Note: These are remarks I gave in a concluding panel at the Conference on Inequality in Memory of Gary Becker, Hoover Institution, September 26 2014. The conference program here, and John Taylor's summary here, where you can see the great papers I allude to. I'll probably rework this to a more general essay, so I reserve the right to recycle some points later.
Hold a conference on election-year politics and you won’t find three smarter minds than this trio of Hoover Institution political scientists: David Brady, Morris Fiorina and Doug Rivers.
Last Thursday and Friday the Hoover Institution at Stanford hosted a wonderful Conference on Inequality in Memory of Gary Becker. John Raisian and I opened the conference commenting on the appropriateness of both the venue and the topic: Gary spent a great deal of time doing research at Hoover over the years, and he began diagnosing and recommending policy solutions to inequality problems decades ago, long before the current explosion of popular interest.
Today's my last day as a full-time employee of the University of Warwick. I started in the autumn of 1974, so forty years ago. You might well think: It’s about time, too. That’s enough! I agree, so my departure is completely voluntary.
In February, Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller wrote a story in the WP about how Al-Qaeda’s then-recent expulsion of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now Islamic State, or IS) raised questions about whether the AUMF “still applies” to ISIS.
The Food and Drug Administration just granted permission for “expanded access” to an experimental medicine for Ebola. It’s OK as far as it goes, but it’s an exception to the FDA’s reluctance to approve the use of life-saving products.
This discussion is related to the time inconsistency of optimal policy, which occurs when the government cannot implement an optimal tax policy because the stated policy is inconsistent with the government's incentives over time. Consider a proposal made by the government of Colombia in 2002.
Who speaks for the Republican Party if the GOP has a good showing on Election Day?
Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, posed this question Monday at a media roundtable discussion attended by about 20 journalists.
BEIJING — China’s Communist Party has ample experience extinguishing unrest. For years it has used a deft mix of censorship, arrests, armed force and, increasingly, money to repress or soften calls for political change.
NEW YORK—When he first ran for president, Barack Obama's themes were "hope" and "change." Hillary Clinton, appearing at a conference last week, trumpeted what she called "evidence-based optimism."
