Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution shares videos intended to encourage discussion, generate ideas, and disseminate information related to peace, the human condition, and the role of government.
California Wealth-Tax Deal Nears Deadline as Unions Split Over Revenue
In a Hoover Institution California update, Bill Whalen and Lee Ohanian argue that the state’s politics are being shaped by institutional strain more than any single scandal. They say the federal investigation of Gavin Newsom and Jennifer Siebel Newsom could help Newsom cast himself as a Trump target in a Democratic presidential race, while exposing family finances and behested payments to deeper scrutiny. They also frame California’s election rules, Xavier Becerra’s likely succession, and a possible deal to avert a billionaire wealth-tax ballot fight as evidence of a system increasingly governed by distrust, weak execution, and interest-group bargaining.
American Security Requires Strategic Competence, Not Military Power Alone
H.R. McMaster argues that the greatest danger to American security is not a lack of military power but a loss of strategic competence after the Cold War. In a Hoover Institution discussion, the former national security adviser says U.S. leaders mistook a temporary unipolar advantage for a lasting condition, underestimated the political nature of war, and failed to connect military action to achievable political outcomes. That failure, he argues, now meets a more dangerous environment in which China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are increasingly reinforcing one another.
American Strategy Fails When Untested Assumptions Become Policy
H.R. McMaster argues that American strategy often fails not for lack of information but because officials allow untested assumptions to become policy. In a Hoover Institution discussion, the former national security adviser says U.S. approaches to China, Iran, Russia and Afghanistan repeatedly projected Washington’s hopes onto adversaries rather than examining their motives, ideology and incentives. His remedy is a more disciplined process: define the problem on its own terms, test assumptions, present leaders with real options, and weigh the risks of inaction as seriously as the risks of acting.
Gulf States Still Anchor Security in the U.S. Despite China’s Rise
Jonathan Fulton tells Elizabeth Economy that China’s Middle East role is substantial but narrower than the recent hype suggests: Beijing is a major economic actor in the Gulf, yet remains a limited security and diplomatic player. In his account, the Iran crisis and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz underscored that regional governments may be frustrated with Washington but still rely on the U.S. security architecture because no other power can replace it. Fulton argues China is useful to Gulf states in trade, infrastructure, digital systems and energy, while its capacity to convert that influence into geopolitical power remains constrained.
U.S.-Iran Memorandum Trades Leverage for a Fragile Midterm Quiet
Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster, and John Cochrane argue that the draft U.S.-Iran memorandum looks less like a settlement than a political pause that gives Tehran money and time while leaving the nuclear question unresolved. In a Hoover GoodFellows discussion, they differ on whether unintended consequences could still weaken Iran’s regime, but largely agree that Washington had leverage in the Strait of Hormuz and failed to use it. They extend that concern to Ukraine and Cuba, framing the central problem as American pressure applied without follow-through.
U.S.-Iran Memorandum Trades Hormuz Relief for Unresolved Nuclear Questions
Hoover fellows Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster and John Cochrane read the reported U.S.-Iran memorandum less as a peace settlement than as a bid to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while postponing the nuclear dispute and front-loading concessions to Tehran. They largely agree the draft looks weak; their disagreement is over whether it buys time for a harder strategy later, creates space for pressure inside Iran, or signals a loss of U.S. will that allies and adversaries will now test.
Unwanted Sexual Texts to Officials Test First Amendment Harassment Limits
Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer use an Ohio harassment dispute over sexually explicit Shrek images allegedly texted to a state senator to examine a harder First Amendment question: when offensive political speech becomes punishable direct harassment. Volokh argues that the law often distinguishes speech about a person from unwanted speech to a person, but says the doctrine is unsettled when the recipient is a government official, the channel is a phone, and the content is sexual but not obscene. Bambauer presses whether punishment should require notice to stop and whether statutes broad enough to reach unsolicited explicit images may also capture protected political criticism.
Britain’s Race Debate Is Importing the Wrong American History
In a Hoover Institution conversation with Andrew Roberts, author and columnist Tomiwa Owolade argues that Britain’s race debate has become distorted by American categories that do not fit British history or demography. Owolade’s case in This Is Not America is not that Britain lacks racism, but that treating black Britons, American descendants of slavery, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and other groups through a single imported racial framework produces bad analysis and weaker civic life.
Soviet Power, Not Popular Support, Put Mao in Control of China
Hoover Institution historian Frank Dikötter argues that Mao’s conquest of China was not the triumph of a popular peasant revolution but the result of Soviet sponsorship, wartime opportunity, American misjudgment, and Communist coercion. Drawing on Chinese Communist Party internal materials and Russian Comintern records, Dikötter says the party was marginal for much of its early history, repeatedly sustained by Moscow, and later legitimized by myths that still shape Western accounts. He connects that history to the present, arguing that a regime unable to examine its origins remains governed by paranoia and insecurity.
Sunlight Advice Should Weigh Total Mortality, Not Skin Cancer Alone
Author Rowan Jacobsen tells Russ Roberts that public-health advice has treated sun exposure too narrowly as a skin-cancer problem, when the relevant question should be total health and mortality. Jacobsen accepts that sunlight can cause skin cancer and that burns should be avoided, but argues that moderate exposure may also confer benefits, especially through mechanisms such as nitric oxide and cardiovascular effects. Roberts presses the limits of the evidence, leaving the case as a tradeoff rather than a reversal: sunlight is risky, but zero exposure may not be the safest default.
China’s Communists Won Through Foreign Backing and Attritional War
At a Hoover Institution book talk, historian Frank Dikötter argued that the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949 was neither inevitable nor chiefly the result of mass peasant support. Drawing on archival research behind Red Dawn Over China, Dikötter presented the conquest as a contingent outcome shaped by Soviet sponsorship, Japan’s destruction of the Chinese Republic’s position, American pressure for truce and coalition in 1946, and the party’s use of coercion, forced conscription and attritional warfare.
Exiled Russian Opposition Can Still Pierce Putin’s Information Monopoly
At a Hoover Institution screening of Lyuba’s Hope, Russian opposition figure Lyubov Sobol argued that exile has constrained but not ended her political work against Vladimir Putin’s regime. In discussion with filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya, producer Paul Gregory, Kathryn Stoner, and Larry Diamond, Sobol described a strategy built around reaching Russian audiences through blocked platforms, documenting repression and war support, pushing sanctions and visa cases abroad, and preparing for a democratic opening organized around institutions rather than revenge.
AI Demand Turns Western Energy Abundance Into an Affordability Test
Condoleezza Rice opened Stanford’s 2026 State of the West symposium by arguing that the American West’s energy abundance is becoming a test of affordability, infrastructure, and public trust. Rice said AI and advanced computing are accelerating electricity demand, putting pressure on the grid and making household energy costs part of the politics of technological adoption. Her case was that the region’s resources, institutions, and policy choices must now align economic growth, energy supply, and environmental responsibility rather than treating them as separate questions.
America’s Energy Advantage Can Strengthen Allies Before the Window Closes
James Ellis argues that U.S. energy abundance has become a strategic asset at a dangerous moment, not merely a domestic question of supply, prices, or technology. Speaking through the Hoover Institution’s George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group, he makes the case for American energy statecraft: using oil and gas production, nuclear and geothermal development, capital, technology, and allied partnerships to strengthen national security, support vulnerable partners, and counter adversaries. That opportunity, he warns, is rare and may be closing.
Huang Zhen’s Sketches Show the Long March at Ground Level
Hoover Senior Fellow Elizabeth Economy uses the Hoover Institution Library & Archives’ 25 original ink sketches by Long March survivor Huang Zhen to explain why the retreat became central to Chinese Communist Party history. She argues that the 6,000-mile march preserved the Communist movement after near-destruction, consolidated Mao Zedong’s leadership, and forged a surviving cadre through extreme hardship; Huang’s drawings matter because they show that political formation at ground level, in images of cooking, carrying, climbing, illness, and movement through punishing terrain.
NVIDIA’s GPU Bet Turned Parallel Simulation Into an AI Platform
In a Hoover Institution interview with Condoleezza Rice, NVIDIA founder and chief executive Jensen Huang argues that the company’s rise began with a contrarian bet that the CPU could not remain computing’s only serious architecture. He links that bet to a broader account of simulation, parallel processing, and artificial intelligence, while also making a civic claim: that NVIDIA’s improbable path, and his own immigrant story, depended on American institutions that supplied capital, talent, legal predictability, and tolerance for risk.
Germany’s Defense Shift Recasts Europe’s Role in NATO
Norbert Röttgen, a senior CDU/CSU lawmaker in the Bundestag, argues in a Hoover Institution discussion with H.R. McMaster that Germany has belatedly accepted that Europe’s peace now depends on deterrence, defense capacity and resilience against Russian coercion. He says Berlin’s post-Cold War assumptions about trade, Russian moderation and American security guarantees cost it crucial time, but that Germany’s sharp rise in defense spending marks a real strategic shift. Röttgen’s answer is not a looser transatlantic relationship, but a new division of labor in which Europe carries more of its own defense while preserving the United States as partner and backstop.
American Achievement Depends on Institutions That Reward Risk and Reinvention
Hoover Institution’s trailer for Only in America presents Condoleezza Rice’s interview series as an inquiry into why innovation, leadership, and reinvention recur in the United States. Through clips from Jensen Huang, Indra Nooyi, Tom Siebel, Mary Barra, Fei-Fei Li, and Yo-Yo Ma, the series argues that exceptional achievement depends not only on individual talent but on American conditions: freedom, opportunity, risk-taking, education, limited government, and a culture that permits people to change their circumstances.
Healthy Communities Form People Through Tension, Not Conformity
Luke Burgis tells Russ Roberts that the central problem of identity is not choosing between individualism and belonging, but learning to remain in communities without being absorbed by them. In the EconTalk conversation, Burgis argues that families, schools, politics, religious groups, workplaces, and marriages form the self through tension — and that modern life too often promises escape from that tension through frictionless affinity. Roberts presses the implication: adulthood requires standing apart from one’s tribe without necessarily leaving it.
Wildlife Mandates Built for Scarcity Now Struggle With Abundance
At a Hoover Institution session on markets and mandates in conservation, Dominic Parker and James Workman argued that wildlife policy is now confronting problems created partly by its own successes. Parker said land-based mandates that helped restore game species such as deer are poorly suited to managing overabundance, shrinking hunter participation, and conflicts over predators such as wolves. Workman made the parallel case at sea: commercial catch shares rebuilt some fisheries, but recreational anglers increasingly sit outside the monitoring and incentives that made those systems work.
Subsidies, Permits, and Carbon Rules Shape Whether Conservation Markets Work
At a Hoover Institution session on “enviropreneurship,” Holly Fretwell and three environmental entrepreneurs argued that markets can finance conservation only when environmental benefits can be measured, paid for, and permitted. Maiky Iberkleid of RESILIFT, Grant Canary of Mast Reforestation, and Manuel Piñuela of Cultivo each described a different bottleneck: subsidized flood insurance that weakens demand for home elevation, reforestation constrained by supply chains and carbon-accounting rules, and grassland regeneration that becomes investable only after legal and underwriting risks are narrowed.
Tariffs Are a Weak Climate Tool Without International Coordination
At a Hoover Institution panel on tariffs, trade and the environment, economists Joseph Shapiro, Arik Levinson and John Cochrane argued over when trade policy can legitimately serve climate policy. Shapiro made the case that tariffs may help enforce international climate coordination in a world without a global carbon regulator, while Levinson warned that much of the case for environmental tariffs rests on overstated claims about outsourced pollution and becomes especially weak when applied to clean technologies. Cochrane pressed the standard economist alternative: price carbon, adjust at the border, and avoid using climate as cover for industrial policy.
Climate Policy Is Shifting From Net-Zero Mandates to Market-Led Adaptation
At a Hoover Institution session on climate policy, Steven Koonin argued that the net-zero mitigation agenda has failed to cut global fossil-fuel dependence and has overstated the evidence for catastrophe. Koonin, Matthew Kahn, Terry Anderson and other participants made the case for shifting attention toward adaptation: local, incremental responses shaped by insurance, real estate, migration, finance and property rights. Their shared claim was not that climate change is unreal, but that better information and market prices may guide resilience more effectively than mandates, subsidies and apocalyptic politics.
Gigawatt-Scale Data Centers Turn AI Growth Into a Local Fight
At a Hoover Institution discussion on the local effects of the AI boom, energy and policy experts argued that data centers have moved from routine commercial development to gigawatt-scale infrastructure fights. Dado Slezak of QTS said the projects can deliver jobs, tax revenue, grid investment, and local benefits, but Robert Bryce and other panelists warned that communities increasingly see them as vehicles for higher power costs, water risk, farmland loss, and big-tech intrusion. The central issue, the panel suggested, is whether developers and regulators can make the benefits credible before local opposition defines the projects as a loss of control.
Federal Environmental Policy Misallocates Local, Interstate, and Climate Problems
Hoover Institution panelists Jonathan Adler and Todd Myers argue that US environmental law often assigns authority to the wrong level of government. Adler makes the case that federal regulation is strongest when states impose costs across borders, but much of the federal environmental code instead standardizes local trade-offs; Myers argues that decentralization works only when it tightens accountability and connects decisions to consequences. Their shared claim is not that states are inherently better than Washington, but that environmental governance should follow the scale of the problem and the distribution of costs and benefits.
American Environmentalism Turns on Markets, Mandates, and Institutional Tradeoffs
Hoover Institution scholars Terry Anderson and Dominic Parker argue that American environmentalism is best understood as a set of institutional tradeoffs between environmental quality and economic freedom, not as a search for final solutions. In their account, mandates can produce gains, as with the Clean Air Act, but they can also restrict choice without meaningful environmental improvement; property rights, federalism, market incentives, technology, trade, and entrepreneurship offer ways to make those tradeoffs more visible and, in some cases, improve both sides.
Iran Ceasefire Debate Turns on Whether Tehran or Washington Has Leverage
Hoover Institution fellows H.R. McMaster, Niall Ferguson and John Cochrane use a mailbag discussion to test questions of war, leadership and institutional resilience against a common standard: whether policy connects means to political ends. Their sharpest disagreement is over Iran, where McMaster argues Tehran is weak and should face more pressure, while Ferguson says it has more room to wait out Washington than the Trump administration expected; Cochrane presses the underlying incentives that make voluntary Iranian nuclear concessions unlikely.
The Declaration of Independence Endures as America’s Unity Document
Historian Michael Auslin argues in his new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, that the Declaration’s endurance rests not only on its claims about liberty and equality but on its assertion that Americans are “one people.” In this Hoover Institution discussion, Auslin presents the Declaration as a unity document whose authority grew through compromise, preservation, reproduction and repeated use by later movements seeking fuller membership in the American project.
Iran Standoff Tests Whether Washington Manages Wars or Wins Them
In this GoodFellows mailbag, Hoover fellows H.R. McMaster, Niall Ferguson and John Cochrane treat the Iran standoff as the central test of American strategy. McMaster argues Washington should stop managing the conflict and intensify pressure on a weakened regime, while Ferguson warns Tehran may be waiting for oil-price and market pain to force the United States into a worse bargain; around that dispute, the three extend the same standard to war leadership, institutional decline, Europe, climate policy and populism: policy has to connect means to political ends rather than substitute rhetoric for results.
Elizabeth II Turned Royal Restraint Into Diplomatic Power
Royal biographer Hugo Vickers argues that Elizabeth II’s statecraft rested on restraint: saying little, appearing above politics, and using ceremony to create room for ministers and officials to act. In this Secrets of Statecraft conversation with Andrew Roberts, Vickers extends that argument to King Charles III, casting monarchy’s diplomatic value as the ability to open doors without seeming to negotiate policy. His account presents the Crown not as an alternative government, but as a constitutional instrument whose power depends on discipline, ambiguity, and the public weight of duty.
Teachers’ Unions Remain Powerful as Membership Falls and School Politics Shift
Michael Hartney and Melissa Lyon argue that teachers’ unions remain central actors in American education, but their influence is harder to measure than collective-bargaining law alone suggests. In a Hoover Institution discussion hosted by Tom Church, they describe unions as layered national, state, and local institutions that shape spending, working conditions, strikes, COVID reopening decisions, and now debates over AI and the purpose of schools. Both see unions as durable, but increasingly defined by transparency fights, voluntary membership, and the politics of what schools are meant to do.
America’s Drug-Death Crisis Began With Chronic-Pain Prescribing
Economists William Evans and Ethan Lieber argue that America’s drug-death crisis began with a domestic medical failure: a late-1990s shift toward prescribing opioids for chronic pain, reinforced by pharmaceutical promotion and regulatory acceptance. In Steven Davis’s interview, they trace how counties with more underlying pain were hit hardest, how OxyContin made the shift more dangerous, and why the crisis later moved from prescription drugs into heroin and fentanyl. Their account leaves little comfort for current policy: correcting prescribing practices may address the original channel, but most deaths now come from illicit fentanyl markets that are far harder to control.
The First Amendment Leaves Privacy Torts With Narrower Reach
Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer argue that privacy is not a single counterweight to the First Amendment but a set of distinct claims, some of which protect speech and others of which restrict it. In a Hoover Institution discussion, they distinguish privacy against government surveillance or compelled identification from privacy asserted against other speakers, where claims over anonymity, hidden recording, private facts, false light, and publicity rights can become demands to limit what others may say.
Finland Brings NATO a Border With Russia and a Whole-Society Defense Model
Finnish diplomat Kai Sauer argues that Finland’s entry into NATO is not a turn toward confrontation with Russia but a response to Moscow’s assault on Ukraine and its challenge to sovereign states’ right to choose their own alignments. In a discussion with H.R. McMaster, Sauer presents Finland as a front-line ally whose contribution rests not only on geography, but on conscription, whole-of-society resilience, energy diversification, and trusted technology capabilities. McMaster frames those strengths as part of a broader transatlantic agenda: moving burden-sharing from complaint to practical cooperation.
News Deserts Are Weakening Local Accountability and Shared Civic Facts
Hoover Institution panelists argued that the collapse of local journalism is weakening American democracy not just by shrinking newsrooms, but by reducing the number of reporters physically present to observe public institutions and supply shared facts. Neil Chase, Elizabeth Green and Vicki Liviakis described a replacement system built from specialized nonprofit outlets, local television, collaborations, community documenters and technology, while warning that legal threats, harassment, funding gaps and uneven philanthropic support are making local accountability reporting harder to sustain.
Migrant Inventors Boost Innovation in Both Home and Host Countries
Economist Marta Prato argues that inventor migration is not simply a brain drain from origin countries to richer destinations. In her analysis for the Hoover Institution, high-skilled inventors often become more productive after moving abroad, while former collaborators at home can also benefit when professional ties continue. The implication, she says, is that migration policy should account not only for the movement of workers, but for the cross-border movement of knowledge.
Dollar Dominance Could Erode Without a Clear Successor Currency
At a Hoover Institution conference on central-bank independence and international risks, Condoleezza Rice, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Stephen Redding and Kenneth Rogoff argued that dollar dominance can no longer be analyzed apart from U.S. security commitments, fiscal policy, technology competition and trade frictions. The central claim running through the discussion was that the United States still benefits from a powerful reserve-currency position, but that privilege depends on confidence in safe dollar assets and stable institutions. Krishnamurthy quantified the reserve-currency asset as a large interest-rate benefit, while Redding and Rogoff warned that tariffs, fiscal strain and political pressure on the Federal Reserve could make erosion costly even without a clear successor to the dollar.
Central Banks Face Accountability Tests Across Independence, Reserves, and Stability Policy
At a Hoover Institution conference on central-bank independence, Marvin Barth, Darrell Duffie and Christina Skinner each framed the next phase of monetary and financial policy as an accountability problem. Barth argued that the Federal Reserve’s policy failures and lack of humility have weakened its political legitimacy; Duffie said shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet depends on changing reserve demand and payment mechanics, not simply selling assets; and Skinner argued that financial stability policy should weigh growth and economic security rather than treating every visible risk reduction as a net gain.
Fed Officials Call for Better Classification Tools Under Economic Uncertainty
At a Hoover Institution policy panel on central-bank independence, structure and emerging risks, Federal Reserve officials Michelle Bowman, Mary Daly, Austan Goolsbee and Christopher Waller each argued that the Fed’s next problems turn on classifying risks before they are obvious in hindsight. Bowman focused on capital rules and private credit, Daly on distinguishing temporary from persistent inflation shocks, Goolsbee on whether expected AI productivity gains lower or raise the appropriate rate path, and Waller on which Fed functions require regional autonomy rather than centralized operations.
Central Bank Independence Requires Limits on Tools, Not Just Mandates
At a Hoover Institution conference on central-bank independence, Thomas Drechsel, Luis Garicano and Carolyn Wilkins argued over how far legal insulation can stretch once central banks have large balance sheets, emergency tools and broad theories of monetary transmission. Drechsel used Fed chairs’ calendars to show how the job has become more outward-facing; Garicano warned that the ECB’s narrow mandate has not prevented fiscal, financial and climate-related expansion through its tools; and Wilkins argued that independence can survive only with clearer boundaries, cost-benefit discipline, exit rules and external review.
Reserve Bank Removal Powers Could Expose the Fed to Presidential Control
At a Hoover Institution conference on central-bank governance, John Cochrane, Edward Nelson, Gary Richardson and David Wilcox treated Federal Reserve independence as a delegated legal structure rather than a self-executing norm. Richardson argued that Congress designed the Fed to frustrate presidential control, while Wilcox warned that ambiguous authority over Reserve Bank presidents could still give a determined president a path into the FOMC. Nelson added that independence protects the Fed’s operational judgment, not the quality of its monetary doctrine.
Fiscal Stress Is Narrowing the Room for Independent Central Banks
At a Hoover Institution conference on central-bank independence, Michael Bordo, Barry Eichengreen and Hanno Lustig argued that fiscal policy is increasingly constraining what monetary policy can credibly do. Bordo used Britain’s Great Inflation to show how a fiscal regime shift can turn shocks into inflation; Eichengreen said U.S. fiscal politics now pose risks to the dollar and the Federal Reserve; and Lustig argued that markets are starting to price Treasurys less as safe assets than as risky debt. Their shared point was that legal independence offers central banks only limited protection when debt dynamics, fiscal politics and bond-market stress move against them.
Three Centuries of Recessions Undermine the Boom-Bust Theory
Tyler Goodspeed argues in a Hoover Institution presentation that recessions are usually misread as the inevitable result of excess in the preceding boom, when the longer historical record points instead to shocks filtered through institutions that either absorb or amplify them. Drawing on UK and US data back to 1700, he says expansions do not die of old age, recession warnings routinely fail, and downturns are often given retrospective moral labels — from dot-coms to housing — that obscure what actually caused the contraction.
Career Choice Should Be Treated as an Empirical Search for Impact
Benjamin Todd, co-founder of 80,000 Hours, argues in conversation with Russ Roberts that career choice should be treated less as a search for a preexisting passion than as a sequence of tests about where a person can do unusually useful work. Todd’s case is that impact depends on marginal value, neglected problems, personal fit and evidence, not simply prestige, pay or visible helping. Roberts presses a counterpoint throughout: that meaning also comes from humane service, local obligations and the smaller contributions that economic or impact calculations can miss.
America Remains Dominant If It Stops Defeating Itself
Stephen Kotkin argues that the United States remains the world’s dominant power, not a late-stage empire in British-style decline, but that it risks weakening itself through overextended commitments, depleted military capacity, damaged alliances, and domestic institutional decay. In a Hoover Institution Uncommon Knowledge interview with Peter Robinson, Kotkin applies that argument to Iran, China, Ukraine, and America’s internal politics: Washington can still deter rivals and lead allies, he says, if it stops treating postwar exceptional dominance as the normal measure of American power.
The Declaration of Independence Became America’s Unity Document Over Two Centuries
In a Hoover Institution book launch for National Treasure, historian Michael Auslin argues that the Declaration of Independence began as a wartime instrument and diplomatic necessity before Americans made it a sacred national text. Auslin’s central claim is that the document’s afterlife — as parchment, symbol, commercial object, equality claim and constitutional touchstone — shows it was not only about liberty and equality, but also about creating “one people” out of divided colonies.
Chile’s Market Reforms Succeeded, but Success Did Not Defend Itself
Sebastian Edwards, the UCLA economist and author of The Chile Project, argues that Chile’s market reforms were a radical dismantling of state control, not a marginal liberalization, and that their success was later obscured by slower growth and political complacency. In a Hoover Institution conversation with Jon Hartley, Edwards makes the case that Latin America’s growth failures are rooted in institutions, policy choices, and recurring hostility to economic freedom, while pointing to deregulation and renewed market reform in countries such as Argentina and Chile as the region’s clearest path back to faster growth.
The American Dream Is Weakening Where Competition and Mobility Are Blocked
In a Hoover Institution discussion moderated by Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, economists John Cochrane, Valerie Ramey and Ross Levine argue that American prosperity has depended less on wealth itself than on institutions and habits that allow competition, risk-taking, mobility and disruption. They differ on emphasis — Cochrane stresses limits on government and regulatory failure, Levine competition joined to justice and stability, and Ramey education, culture and immigration — but converge on a warning that the American Dream weakens when schools fail, incumbents are protected, fiscal space erodes and politics stops doing routine maintenance.
Taiwanese Support for Self-Defense Is High but Conditional
Wen-Chin Wu, in a Hoover Institution talk drawing on multiple public-opinion surveys, argues that Taiwanese support for self-defense is high but conditional. He separates backing for national defense measures, including U.S. arms purchases, from personal willingness to fight or resist, and finds that both depend heavily on perceived threat from China, expectations of U.S. intervention, party identity, costs, and question wording. The result, in Wu’s account, is not a Taiwan that is either complacent or uniformly resolved, but a public that is “worried but cool” amid coercion and strategic ambiguity.
A Near-Death Vision Forced a Rationalist to Reconsider Consciousness
Sebastian Junger, speaking with Russ Roberts on EconTalk, recounts how a near-fatal ruptured aneurysm in 2020 forced him to confront an experience his atheism could not easily explain: the apparent presence of his dead father as he was close to death. Junger does not present the episode as proof of God or an afterlife, but argues that a serious rationalist should neither convert mystery into doctrine nor dismiss it because it violates prior assumptions. His account treats mortality as both a medical fact and a destabilizing encounter with consciousness, fear, and reverence.
Civic Education Must Balance Democratic Attachment With Liberal Inquiry
A Hoover Institution webinar with Melinda Zook, Joseph Knippenberg, Benjamin Storey and Dan Edelstein argues that civic education belongs within liberal education but cannot be treated as a neutral extension of it. The panelists frame the central problem as a tension between cultivating inquiry, skepticism and intellectual independence, and teaching students to understand and care for the constitutional republic in which they share political responsibility. Their institutional question is how universities can build that education through general education, civic-thought programs and existing departments without reducing civics to either indoctrination or another academic silo.
California’s Revenue Windfall Masks a Narrow and Mobile Tax Base
In a Hoover Institution California update, Bill Whalen and Lee Ohanian argue that the state’s newly balanced budget reflects another capital-gains windfall rather than a sounder fiscal model. They say California remains dependent on a narrow group of high-income, mobile taxpayers, with AI and possible IPOs offering more revenue upside while reinforcing the same volatility. The discussion extends that critique into state and Los Angeles politics, where they see unsettled Democratic fields and Spencer Pratt’s mayoral bid as symptoms of frustration with incumbent governance.
Iran Crisis Weakens U.S. Leverage Ahead of Trump-Xi Summit
Former Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell argues in a conversation with Elizabeth Economy that the Iran crisis has weakened the U.S. position in Asia just as President Trump meets Xi Jinping in Beijing. Campbell says the conflict has diverted military capacity and political attention from the Indo-Pacific, exposed limits in allied support, and given China an opening to test U.S. commitments, especially on Taiwan. Economy shares his emphasis on allies but is less convinced that Beijing can convert U.S. disorder into lasting strategic advantage.
Wargames Need Policy Records to Become Usable Evidence
Hoover fellow Jacquelyn Schneider argues that wargames are useful to policymakers only when the record around them survives: who commissioned them, how participants interpreted them, and how their lessons entered later decisions. In a Hoover Institution discussion of its Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, Schneider uses the 1961 Berlin Crisis Game to show why the “outer game” can matter as much as the exercise itself, especially when crisis lessons are later carried into real decisions such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
America Must Rebuild Defense Manufacturing to Arm Allies Against China
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey tells Peter Robinson that the United States should stop acting as “the world police” and instead become a far more capable “world gun store,” arming allies that are willing to fight for themselves. His case links defense procurement, autonomous weapons, manufacturing capacity, China, patents, and Silicon Valley culture into one argument: America cannot deter its rivals if it keeps rewarding slow weapons programs, outsourcing real engineering, and treating national loyalty as optional.
Supply-Chain Chokepoints Turn Cheap Inputs Into Geopolitical Leverage
In a Hoover Institution discussion with Steven Davis, trade policy experts Chad Bown and Soumaya Keynes argue that the real danger in cross-border supply chains is not import dependence in general, but concentrated control over inputs that firms cannot quickly replace. Bown points to China’s 2025 restrictions on rare earths, permanent magnets and Nexperia chips as cases where upstream chokepoints threatened auto production more effectively than reciprocal tariffs. Keynes cautions that governments need sharper vulnerability mapping, but that information alone will not make private firms pay the cost of resilience when cheaper, efficient supply chains remain available.
Student Disadvantage Raises Teachers’ Stress-Related Sick Leave in Swedish Schools
In a Hoover Institution presentation of an NBER paper, Krzysztof Karbownik argues that student composition should be treated as a workplace condition for teachers, not just a background feature of schools. Using Swedish register data on secondary teachers, the study finds that teachers in schools serving more disadvantaged students have higher rates of doctor-certified sick leave, especially for psychiatric and stress-related diagnoses, and that the pattern persists when comparing teachers to themselves as student cohorts change. Karbownik’s mechanism is classroom interaction—conflict, threats, lack of respect and poor climate—rather than workload or school management alone.
Renoir’s Cahen d’Anvers Portraits Became a Record of French Anti-Semitism
Catherine Ostler tells Andrew Roberts that the Dreyfus affair was not an isolated miscarriage of justice but the eruption of a France already “soaked in anti-Semitism.” Using the Cahen d’Anvers sisters, painted by Renoir as children and later scattered by conversion, war and deportation, she links the military frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus to the social world that first admitted wealthy Jewish families and then turned on them. The paintings, in her account, survive as evidence of both Belle Époque assimilation and the limits of that acceptance.
U.S.-China Diplomacy Can Manage Risk but Not Resolve the Systems Contest
At a Hoover Institution discussion on U.S. strategy toward China, Sarah Beran, Matt Turpin and Miles Yu argued that diplomacy with Beijing remains necessary but cannot resolve the deeper contest between the two countries. Beran framed the task as risk management through leader channels, alliances and domestic renewal; Turpin described a long hostile rivalry that will run through trade, technology and economic statecraft; and Yu said the problem is systemic incompatibility that Washington should confront more directly.
AI Makes Embodied Competence More Valuable, Not Less
Aled Maclean-Jones argues that Tom Cruise’s later action films are best read as studies in embodied competence: knowledge acquired through tools, risk, repetition and physical contact with the world. In conversation with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, he uses Cruise’s stunts, household repair, navigation and childbirth to question a culture that treats usefulness as mainly intellectual — a question sharpened by AI systems that now operate in the same verbal and analytical domains as many knowledge workers.
Coal Company Towns Left a Legacy of Weak Government and Public Mistrust
Hoover fellow Elizabeth Elder argues in her book Company Towns that mistrust of government in former coal communities is rooted less in abstract anti-government ideology than in generations of local experience with weak, captured, or corrupt public institutions. In her account, coal companies often kept local governments small, blurred public authority with company power, and substituted private provision for public capacity. When coal declined, those towns were left not only with job losses but with governments many residents had little reason to see as competent, independent, or democratically accountable.
China Could Pressure Taiwan Into Submission Without Invading
In Defending Taiwan, Eyck Freymann argues that U.S. strategy is too narrowly focused on deterring a Chinese invasion and is underprepared for a gray-zone crisis that could isolate Taiwan without open war. Freymann’s case, developed in discussion with Hoover Institution participants including Philip Zelikow, is that Beijing’s most plausible path may be legal, commercial, and coercive control over Taiwan’s external ties. Deterrence, he argues, will require Washington and its allies to integrate military power with political discipline, economic planning, technological leverage, and diplomatic coordination before such a crisis begins.
Fellows Split Over Whether the Constitution Is Too Hard to Amend
At the first public taping of Hoover’s GoodFellows, John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson and H.R. McMaster used the Constitution as a text for argument rather than commemoration. Cochrane warned against treating it as scripture and stressed the civic “spirit” behind it, McMaster described an imperfect founding grounded in principles, and Ferguson stated a broad First Amendment position. Their clearest split came over amendment: Ferguson said the process no longer works in practice, while Cochrane argued its history shows it has sometimes been too available.
Trump-Xi Summit Prep Risks Leaving Security Flashpoints Off the Table
Sarah Beran, a former diplomat and national security official, argues that the Trump-Xi summit is being prepared through an economic channel that cannot handle the relationship’s highest-risk disputes. In conversation with Elizabeth Economy, Beran says the meeting may produce useful optics and limited trade progress, but without national-security preparation on cyber, Taiwan, arms control and military channels, it is unlikely to do more than briefly stabilize a relationship defined by recurring tension and mutual leverage.
Cuba’s Opposition Says Democratic Change Can Be Forced Within 12 Months
Cuban opposition leader Rosa María Payá tells H. R. McMaster that Cuba’s humanitarian collapse is also a political opening: the regime, she argues, survives by force, foreign patronage, military control of the economy, and regional repression, not by consent. In a Hoover Institution conversation, Payá says democratic change can be generated within 12 months if outside pressure on regime elites is paired with recognition of a prepared opposition alternative and direct support for Cubans demanding freedom.
Senior Officers Must Advise Privately and Execute Lawful Civilian Decisions
In a Hoover Institution discussion on civil-military relations, retired generals Joseph Dunford and Christopher Cavoli, with H.R. McMaster moderating, argued that the U.S. military’s democratic role depends on a hard boundary: senior officers give candid, private, nonpartisan advice; civilian leaders make policy; and the military carries out lawful orders. Their case was that this discipline is not Washington etiquette but a practical safeguard for the force, ensuring Americans are not sent into danger without an achievable political objective, clear risks, and accountable civilian decisions.
Indian High-Skilled Migration Fueled Silicon Valley and India’s IT Export Rise
Economist Gaurav Khanna argues that Indian high-skilled migration to the United States during the internet-era tech boom was not a simple case of brain drain. In his account, Indian programmers and computer scientists helped expand US technology production and innovation, while the prospect of migration, visa limits and return migration helped build India’s own skilled workforce and IT networks. The result, he says, was a “brain circulation” channel that contributed both to Silicon Valley’s growth and to India’s emergence as the world’s largest IT exporter.
Smart Boundaries Can Make Creative Work More Productive
In an EconTalk conversation with Russ Roberts, author David Epstein argues that creativity and productive work often depend less on open-ended freedom than on well-chosen constraints. Drawing on cases from Mendeleev’s periodic table to Isabel Allende’s writing rituals and the failure of General Magic, Epstein says boundaries can clarify priorities, block habitual shortcuts, and force the kind of search that abundance often prevents.
Free-Market Politics Must Be Rebuilt From First Principles
Daniel Hannan, the new director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, argues that Britain’s problem is not just bad policy but a lost understanding of the case for markets, trade and limited government. In a Hoover Institution conversation with Andrew Roberts, Hannan says free-market ideas must be rebuilt from first principles, especially among younger voters, because their core claims are counter-intuitive and no longer carried by political habit. His wider case links economic illiteracy to protectionism, legal and bureaucratic overreach, culture-war imports and a politics that denies scarcity and trade-offs.
Clinton’s Russia Policy Began With Cooperation, Not NATO Encirclement
Rose Gottemoeller, a former senior U.S. arms control official and NATO deputy secretary general, uses her book Security Through Cooperation to challenge the Kremlin’s account of post-Cold War U.S. policy toward Russia. In her telling, the Clinton administration’s first instinct was not encirclement through NATO enlargement but an effort to build a durable security, economic and political relationship with Moscow, rooted in nuclear risk reduction, space cooperation and practical diplomacy. That argument leads to a more conditional conclusion about the present: cooperation served U.S. security before, she says, but cannot be restored in full while Vladimir Putin remains in the Kremlin.
Economic Freedom, Not Managed Equality, Drives Growth
Former US senator Phil Gramm, in a Hoover Institution conversation with economist Jon Hartley, argues that America’s debates over inequality, poverty, deficits and financial crises are distorted by measures and narratives that leave out central facts. Drawing on his books and legislative career, Gramm makes the case that economic freedom, not directed investment or redistribution, has been the main source of US growth and mobility. He contends that official inequality statistics undercount transfers and taxes, that the 2008 crisis stemmed from housing policy rather than Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and that efforts to substitute government judgment for markets reliably fail.
Mont Pelerin Society Organized Classical Liberalism Against Postwar Planning
Hoover Senior Fellow John Taylor recounts the Mont Pelerin Society’s 1947 founding as an organized response to the postwar rise of socialist planning and state intervention. In Taylor’s telling, Friedrich Hayek and the society’s first members were not simply defending markets in economic terms; they were trying to rebuild classical liberalism as an intellectual program for freedom, aimed at the practical policy questions that had made collectivism newly credible.
Noncompete Enforcement Reduces Mobility and Innovation Despite Firm Investment Claims
Economists Steven Davis and Evan Starr examine whether states should enforce noncompete agreements, a contract tool Starr says now reaches well beyond executives and trade-secret holders to low-wage workers, interns, and janitors. Starr argues the evidence points to weak worker consent, continued use of unenforceable clauses, and lower innovation where noncompetes are enforced; Davis presses the countercase that some clauses may protect legitimate firm investments in training, clients, or confidential information. Their disagreement centers on whether law can distinguish those uses cheaply enough, or whether broader bans and bright-line rules are the better response.
U.S. China Policy Needs a Unified Economic Statecraft Command
Elizabeth Economy’s conversation with Randy Schriver and Mike Kuiken of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission argues that Washington’s China problem now cuts across trade, technology, supply chains, cyber operations, Taiwan planning, pharmaceuticals, and sanctions policy. Schriver and Kuiken say the US government still manages many of those risks through agencies and laws built for an earlier era, leaving economic statecraft fragmented just as China’s leverage has become more integrated. Their case is less for severing all economic ties than for building the machinery to decide which ties are tolerable, which are dangerous, and which require national effort to replace.
Deterring China Over Taiwan Requires Options Short of War
Eyck Freymann’s argument in Defending Taiwan, discussed with Niall Ferguson at the Hoover Institution, is that U.S. deterrence is too narrowly built around stopping a Chinese invasion. Freymann says Beijing could instead use customs controls, coast guard pressure, energy constraints, supply-chain leverage, and political coercion to force Taiwan toward submission without triggering a clear war. His prescription is for Washington to build credible options between inaction, military escalation, and an economic rupture it cannot sustain.