can actually work in our favor, because they’re skeptical of government too — or of pat answers generally.

Ben Klutsey: There’s a lot of opportunity there, because I think entrepreneurship is a pathway. What I see with young people, with the innovations in technology we have now, is that you can be a solopreneur, and I see a lot of them taking advantage of that opportunity with AI and these new tools. You can run your own business, be as entrepreneurial as possible. I think that’s a path for us to have some serious conversations with a lot of young people about how we can build a stronger society.

Peter Lipsett: Speaking of a stronger society and people coming together — you actually started a program here on pluralism and civil society before you stepped into the executive director role; you created that program yourself. This is a hot topic right now — bridging divides, figuring out how to get different sides to talk to each other. Sometimes I think people boil that down to something kind of mushy. Why is that idea of pluralism important to the work of Mercatus? And, frankly, broadly speaking — I think there are actually a lot of more conservative donors who are skeptical of some of this bridge-building, not because they don’t want a civil Thanksgiving, but because they wonder: what’s the end goal here?

Ben Klutsey: A lot of it was almost like a demonstration effect — we wanted to show that it was possible to have difficult conversations even from a free-market, classical-liberal perspective. But we got really frustrated going into late 2019 and early 2020, when the pandemic was emerging and all these protests were happening, because what we saw was just labeling and dismissing people, even when they had good ideas worth discussing. Mercatus is Latin for markets, and we care about the marketplace for goods and services, but the marketplace of ideas is even more important — that’s where innovation comes from. To the extent that the marketplace of ideas had become oriented toward conflict and discord, we thought there was a role for classical liberalism to help reorient things back toward civility, mutual engagement, and mutual forbearance.

It was very interesting — we learned a great deal, and that continues to inform how we engage with people across divides and differences. We learned that you can actually engage people with respect, with authenticity, and with curiosity, and once you’re willing to do that, you can get some really productive engagement going.

Peter Lipsett: When you say you “learned a great deal,” though — that could also be a euphemism for “we didn’t solve it.” So I’m guessing you didn’t solve it.

Ben Klutsey: No, it’s not a problem any one organization can solve, but looking at the number of organizations now stepping forward to get involved in this issue of polarization, I’m filled with a lot of hope. One thing we realized from doing this work is that we’re actually overestimating how extreme the other side is — the true extremes on both sides are no more than about fourteen percent of the population. Most Americans want to be able to have good conversations and work together; they’re part of what More in Common calls the “exhausted majority.”

We went across the country, from Pittsburgh to Phoenix to Atlanta, having conversations with regular Americans — from free-market ideas to pushback from more socialist perspectives, and so on. It’s possible to have these conversations, and sometimes you can actually draw people to your side when you’re not trying to convince them.

Peter Lipsett: Right — nobody likes to be convinced. But they like to be talked to like normal people.

Ben Klutsey: We did the same across campuses, from Fargo, North Dakota to Tallahassee, Florida, and you have students who say, “You know what, I think markets are useful, I think capitalism is fairly positive, because I want to pursue some entrepreneurial endeavors” — and we help them think through ways a regulatory apparatus can sometimes restrain that. Those end up being incredibly powerful conversations. That’s what makes me hopeful.

Peter Lipsett: Hopeful — and not just the campus piece. Some of those other conversations were documented in a film called Undivide Us, which you did with State Policy Network. I saw it, and some of those conversations aren’t pleasant — they’re hard conversations. But I don’t think anybody decked anybody. You got through it, even in the moments where you were sitting there uncomfortable.

Ben Klutsey: Yeah, there were certainly some very tense moments. But the parts that surprised me most were at the end, when the cameras were off and we’d stopped facilitating — people didn’t want to stop the conversations. They were exchanging emails and phone numbers, because it was almost a cathartic experience; they’d never had the chance to talk to people across differences before. That’s the challenge we face — we’re so siloed into our own echo chambers and camps. Once you begin to break that down, it leads to some really positive outcomes.

Peter Lipsett: I’m curious — you have a fascinating personal history, and if I can indulge in touching on it for a second, because I wonder how much of it fed into your interest here. For the listeners: you grew up in Ghana, in an authoritarian era, when your father would say, “Don’t talk outside these walls about politics” — not because it was impolite, but because it was actually dangerous. And then, in a scenario so few people get to experience, that just flipped, and suddenly you’re in a market economy where you can talk freely and have freedoms you didn’t have before.

When that switch flipped, did you suddenly find yourself in these kinds of pluralistic conversations, thinking, “Well, I never really believed that”? What were those conversations like, and how did they influence you?

Ben Klutsey: First of all, it was just a lot of ideas that I’d had but never had the chance to really engage with or have conversations about — I now began to do that. You learn a lot. John Stuart Mill says that a lot of the ideas we hold most dearly become dead dogma if we don’t challenge them and get pushback, and that’s how we learn more about why we hold on to them. So it was a process — being in an academic setting where professors and teachers encouraged you to get into what he called “bull sessions,” where you argue and discuss, and that’s how you truly learn.

For me, it was a process, and when I go across campuses and talk to students, I often say: you have something really special here in America, and you have to work really hard so you don’t lose it, because liberty is the kind of thing you take for granted until it’s gone. Having lived in both societies — one where you don’t have free speech or economic freedoms, and one where you have everything in spades but have to work really hard to preserve it — I think that’s part of the Great Forgetting challenge we face.

My goal, and the ethos within Mercatus across the board, is that all of our scholars and everyone involved in training students and running our fellowship programs engage with students who may not have encountered any of these ideas before, in very respectful ways, because that’s how people learn. You engage them with ideas, show them it’s okay to challenge and be curious, but it’s also important to be authentic. It’s been great.

Peter Lipsett: Switching gears slightly — George Mason has always been a very important piece of this. In fact, your money used to flow through the university; now you have your own 501(c)(3). What does that relationship do for you?

Ben Klutsey: We’ve been incredibly fortunate to be partnered with George Mason University, and in fact our growth has kind of tracked together — we’ve grown as George Mason has grown. We benefit from great credibility being within the university; we have access to remarkable scholars and researchers, and to great students who participate in our programs and fellowships, from the graduate level to the PhD level.

Being part of George Mason also helps us live out this liberal ethos, where the university is a place where you get to disagree together. We’re an environment that requires viewpoint diversity and engagement across differences, and that’s been really helpful. George Mason is one of the most diverse universities in the country, so you really learn to navigate this amazing institution with different perspectives and backgrounds. I think it’s made us a much stronger organization than we would have been otherwise.

Peter Lipsett: That’s interesting. Okay — before we wrap up, I want to make sure we talk about some of the more practical things you all do. Student training is practical, but it’s long-term. There’s also this program called Emergent Ventures that came around in the COVID era, I believe, that gets money to entrepreneurs very fast.

Ben Klutsey: I think that’s a great way to describe it. And — you’ll remember I mentioned that talent is the best asset

Peter Lipsett: How does it tie into what you’re doing here? Give a better description than the one I just gave.

Ben Klutsey: — we have when it comes to the marketplace of ideas and the competition of ideas. The way Emergent Ventures works is to identify high-agency, proactive, entrepreneurial people who are engaged in projects ranging from starting a nonprofit to doing research — to the extent that their work has high value in advancing social change in a positive way, we want to support it. It’s a really important way for us to identify great talent, because there’s so much more talent out there than our current networks can access. Emergent Ventures gives us that opportunity and latitude to engage great talent across the board. We don’t discriminate at all in terms of the interests of the talent.

Peter Lipsett: And what kind of — those are entrepreneurs, people starting companies or nonprofits, and across the world too, right?

Ben Klutsey: Yes, exactly. They have to be pursuing a project they care deeply about, one they think can create real change. Sometimes it’s research, sometimes it’s starting a nonprofit, sometimes it’s starting a think tank. We find that’s sort of the best way — it leans into that bottom-up way of addressing social change. As I mentioned, it’s the Ostromian approach — bottom-up. You find and support talent that way.

Peter Lipsett: Do you have a metric for success there? Do you follow up with people? Is it kind of like venture capital, where you expect sixty percent to fail but the forty percent that succeed are going to be awesome?

Ben Klutsey: That’s the approach. We believe that when they’re successful, you hear about them. They do have to send us a short annual written update about what they’re doing — it’s very brief, so it’s not overly taxing. But you hear about them. You hear about people like Dwarkesh Patel, who has probably the most important podcast on AI, where he’s brought on people like Mark Zuckerberg and some of the most influential people in AI to have important conversations about its impact. There’s a whole host of people doing phenomenal work — someone starting a podcast, someone doing research, someone starting a nonprofit. It varies widely, and I understand that can be confusing, but it’s all in the effort of identifying incredible talent. What happens with that identification is that it raises people’s aspirations — the sense that there’s something special they could do. With that support, they become part of a network — the Mercatus network — connected to great classical liberal scholars who can help them in their ideas formation.

Peter Lipsett: So even though it’s something that seems like a fast kind of deal — the money goes out fast — it’s still a long-term bet. It still fits into that marathon-not-a-sprint idea, because you’re seeding this bit of talent. Even the ones that fail, I suppose, right?

Ben Klutsey: Failure is the best way for us to learn. We shouldn’t expect to succeed every single time. We believe in markets, and we believe markets are a good way to learn whether what we’re doing is succeeding or not. Sometimes people start a project and it changes into something else entirely from what they set out to do.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, no, this is good. DonorsTrust just announced a new initiative — you know, so many donors think, and it sounds negative, I don’t mean it this way, but they tend to think in the short term. They get pulled into the political environment; that’s the noise they’re hearing. They need to see wins — we all want to see wins. But your product is a much longer-term gain. You’re saying we’re going to win in thirty years, twenty years — ten years can feel too far away already. How do you talk about that to donors? How do you help them really appreciate the need to invest in these long-term, long-time-horizon, idea-generating things that Mercatus does?

Ben Klutsey: Yeah, and I get it — we all want to see results very quickly, and sometimes the volatility and how sensationally the news reports things make it seem like everything is dire, and that we need to react very, very quickly. My caution is this: we ask the question, who’s going to be the next Hayek, the next Friedman, the next Walter Williams? And if you look at the talent pipeline, we see the challenges — it’s thinning out, and we have to double our efforts to replenish it. So the question we ask isn’t just about the next five years, which matters too, but about the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. We need people who are trained and developed in the foundational ideas of what a free society is and how it’s sustained, and that requires time.

You can’t produce talent the way you produce a product — talent has to be cultivated and engaged, and sometimes it remains dormant for a while until you begin to see remarkable work. That’s what we’re encouraging people to think about with Mercatus — that it requires patient capital, supporting people from the early stages of their careers as scholars, thinkers, and academics, because they’re going to be the ones making an impact twenty years down the road. And they do make a difference now, too — sometimes we just don’t hear the noise about what they’re doing. But they make a difference when they’re called up to a briefing or a conversation, and some of them are teaching students right now who, ten years from now, will carry forward the lessons those professors taught them.

Peter Lipsett: Or just a political wind shift, right? Look at the Overton window — look at your home country of Ghana. People needed others to jump in and articulate, even when they weren’t expecting to, how these free-market ideas work.

Ben Klutsey: I need to incorporate these ideas in the way I’m building policy, or developing my organization, or whatever it is. If we’re really thinking about the long-term sustainability of these ideas for human flourishing, we need to spend time, effort, and resources developing that next generation. Sometimes we have to resist the discouragement that comes from looking at what’s happening around the world right now, and instead say: we’re doing something that will make sure things are sustainable in the long term. Thanks for having me — it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Peter Lipsett: Well put. Ben Klutsey, thank you so much.

I appreciate Ben joining me and helping me better understand the Mercatus Center. As I said at the top, I’ve known Mercatus a long time, but it does so many things that it’s hard to get your head around all of it — other than knowing it’s a long-term game. It’s really about thinking through how we get these economic principles to outlast us, outlast this generation, and continue carrying forward. His description of that three-legged stool — economic theory coming together with institutions, and then bottom-up action — really helped solidify my understanding of what it means to build these bridges. It’s fascinating stuff, important stuff, long-term stuff that’s hard to focus on and yet so needed, because when the moment comes, we have to have these ideas ready to go.

I appreciate you tuning in for this. Whether you’re watching on YouTube or listening, we’ll be back with another great episode soon. But if we can help you in the meantime at DonorsTrust, we’re always happy to do that, whether you care about ideas over the long term or the short term.

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