This Friday, Norbert Holtkamp explains why international research collaboration is vital to continued US scientific and geopolitical competitiveness; a new video from Hoover’s Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy succinctly explains what we know about Medicaid and its costs; and Lee Ohanian and coauthor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde show how striking five simple words from a 1974 law could transform housing affordability and availability in the United States.
Technology Policy Accelerator
In a new interview at Defining Ideas, Hoover Institution Science Fellow Norbert Holtkamp shares insights from a National Academy of Sciences working group he participated in, looking at the benefits and risks of international research collaborations in science. Holtkamp, former deputy director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, notes that the facility’s laser—the most powerful in the world—was designed and funded by the US Department of Energy, “but its development also relied significantly on expertise from overseas.” Additionally, Holtkamp says that “by engaging with researchers from other countries, we expose them to US culture, and they get to see what a great place this is to live and work.” The firsthand exchange of knowledge this allows “is vital to innovation.” Holtkamp acknowledges the security risks of international research collaboration but maintains that the government, as opposed to universities, should be the entity to vet potential visiting foreign researchers. He adds, “Obviously, highly sensitive areas such as research into hypersonic technologies used for missiles should be very tightly scrutinized.” Read more here.
Tennenbaum Program for Fact Based Policy
The first installment of a new short video series from Hoover’s Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy, “Here’s What We Know,” illuminates essential facts about Medicaid, a cornerstone of American healthcare. This program provides coverage to roughly one in four Americans, including low-income adults, children, pregnant women, seniors, and those with disabilities. With a price tag of $900 billion annually, it accounts for 18 cents of every US healthcare dollar spent. Its massive scale and rising costs fuel debates about the program’s sustainability, as continued growth in Medicaid spending strains the federal budget and places constraints on other national priorities. Watch here.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In a new piece for the Civitas Outlook, Senior Fellow Lee Ohanian and coauthor Jesús Fernández-Villaverde examine why, despite the clear and overwhelming cost advantages of manufactured home construction over traditional building methods, “manufactured homes account for only about 10 percent of new housing in the US today.” They find that the situation is “primarily due to a single outdated regulation,” requiring that “manufactured homes be built on a chassis (a fixed steel frame with wheels), which raises costs, blocks access to conventional mortgage financing since the house can be moved, and, perhaps most importantly, reinforces the ‘mobile home’ image that fuels zoning resistance.” Ohanian and Fernández-Villaverde suggest that “deleting just five words (‘built on a permanent chassis’)” from the 1974 Mobile Home Construction and Safety Standards Act “would unlock vast homeowner potential for households that now struggle to afford a home.” In high-cost states like California, where “a 1,500-square-foot home can cost more than $1 million to build using traditional methods,” eliminating the chassis requirement presents “a historic opportunity to improve millions of lives.” Read more here.
International Affairs
Writing at his Blade of Perseus site, Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson argues that chronic policy challenges across immigration, refugee integration, energy generation, economic regulation, and defense have brought Europe to a critical juncture. In Hanson’s view, the “United States is finally taking the opposite approach of cracking down on illegal immigration, deregulating the economy, and unleashing high technology to fast-track new frontiers of artificial intelligence, robotics, cryptocurrency, and genetic engineering.” In response, Hanson suggests that many of “Europe’s best and brightest—and frustrated—are migrating to greater opportunities and freedom in the US, further hampering European research and development.” As European states look to dramatically increase defense spending in the face of threats from Russia and demands for greater burden-sharing from the US, Hanson concludes, “We will soon see whether Europeans can adopt such needed reforms or find the necessary medicine worse than their current crippling continental disease.” Read more here.
Revitalizing History
In this excerpt from Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, published at Defining Ideas, historians Jonathan Horn and Ian W. Toll close the curtains on the Pacific theater of World War II, which ended eighty years ago with two blinding explosions and the surrender of Imperial Japan. This excerpt deals with the wartime context for the decision to employ the atomic weapons as an alternative to a planned—and universally anticipated—US ground invasion of Japan. Robinson, Horn, and Toll consider competing views of the morality of the atomic bombings in 1945 and in the decades since their use. Emphasizing the need to consider the facts as the decision makers at the time would have understood them, Horn says, “Americans become too comfortable with looking back and saying they would have done things differently.” You can watch the full interview on Uncommon Knowledge here. Read more here.
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