The forces that reorganized human society that came with the agricultural revolution still control and constrain our social evolution today. The human global economy has become a global, unified, interlocking system of resource extraction and surplus production. Integral to this system are institutions and belief systems supporting it. Today, neoliberalism is the dominant ideology supporting the ultrasocial system. Far from supporting individual freedom, it is a philosophy that defends sacrificing the well-being of individuals for the benefit of the global market. Fredrich Hayek, one of the leading figures of neoliberal thought, was influenced by biological theories of group selection and recognized that the market economy was a kind of superorganism. Neoliberals explicitly argue that the market is a supreme information processing system, far superior to human reason. The political agenda of neoliberals is twofold: to protect the market from public regulation and to promote government spending to expand market activity.

The crisis of anthropogenic climate change is made worse by the hegemony of neoliberal, free-market economic orthodoxy. Almost everywhere the idea of “the market” reigns supreme, like an angry god demanding constant deference and tribute. The essential problem is this: Neoliberalism is hostile to the idea of economic planning and redistribution; it maintains that the market is largely self-regulating, but adapting to and mitigating the worst of climate change will require robust and active states.

The Thomas Jefferson Center Annual Reports credit the Volker Fund for a founding grant and the Earhart Foundation for providing critical support to graduate students. The Rockefeller Foundation supported Nutter’s NBER Soviet growth project and provided Tullock’s initial fellowship at the TJC. The Earhart Fellowship program has been neglected in previous histories of this period, perhaps because it was decentralized. The Foundation selected faculty sponsors to award graduate fellowship to students of their choice. The chapter presents the history of the fellowship program by major departments over the whole of the foundation’s existence. Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia had fellows a year before the University of Chicago but Earhart fellowships at those institutions declined over time while those at Chicago and Virginia survived. Thus, the association of the Earhart Foundation with Chicago seems to be a result of a survival bias. The number of sponsors or fellows who were president of the American Economic Association or Nobel laureates is also remarkable. Earhart funded Nutter’s “rational debate” series exemplifying government by discussion at the early Virginia School.