Today, Hoover celebrates the 100th episode of Today’s Battlegrounds; Larry Diamond analyzes how James Madison incorporated wisdom about human nature into the US Constitution; Amit Seru and Mickey D. Levy write about the promise of new Federal Reserve task forces identifying potential reform opportunities at the central bank; and John Cochrane comments on a recent open letter calling on policymakers to “steer” AI development.
Security and Defense
The Hoover Institution's Today's Battlegrounds with H.R. McMaster has reached its 100th episode, marking a major milestone for a series devoted to thoughtful conversations about the challenges shaping global security, freedom, and prosperity. Grounded in the principle of strategic empathy—the effort to understand how allies, adversaries, and partners perceive the world and make decisions—the series has become a leading forum for discussions on the ideas, history, and leadership shaping today's strategic environment. For the milestone episode, Senior Fellow H.R. McMaster sits down with Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, to discuss how Singapore is charting its own course amid intensifying competition between the United States and China. Read more here.
USA@250
More than any other founder, James Madison shaped the US Constitution—contributing logic, persuasion, and an acute understanding of human nature, writes Senior Fellow Larry Diamond for the Founders & Fellows series. It was Madison who led the search for a solution to the twofold problem of power: How can a government control the governed, and how can a government control itself? His development of diffused authority and checks and balances emerged as a system that would rein in the dangers of ambition and “faction,” Diamond says, while his authorship of the Bill of Rights built a firm, explicit foundation for the protection of personal liberty. Madison’s skill at establishing an equilibrium for power is being put to test by today’s severe partisanship, Diamond argues, and it will fall to modern Americans to figure out how to return to the politics that most upholds what Madison called “the public good.” Read more here.
Monetary Policy
At Barron’s, Senior Fellow Amit Seru and Visiting Fellow Mickey D. Levy comment on “five task forces formed of outside experts” that Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has tasked to “examine the central bank’s communications, balance-sheet policy, data sources, productivity and jobs, and inflation.” On the communications front, the authors write, “Some forward guidance can be useful during a crisis, but when it acts as a forecast of future policy, markets start to treat conditional judgments as promises.” Levy and Seru say the Fed “should learn how to more clearly tell the public what it is trying to achieve, which tools best suit those objectives, and what evidence would cause the Fed to change course.” They also call for an additional effort to study financial stability, arguing that episodes like the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse showed that “the Fed’s mistakes in bank supervision and crisis response can be just as consequential as an error in setting the federal-funds rate.” Read more here. [Subscription required.]
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In this week’s Grumpy Economist Weekly Rant, Senior Fellow John H. Cochrane challenges an open letter that called on economists, technology leaders, and policymakers to act now to steer the development of artificial intelligence. Cochrane argues that this demand moves too quickly from uncertainty about AI’s effects to confidence in policymakers’ ability to manage them. Cochrane questions both the economic and institutional assumptions behind the letter. Technological progress has displaced particular forms of labor for centuries without producing permanent mass unemployment, while regulation requires evidence of a market failure and confidence that government intervention can improve the outcome without inviting cronyism or protection. Rather than policymakers being granted broad authority over an emerging technology, Cochrane says, the burden should remain on advocates of regulation to explain the specific failure they seek to correct and demonstrate that public institutions are capable of correcting it. Read more here.
Artificial Intelligence
The artificial intelligence systems discussed most frequently today operate primarily through language. Even models that can generate images and video “still cannot track a coherent environment over time.” In contrast, “world models” are AI systems designed to “build a working representation of an environment to predict how it changes in response to action.” Such models “can help manufacturers test designs before building them, engineers assess infrastructure under stress, and robots work in settings that are too dangerous for people.” But as this new paper from Stanford’s Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence argues, “moving AI closer to the physical world raises new policy concerns, such as flawed simulation, pervasive sensing and privacy erosion, questions of liability . . . and dual-use risks in national security.” Featuring Senior Fellow Amy Zegart, this paper outlines a first-of-its-kind governance and policy agenda for world models and spatial intelligence. Read more here.
Revitalizing History
What are the conditions required to consolidate state power into an empire—and what does the study of history reveal about the circumstances that lead to an empire’s fall?
The Big Idea: Historian and author Lord Conrad Black joins Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts to discuss the third volume of his monumental Political and Strategic History of the World. The conversation explores the rise and fall of great empires, the enduring influence of statesmen such as Napoleon, Lincoln, Washington, Bismarck, and Theodore Roosevelt, and the forces that shaped the modern international order. Watch or listen here.
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