Interview with Anne Bradley

Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez and Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the Econ Thoughts SPE Podcast, spoke with Dr Anne Bradley, who is George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the Academic Director at the Fund for American Studies.

In the conversation, Anne reflects on how economics helps us understand not only markets but the deeper conditions that allow individuals and societies to flourish.

Drawing on her academic work and teaching, she emphasises that economic analysis begins with understanding human choice, trade-offs and institutions. Flourishing, she argues, is inherently social: we succeed not in isolation but through networks of cooperation, trust and opportunity. Filippo and Anne highlight that GDP alone is an incomplete metric— paraphrasing Adam Smith, true prosperity depends on whether “the majority of people have real opportunities to develop their potential,” a theme that runs throughout her research.

She discusses how economics offers a framework for thinking about constraints, incentives and the unseen consequences of policy choices, all of which shape long-term wellbeing. The discussion covers Anne’s work on poverty alleviation and civil-society solutions, which argues that sustainable reductions in poverty emerge from economic and political freedom, strong local institutions and the dignity that comes from work. Markets, Anne notes, remain “an incredible anti-poverty machine,” yet they function well only when embedded in supportive social norms and institutions.

The interview also revisits Bradley’s early career research on the economics of terrorism, a topic where she brought economic tools to bear on a highly complex issue. She explains how terrorism can be understood through supply-and-demand dynamics: while policy tends to focus on disrupting the supply side, long-term progress requires reducing demand by addressing the political, economic and institutional drivers that make terrorism a viable strategy for groups. Raising opportunity costs, strengthening economic freedom and providing peaceful avenues for conflict resolution, she argues, are essential to making terrorism “too costly to sustain.”

This analytical lens—rooted in incentives, institutional quality and long-term thinking—connects directly back to her broader work on how societies cultivate resilience, prosperity and flourishing.

Dr. Anne Bradley is the George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the Academic Director at the Fund for American Studies. She served as the Vice President of Economic Initiatives at The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, and is a visiting professor at Georgetown University and has previously taught at George Mason University and at Charles University, Prague.

She served as the Associate Director for the Program in Economics, Politics, and the Law at the James M. Buchanan Center at George Mason University.