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.
Russia’s Repression Reveals the Limits of Putin’s Claim to Popular Support
Vladimir Kara-Murza argues that the Kremlin’s repression of opponents undermines its claim that Russians support Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. In a discussion with H.R. McMaster, he says Western governments repeatedly accommodated Putin as he tightened control at home and expanded aggression abroad, and urges them to target regime officials while supporting Russians who oppose the government.
Third Way Civics Brings Civic Learning Into Courses Across Disciplines
Trygve Throntveit argues that colleges can help address a civic crisis he describes as Americans’ declining ability and willingness to work across differences. His proposed model, Third Way Civics, folds civic inquiry and dialogue into regular coursework, asking students to examine primary sources and reason together rather than receive prescribed conclusions. Throntveit says pilots across more than 50 courses have shown gains in civic engagement and willingness to listen to people with whom students disagree.
Rising Energy Demand Makes Reliability Central to Climate Policy
Steven Koonin argues that rising energy demand makes reliability and affordability essential tests of climate policy, and that trying to decarbonize too quickly can create risks of its own. In his remarks on energy realism, he says wind and solar cannot alone guarantee power through prolonged periods of low output, and calls for faster construction, sustained research and development, and nuclear power at scale. His case is for reducing emissions while being candid about costs, technical limits and the time needed to build.
Civic Education Must Teach America’s Promise Alongside Its Failures
Stephen Morris argues that civic education must restore Americans’ knowledge of the country’s history, including both its achievements and its failures. He says a weakening civic memory leaves young people less able to understand the gap between the nation’s founding ideals and people’s lived experience, or to take part in addressing it. Morris presents reflective study and community engagement as ways to prepare citizens to carry forward the country’s unfinished civic work.
Brazil’s Supreme Court Has Become a Durable Political Power Center
Felipe Jafet argues that Brazil’s Supreme Court has accumulated legislative, investigative, executive and judicial powers, eroding the constitutional separation of powers and making the Court difficult to check. He contends that unilateral decisions by long-serving justices have enabled selective enforcement and censorship, and calls on Congress to restore institutional limits through constitutional reforms and the impeachment of Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
The Retreat From Reading Weakens the Public Culture of Argument
Journalist James Marriott argues that the decline of long-form reading threatens more than books’ place in daily life: it weakens the habits of sustained argument, critical scrutiny and complex thought that literacy helped establish in public culture. Speaking with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, Marriott contends that writing makes ideas more stable and contestable than performance-driven media, while Roberts questions whether books alone can provide depth or improve political judgment. Marriott’s narrower conclusion is that reading may persist not as a mass habit but as a deliberate discipline.
Treasury Intervention Cannot Override Fiscal Pressure on Long-Term Yields
Anil Kashyap argues that recent U.S. Treasury moves to support the yen and potentially buy long-dated government debt may influence markets briefly but cannot durably lower borrowing costs or stabilize currencies without fiscal and monetary policy changes. In discussion with Steven Davis, he says large deficits and rising debt-service costs are putting sustained pressure on both U.S. and Japanese yields, while Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole remarks have set up an immediate test of whether the Fed will act on his stated concerns about inflation.
Gestapo Arrest List Revealed Plans to Decapitate Occupied Britain
Hoover Senior Fellow Russell Berman examines a surviving Gestapo arrest list prepared for Operation Sea Lion, Nazi Germany’s planned invasion of Britain in 1940. The pocket-sized booklet named thousands of people the occupation forces expected to seize, from Winston Churchill and other political leaders to exiled officials, writers, Jewish intellectuals, and former Nazis who opposed Hitler. Berman argues that the directory shows an intended occupation strategy of eliminating Britain’s independent political, cultural, and ideological authorities.
Bard and Johns Hopkins Advance Competing Models of Civic Education
American colleges are expanding civic education programs, but Roosevelt Montás of Bard College and William Howell of Johns Hopkins argue that the effort turns on a basic question: whether universities should prepare all students for citizenship or train future practitioners to improve governing institutions. Montás makes the case for a shared liberal education rooted in texts and discussion, while Howell is building a professional school that pairs institutional problem-solving with reflection on the contested ends public institutions serve. Both reject technocratic training as sufficient for democratic life.
Spoiler Liability Turns on Borrowed Expression, Not Revealed Facts
Eugene Volokh argues that revealing a plot twist in one’s own words is generally not copyright infringement, even if it ruins the audience’s incentive to watch: copyright protects expression, not facts about a fictional story. With Jane Bambauer, he examines where that line changes—when a spoiler reproduces dialogue, detailed scenes, or footage—and how fair use, unpublished material, and participation in a leak can create more difficult legal questions.
Build Rate, Not Energy Reserves, Will Determine AI Leadership
Philip Zelikow of the Hoover Institution argues that U.S. leadership in AI will depend not only on chips and software but on the ability to build electricity generation and transmission at far greater speed. America’s fuel resources and nuclear prospects offer little strategic advantage, he says, if projects take 10 to 15 years while China expands power capacity across multiple sources at scale. Zelikow calls for bipartisan regulatory changes that turn energy abundance into operating capacity for a data-center-intensive economy.
Incentives Explain Conduct but Cannot Decide What Is Right
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues that incentives explain why people face pressure to do harmful things but cannot excuse conduct they know is wrong. In an EconTalk conversation with Russ Roberts, he calls surrendering moral judgment to money, status or institutional approval “loser behavior,” and contends that better systems still require people willing to refuse their terms. Their discussion tests that claim against everyday compromises, career choices and the institutions that reward them.
Cross-Border Threats Demand Intelligence Before Crisis Forces Clarity
Phillip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, argues that the attacks exposed a war the United States had failed to recognize and forced it to confront how transnational threats exploit safe havens, porous travel and identity systems, and divided government agencies. He credits post-9/11 reforms with making another attack harder, while arguing that the underlying lesson now applies to AI-enabled risks, pandemics, cyber threats and criminal networks: institutions built for earlier eras should be reviewed before another crisis dictates the response.
China’s Credit-Fueled Growth Model Now Constrains Its Future
Rhodium Group’s Logan Wright argues that China’s financial system, once the engine of its economic rise, now locks capital into unproductive state firms and investment while starving households and private businesses of the income and credit needed for a new growth model. In a discussion with Elizabeth Economy, he says Xi Jinping’s centralization has made it harder to absorb losses or reverse policy, leaving Beijing reliant on exports as domestic consumption and employment weaken. A genuine shift, Wright contends, would require conspicuous fiscal transfers, financial restructuring and a willingness to accept slower growth.
The Earned Income Tax Credit Targets Poverty More Directly Than Wage Floors
David Neumark argues that minimum-wage increases are a poor anti-poverty tool because they can reduce jobs and hours for lower-skilled workers while directing gains to many people outside poor households. He contends that the Earned Income Tax Credit better targets low-income working families by supplementing their earnings without raising employers’ cost of hiring.
Central Banks Cannot Conceal the Fiscal Signal in Rising Yields
Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan argues that central banks cannot solve a fiscal problem by suppressing the market signals it produces. Rising long-term yields may reflect government deficits and the future cost of accumulated debt, he says, rather than market dysfunction requiring intervention; attempts to push them down risk delaying the fiscal adjustment policymakers must eventually make. Central banks can restore liquidity in a genuine market crisis, Rajan contends, but they cannot make persistent public borrowing sustainable.
Quantum Computing Threatens the Encryption Underpinning Digital Trust
Hoover Institution’s overview argues that cryptography is the largely invisible trust layer behind modern communications, banking and digital records, while blockchain uses it to create shared ledgers without centralized custodians. That decentralization can reduce reliance on intermediaries but also complicates oversight of illicit finance, taxes and monetary policy, the source says. It further warns that quantum computing and law-enforcement demands for exceptional access could weaken the encryption on which those systems depend.
Churchill’s 1940 Decision Shows How Leaders Can Redirect History
Historian Andrew Roberts argues that broad economic and social forces set the conditions of history, but individual leaders can still determine its course in moments of crisis. In conversation with Peter Robinson, he presents Winston Churchill’s decision to fight on in 1940 as the clearest case, defends Churchill against recent accusations over war and empire, and contends that historical judgment depends on chronology, intent and close reading rather than political mythmaking.
Common Standards and Student Agency Define a Sowell-Inspired School Model
Educator Ian Rowe argues that Thomas Sowell’s work offers a practical model for schools serving low-income Black and Hispanic students: maintain common standards, teach students to test claims with evidence, and reject assumptions that race determines educational potential. Drawing on Sowell’s history of high-achieving Black schools and his challenge to race-based leniency, Rowe says Vertex Partnership Academies teaches students to see themselves not as victims but as “architects of their own lives.”
Churchill’s 1940 Decision Shows How Leaders Still Shape History
Historian Andrew Roberts argues that Winston Churchill’s decision to keep Britain fighting in 1940 demonstrates why individual judgment can still redirect history, even amid the constraints of geography, economics and public opinion. In conversation with Peter Robinson, Roberts defends Churchill against charges ranging from racism to responsibility for the Bengal famine, while arguing that Churchill understood Nazism’s character more clearly than contemporaries willing to seek accommodation. His broader case is that, as wartime memory recedes, serious study of leaders’ choices is necessary to understand statecraft.
Deterrence Depends on Turning Commercial Technology Into Fielded Capability
Dan Berkenstock, co-author of Hoover’s Mobilize the Modern Defense Industrial Base, argues that deterring China and Russia will require the United States to turn its commercial technology and capital markets into fielded military capability. He says venture-backed firms can rapidly develop low-cost systems, but Pentagon procurement must provide credible demand and transition financing if those companies are to survive the gap between prototype and production.
Housing Affordability Depends on Building More, Not Cheaper Mortgages
Richmond Fed president Tom Barkin argues that housing affordability depends less on cheaper mortgages than on making homes easier and less costly to build, through changes to land use, permitting, redevelopment and local attitudes toward construction. In a discussion with Steven Davis at Jackson Hole, Barkin also describes a labor market with low layoffs but weak hiring, and says uncertainty over long-term real interest rates leaves fiscal policy with less reason to assume borrowing will remain cheap.
Faster Payments Could Erode Banks’ Core Deposit Franchise
Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid argues that the important payments shift is not digitization but the growing speed and range of ways money can move, which could make banks’ deposit funding less predictable. Instant-payment rails, stablecoins and other emerging models may erode the float and stability that once defined the core deposit franchise, he says, while raising the stakes for resilient payment infrastructure. Schmid places that work within a Fed mandate he says is owed to the public—not financial markets—and requires both inflation control and dependable financial plumbing.
Unelected Power Is Expanding Beyond Constitutional Checks
Victor Davis Hanson argues that American self-government erodes when power escapes the constitutional restraints that make it answerable to voters. In this Hoover Institution discussion, he contends that electoral compacts, expansive administrative agencies, partisan institutional changes and supranational bodies can bypass the division of authority among states, branches of government and the electorate. His proposed standard is authorization: political change may be necessary, but it must proceed through constitutional amendment, accountable delegation and sovereign democratic control.