ABSTRACT The thesis of this symposium, organized by James Bicksler, was that while finance theory will surely inform practitioners, it seems appropriate to pay some attention to the opposite flow: practitioners can inform theory. Contributors include a distinguished group of practitioners with extensive backgrounds in economics, and economists with extensive public policy experience: Martin Feldstein, Robert Glauber, David Mullins, and Steven Wallman. Their topics range from privatizing social security, to managing market crashes, to the regulatory agency cost problem, to regulatory constraints in a technologically advanced world.