Today, Tarun Chhabra testifies before the Senate on how the US government can preserve American leadership in artificial intelligence; Matthew Kahn explains why free busing is unlikely to reduce congestion in New York City; and Andrew Hall explores how the incentives within the popular gaming platform Roblox are impacting children.
Confronting and Competing with China
Distinguished Visiting Fellow Tarun Chhabra, currently head of national security for AI firm Anthropic and formerly a senior US national security official, testified this week before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Policy. “If there is a single point I want you to take away from today’s hearing,” wrote Chhabra in his statement, “it is this: access to advanced AI chips and the tools needed to manufacture them remains the single most significant, controllable factor that could allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to close the gap with the United States in AI.” He urged lawmakers to pursue bipartisan legislation to “to maintain stringent export controls on AI chips, strengthen restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and close the loopholes that allow the CCP remote access to frontier AI capabilities.” Read more here.
State and Local Governance
In a coauthored op-ed for City Journal, Visiting Fellow Matthew E. Kahn argues that in New York City, fare-free transit would create more problems than it would solve. Kahn and coauthor Shawn Regan’s column reviews studies of free transit and congestion conducted in several cities across the country and around the globe, and find that when buses go fare free, “transit agencies report increased vandalism, loitering, and conflicts that make buses less attractive to discretionary riders, the very group most likely to shift from driving.” While noting that fare-free transit can operate successfully in “many rural, resort, and university-dominated systems,” the authors stress that New York City does not fit this bill. “If [Mayor-elect Zohran] Mamdani wants fewer New Yorkers driving, the path to that goal runs through faster, more reliable buses, not free ones,” Kahn and Regan conclude. Read more here.
Technology Policy
“If we want to understand the future of liberty in an algorithmic world, we have to understand how children, our most-online citizens of the future, encounter [gamified digital environments] today,” writes Senior Fellow Andrew B. Hall of digital environments and market mechanisms in a new post at his Substack. Hall focuses on Roblox, “one of the first ‘algorithmic nations’ [kids] inhabit,” with “an astonishing 50 million daily active” users under the age of 13. The post examines the design mechanisms Roblox games employ to encourage frequent engagement by children, with Hall noting that gameplay “sometimes bleed[s] into gambling.” He provides recommendations to Roblox and to policymakers regarding how the platform should be modified to discourage addictive feedback loops and increase parental controls. Hall concludes that incentives within platforms like Roblox will play an important role in the future of “liberty in an algorithmic age” and that they merit further study. Read more here.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
At Defining Ideas, Research Fellow David R. Henderson writes that Thanksgiving is a most appropriate time to be grateful for economic freedom, the near-miraculous driver of prosperity that many people take for granted. Thanksgivings of the past would have been meager compared to the bounty modern people enjoy in the West—and even today’s low-income consumers have a seat at the table. He also shows how an overreliance on the Consumer Price Index tends to underestimate the income benefits that Americans have collected in recent decades. But, he adds, overregulation by a large government, steep tariffs, and restriction of legal immigration pose a three-pointed threat to Americans’ economic freedom. Read more here.
For a new episode of Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, Policy Fellow Jon Hartley speaks with Don Brash, one of New Zealand’s most influential economic policymakers of the past half century, known for his central role in transforming the country’s monetary and financial institutions. Hartley and Brash discuss the latter’s career as a central banker at the helm of New Zealand’s central bank, helping to start inflation targeting in New Zealand, promoting New Zealand’s 1980s market reforms, and floating the New Zealand dollar; Brash’s time as a politician and leader of the National Party; unaffordability in New Zealand housing and Auckland’s successful zoning reform; and whether there is a need for market reforms today internationally. Watch or listen here.
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