More than 30 Troy University students applied for a chance to join an extracurricular reading program through the Sorrell College of Business’ Johnson Center for Political Economy to explore capitalism versus socialism this fall.

The program is funded by a $4,000 grant from the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty’s Mini-Grants on Free Market Economics program .

“Over the past decade, young Americans have consistently in polls revealed surprising support for socialism, despite socialism’s poor historical record,” said Dr. Dan Sutter, the project’s director and Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics.

“Many analyses, though, reveal that students’ positive view of socialism is based on little concrete knowledge of socialism. These same polls also found that attitudes toward socialism could be changed with greater information,” he said.

Ten students were selected to participate and will receive a $1,000 scholarship and three books the group will use to discuss the topic. Those books are: “Defending the Free Market” by Robert Sirico, “Why Not Socialism?” by G.A. Cohen, and “Why Not Capitalism?” by Jason Brennan. The reading group will run through December, meeting weekly.

Sutter said the participants get the scholarship with no strings attached, meaning there are no grades given and no lines to tow to get the scholarship. All they have to do is engage in discussion with their fellow students. It is funded through $250 from Acton and $750 from the Johnson Center.

“It’s a reading group and they will primarily discuss among themselves,” Sutter said. “More than anything else I like to see the exchange of ideas. When students engage in a topic, that’s when they’re going to learn – it’s so much more than memorizing just to get a good grade on an exam, it leads to real, life-long learning and it changes how people think about things.”

While some students come from economics and finance, the group also has students from electrical engineering, anthropology, and political science.

“We’re really a cross section from across the University,” Sutter said. “It’s more than reading this stuff in books. I want them to spend more time listening to one another than talking.”

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, ecumenical think tank located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in 1990, the Institute works internationally to “promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.”