Join the Hoover Institution for a special conversation as part of The Ideas That Made U.S.: Dialogues on Freedom, our year-long series marking America’s 250th anniversary.
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle will moderate a dynamic conversation with Hoover senior fellows John Cochrane (a.k.a. the Grumpy Economist and GoodFellow), Valerie Ramey, and Ross Levine on a defining question of the American experiment: why has the United States been such an enduring outlier in prosperity and can it remain so? For more than a century, America has been the world’s most prosperous large nation, yet confidence in the American Dream is faltering.
Drawing on their expertise in economic growth, public policy, and financial systems, the discussion will examine the sources of America’s exceptionalism, from freedom and federalism to a culture that rewards risk-taking and tolerates failure and ask whether those strengths are now being undermined. Are the institutions that once expanded opportunity still doing so, or have they become barriers to growth and mobility?
Looking ahead, the panel will consider what it will take to restore a sense of dynamism and possibility in the American economy, and whether current policies are strengthening that future or quietly putting it at risk.
