Today, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives announces the second season of its signature video series Reflections; Lee Ohanian asks whether Los Angeles County could find a better use for a billion dollars than an eight-mile bike path; and John Cochrane discusses why the freedom-oriented economic and moral philosophy established by Adam Smith has much more to offer today’s world than a zero-sum vision of prosperity.
Library & Archives
Reflections, the signature video series from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, returns this month for a second season, featuring more historical objects from Hoover’s collections and drawing on the expertise of Hoover fellows. Each episode pairs a collection within the Library & Archives with a leading Hoover scholar who discusses a significant moment in US or world history informed in part by the items presented. Episodes will be released throughout 2026, beginning with a new video from renowned military historian and Hoover Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson. This episode deals with the Gallipoli Campaign in World War I, using the sketchbook of British Lieutenant Colonel M. J. W. Pike, commanding officer of a battalion in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, who fought in Turkey in 1915 and 1916. Read more here.
California Policy and Politics
Los Angeles is trying to build an eight-mile bike path along the Los Angeles River at a cost of perhaps $1.2 billion. Voters approved a sales tax hike in 2016 to pay for transportation improvements like this, Senior Fellow Lee Ohanian writes at California on Your Mind, but does this particular expense make any sense in the car capital of the United States? Bike commuters in Los Angeles are few, Ohanian notes—fewer even than in colder places like Minneapolis or Missoula—and biking in LA traffic is notoriously dangerous. As for progress in building this path: Not a single foot has been built. Ohanian explains how red tape—in particular, the hydra known as environmental review—has tied up the project for years. It won’t even be built by the time the Olympics return in 2028, Ohanian points out. It’s easy to suggest better ways to spend those billion dollars, he argues, starting with repairs to LA’s worn-down roads. In the end, Ohanian says, voters must decide whether a billion-dollar bike path is tax money well spent. Read more here.
Economic History
In this week’s Grumpy Economist Weekly Rant, John Cochrane marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations by arguing that Smith’s central insight remains misunderstood. The famous butcher-brewer-baker passage and the “invisible hand,” he says, aren’t just descriptions of how markets function. They express a moral vision: People pursuing their own advantage in competitive, voluntary exchange can end up enriching others, often without intending to. Cochrane connects that vision to modern debates about wealth, billionaires, and the lingering “zero-sum” suspicion that someone’s success must come from someone else’s loss. The real story of the last two and a half centuries, Cochrane argues, is that economic freedom—grounded in property rights, the rule of law, and open competition—made broad prosperity possible, not subsidies, protectionism, or heavy regulation. Read more here.
The Middle East
At The Caravan Notebook, a publication of Hoover’s Middle East and the Islamic World Working Group, contributors Danny Ayalon and Moran Alaluf consider the implications of a generational turnover in leadership underway across the Middle East. Ayalon and Alaluf analyze the leadership styles and priorities of figures including Syrian President Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This in-depth essay argues that any lasting and favorable change in the region will depend on the United States. The authors also caution that “the assumption that a singular leadership change will automatically produce regional change is a misconception.” Read more here.
Politics, Institutions, and Public Opinion
“Congressional bipartisanship is spooked by scarecrows that appear as primary season begins,” Senior Fellow Paul Peterson writes at his Substack. “Frightened by primaries, members of the Senate and the House dare not work across the partisan aisle out of fear they will be called cowards or traitors.” Peterson cites the sudden change of heart by Texas Senator John Cornyn on the sixty-vote cloture rule as a case in point. Cornyn “now says it is more important to pass the SAVE bill than to sustain a long-standing Senate tradition essential for bipartisan policy making,” Peterson notes. He goes on to explain why primary elections tend to amplify the influence of ideological extremes within political parties and what the Cornyn saga might mean for the future of President Trump’s domestic policy agenda. Read more here.
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