Brownstone Institute Events
Brownstone Pittsburgh Supper Club, October 28, 2026: George Paik
DeBlaze at 131 | 131 E Main St., Carnegie, PA 15106
Wednesday, October 28, 2026 6:30 – 9 pm
$53 includes appetizers and dinner
Pittsburgh Brownstone Supper Club is pleased to welcome George F. Paik as he presents “American Institutions And Public Trust”.
Public trust has been deteriorating for decades. Institutional operators shape everyone’s lives while focusing on their career interests. Our politicians try to alienate us from each other. Only comity underwrites trust. American comity rests on our national self-conception as holders of certain Truths: of unalienable, equally endowed personal rights, and of government legitimated by consent of the governed. Can we re-set our institutions on this existential bedrock?
George F. Paik is a former political affairs officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, a twenty-year veteran of U.S. capital markets, and a student of social theory and American history.
His diplomatic service straddled the end of the Cold War, giving him a “before and after” view of U.S. foreign policy. Duties included political analysis, human rights, and trade affairs, at postings in Brazil and in Trinidad and Tobago and in Washington. In finance, he has worked as Head of Loan Capital Markets, Mellon Bank; corporate lender, Peoples United Bank; Manager Capital Markets, Bank of Montreal New York; and loan syndicator, Manufacturers Hanover Trust. He has long worked to promote international affairs awareness with World Affairs Councils, American Committees on Foreign Relations, and currently a Pittsburgh Committee on Foreign Relations (pghcfr.org). He blogs on commonconviction.net, and has contributed to sites including foreignpolicyblogs.com, World Policy Journal, and internationalpolicydigest.org.
Paik holds an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University. His undergraduate thesis was titled Elihu Root and the War Department Reforms of 1904: Anatomy of a Progressive Era Reform.