Today, Russ Roberts speaks with author Hussein Aboubakr Mansour about the roles that both domestic and international actors play in the political economy of Palestine; Lee Ohanian reviews the current state of homelessness policy in Los Angeles, critiquing various failed approaches; and Peter Berkowitz pushes back against the “postliberal” arguments of Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen to defend the philosophical foundations of the American republic.
Middle East History
Many discussions of Israel or Palestine take the form of a morality play, pitting good guys against bad guys. On the latest episode of EconTalk, Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour offers a different approach. Mansour, director of the Endowment for Middle East Truth’s Program for Emerging Democratic Voices from the Middle East, analyzes the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning. In conversation with Visiting Fellow Russ Roberts, Mansour speaks about his childhood in an Egypt organized around the liberation of Palestine and explores why any exit from the system must run not through policy but rather through the human need for meaning itself. Watch or listen here.
California Policy & Politics
Los Angeles’s claims of making progress against homelessness ring hollow, Senior Fellow Lee Ohanian argues in his latest column for California on Your Mind. The count of homeless individuals in the city (and the county) continues to rise; Skid Row consumes increasing amounts of fire, police, and housing resources; and the city remains mired in ideological views that keep the problem from being tackled, he writes. Ohanian marshals evidence that both “housing first” and “harm reduction” policies have been oversold. “One peer-reviewed academic study found that clean needle exchange is associated with lower HIV infection but more overdoses and overdose deaths,” the economist writes. The “housing first” approach fails, in Ohanian’s view, due to costs on the order of $1 million per publicly financed unit plus the lack of a “requirement for sobriety or treatment for substance abuse or mental health disorders.” As proposed policy fixes founder, open drug trafficking and sales, violence, and lawlessness reign in the downtown area, Ohanian concludes, while billions of dollars vanish into bureaucracy. Read more here.
Political Philosophy
In his weekly column at RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz critiques the “postliberal” philosophy of Notre Dame professor and public intellectual Patrick Deneen. Deneen, “a significant influence on Vice President JD Vance,” has authored several books arguing that “liberalism in America is the enemy of all that is beneficial, good, and just and therefore citizens should repudiate it.” By “liberalism,” Deneen does not just mean modern left-of-center politics but also the political philosophy undergirding the American founding, with core features like individual rights, limited government, the rule of law, and an independent judiciary. Contra Deneen, Berkowitz argues that “America’s founding heritage was neither purely preliberal nor purely liberal” but rather drew on “distinct yet overlapping traditions: biblical, classical Greek and Roman, and classically liberal.” While agreeing with Deneen on a variety of societal ailments in America today, like “scorn for the rule of law; massive accumulation of national debt . . . and hostility to national borders,” Berkowitz rejects the claim that philosophical liberalism is the causal driver of these problems and calls for greater appreciation of the nation’s varied philosophical foundations and traditions. Read more here.
Artificial Intelligence
In a post at his Free Systems Substack chronicling several recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence, Senior Fellow Andrew B. Hall notes that recently developed AI models have solved more than 10 previously unsolved problems in formal mathematics. Hall points out that these are “verifiable” solutions. “AI seems poised to autonomously solve a very wide array of problems like these,” Hall says, since “it can work on them and verify for itself if it has gotten the answer right or not.” But in Hall’s field of political economy, he sees more obstacles on the road to autonomous research breakthroughs. Hall also voices some concerns he has about the “explosion” of published open letters in the AI world in recent weeks, writing that they “risk devolving into signaling exercises” that may not facilitate evidence-based policy discussion or truth-seeking. Read more here.
Determining America’s Role in the World
The postwar international order rested on American economic strength, military power, and a network of institutions and alliances designed for the Cold War, Research Fellow Kiron K. Skinner argues in this video from Hoover’s 2025 Summer Policy Boot Camp. As new threats have emerged and global power has shifted, the assumptions guiding US foreign policy has become increasingly contested, while interventions abroad and political divisions at home have weakened public confidence in the prevailing approach.
The Big Idea: By 2016, Donald Trump’s campaign was advancing a different framework to alliances, sovereignty, and America’s role in the world, Skinner argues. Watch here.
Related Commentary