GMU is in the news at the moment having made the final four of the men's NCAA tournament (nice article in The Age). It's led Peter Boettke and Alex Tabarrok to pen "The Secret of George Mason", pubished by Slate:
What's remarkable is that GMU's freewheeling basketball team and its free-market academic teams owe their successes to very similar, market-beating strategies. GMU has excelled on the court and in the classroom by daring to be different.
The department got started with a heretical premise: The academic market is inefficient, so how can we exploit it?
From the 1960s into the 1980s, a small university such as GMU could hire conservative and free-market thinkers of true genius for the same kinds of reasons that, in the mid-1960s, a middling school like Texas Western University could recruit some of the best basketball players in the nation, so long as they were black,
For an overview of the GMU Econ department, see this sidebar.
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