From the Director

Joining the Policy Dialogue with Defining Ideas
By John Raisian

Economic Policy

A Wake-up Call for Washington
By John B. Taylor
Under President Barack Obama’s budget plan, the federal debt is exploding. To be precise, it is rising—and will continue to rise—much faster than gross domestic product, a measure of America’s ability to service the debt.

New Keynesian versus Old Keynesian
By John F. Cogan, Tobias Cwik, John B. Taylor and Volker Wieland
Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. We find that the models currently being used to evaluate fiscal policy stimulus proposals are weak.

Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow
By Michael J. Boskin
The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter’s higher taxes and Bill Clinton’s draconian defense drawdown.

Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity

The Crisis of 2008: Lessons for and from Economics
By Daron Acemoglu
Although it is too soon to tell how the second half of 2008 will be featured in history books, it certainly signifies a critical opportunity for the discipline of economics.

Prudential Bank Regulation: What’s Broke and How to Fix It
By Charles Calomiris
For better or worse, financial crises produce regulatory reactions. The reforms in reaction to the current crisis have not yet been settled, but prospects for reform are mixed.

Corporate Governance: Promises Made, Promises Broken
By Jonathan Macey
It is more accurate to characterize corporate governance as being about promises than as being about contracts.

The Employee Free Choice Act Is Unconstitutional
By Richard A. Epstein
With the Employee Free Choice Act, unions and their backers seek to reverse seventy unbroken years of the National Labor Relations Act.

No One Washes a Rental Car
By Terry Anderson and Laura E. Huggins
If natural resources are unowned, users have little incentive to protect them; if they are owned, long-term stewardship will follow.

K-12 Education

Learning from No Child Left Behind
By John E. Chubb
A careful examination reveals sufficient justification for continuing to improve public education through the No Child Left Behind Act.

Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut
By Chester E. Finn Jr.
Preschool looms large in the thinking of prominent education analysts and others who are alarmed by America’s long-standing achievement gaps and doubtful that K–12 schooling alone can accomplish much in light of the other powerful forces in the lives of children and families.

Liberating Learning
By Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb
The information revolution has globalized the international economy, made communication and social networking virtually instantaneous and costless, and started the first stirrings of a revolution in how children can learn and be educated.

Performance-Based Funding
By Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth
Public school spending per pupil has almost quadrupled since 1960. Achievement, however, has remained largely flat, raising important questions about whether America’s children are getting their money’s worth.

The Misplaced Math Student
By Tom Loveless
One hundred and twenty thousand eighth graders are misplaced in algebra classes.

Energy Policy

The Past Must Not Be Prologue
By George P. Shultz
Energy is a large and critical component of the economy. Getting energy policy wrong and adopting unnecessarily costly, economically inefficient policies will negatively affect our standard of living.

Do National Security and Environmental Energy Policies Conflict?
By Gary S. Becker
Prospects for consensus on energy policies are dim for the many approaches that put the environment ahead of national security.

Ending the Oil Era: An Interview with R. James Woolsey Jr.

Reliance on oil is a major environmental concern and national security issue among industrialized nations, particularly the United States, which uses and imports more oil than any other country. Former CIA director and Hoover Institution senior fellow R. James Woolsey Jr. talks about his take on ending the oil era.

National Security and Law

The Real Guantanamo
By Benjamin Wittes
As the move to close the detainee center at Guantanamo continues, let us look at why Guantanamo is actually an ideal detention site.

The New Mask of Terrorism
By Philip Bobbitt
Some one-third of all international terrorist attacks between 1968 and September 10, 2001, involved American targets.

Who Gets a State and Why
By Stephen D. Krasner
In the nineteenth century, political entities whose security was controlled by outside actors would have been called protectorates; in the twenty-first century, they can be accepted as fully recognized sovereign states.

Does Europe Believe in International Law?
By Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner
American politicians frequently express their skepticism about international law, while European politicians loudly proclaim its central role in their value systems, even when they are defying it.

What Do You Do with a Captured Pirate?
By Ruth Wedgwood
Why has the West’s response to twenty-first-century piracy on the high seas been so anemic? In part it is logistic; in part, it is a purposeful deformation of the law.

Virtues of a Free Society

Virtues and the Making of Modern Liberalism
By Peter Berkowitz
For students of politics, the study of virtue is not a choice but a necessity imposed by the character of their subject matter.

On Religion and Rational Control
By Harvey C. Mansfield
Rational control has replaced individual virtue, which is subject to vagaries and may not be active or awake.

Pragmatism, Obama Style
By Peter Berkowitz
At its most extreme, philosophical pragmatism denies the very existence of objective truth, arguing that opinions we declare true are merely those that have proved useful to one interest or another.