This Friday, Condoleezza Rice sits down for a wide-ranging Q&A in Arkansas on her upbringing in Alabama and her distinguished career in government; Steven Koonin sorts data center myths from realities; and an excerpt from the Hoover Institution Press’s recently released The Troika sheds light on spycraft and state power in East Germany.
Revitalizing American Institutions
On September 30, Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice spoke at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, as part of its Building Bridges speaker series, intended to mark the 250thanniversary of American independence with conversations on civic-minded compromise, courage, and care. Rice discussed growing up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama; lessons she absorbed from her father, a Presbyterian minister; her career in diplomacy and US foreign policy; reflections on 9/11 and the war on terror; the threat from China to the international system today; and how to sustain democracy in an age of AI and partisanship. Watch or listen here.
Energy and the Environment
A divided America seems to agree on one thing: Most folks don’t want new data centers in their communities. But do data centers live up to their sour reputation as water and electricity gluttons? Or are they, in fact, a 21st-century version of the automobile—an innovation deemed dangerous at first but eventually a means to community advancement and prosperity?
Get the Story: In a new episode of Matters of Policy & Politics, Senior Fellow Steven E. Koonin discusses what’s behind data-center opposition and whether America will rise to the challenge of a greater demand for electricity in the near future as artificial intelligence and the needs of an increasingly information-intensive society and economy continue to reshape the nation’s landscape. Watch or listen here.
Revitalizing History
A book called The Troika emerged during the twilight of the Soviet empire as its author, a retired East German spymaster, attempted to understand the decline of Communism and what it meant for Germany. Markus Wolf’s manuscript about the experience of German Communists under the Soviet regime was meant to humanize the system and its participants, while its frankness about government terror drew heavy attention in 1989. However, its author was met with a mixed reception after Communism’s collapse for his ambiguous attitude toward Germany fully renouncing socialism. The self-assured manner of the former Stasi chief and his loyalty to socialism drew controversy right up until his death in 2006. Now, the Hoover Institution Press has released The Troika in English for the first time. Read an excerpt in Defining Ideas.
Economic Policy
In this episode of Economics, Applied, filmed at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development chief economist Stefano Scarpetta joins Senior Fellow Steven J. Davis to discuss how distributed ledger technology, stablecoins, and tokenization could make transactions more efficient and less expensive while expanding access to financial markets.
The Big Idea: Scarpetta explains that for these innovative financial technologies to perform successfully at scale, users need to have confidence in them and acquire financial and digital literacy to understand how they work. Watch or listen here.
Freedom Frequency
Currency unions were once seen as a way to support trade and to coordinate economic policy across nations. But today, flexible exchange rates have moved to the fore in emerging-market economies. As Argentine economist Emilio Ocampo writes in this essay for Freedom Frequency, Latin American nations that chose monetary integration appear not to have achieved much greater growth, stability, or competitiveness than their neighbors—and they remain subject to strong spillovers from US policy. The dollar is already the monetary anchor for trade, debt, financing, and commodity prices in Latin America, and the United States has many reasons to support this dominance. Ocampo’s essay proposes an Americas Monetary Accord that would offer price stability with a dollar anchor. It would respect sovereign decisions in Latin America and accommodate other currencies if they were fully convertible at fixed rates, and it would lay a multilateral foundation with no need for a supranational bank or single currency. Read more here.
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