This Friday, Zachary Shore explains the surprising origins of wise decisions across history, and how AI might be able to help leaders evaluate the wisdom of different choices when the stakes are high; Rowena He recalls her experiences teaching Hong Kong students about a Mao-era Chinese dissident; and Terry Anderson speaks with Bill Whalen about the intersection of market-based economics and environmental conservation efforts.
Revitalizing History
National Security Visiting Fellow Zachary Shore has launched a new Substack, Wiser Way. In his first column, Shore argues that amid the advance of autocracy, global conflict, and ongoing climate change, “it’s wise leadership we need now more than ever.” But, he notes, such leadership appears to be in short supply. Considering the role AI could play in increasing wisdom in governance, Shore says that with the right guidance, it’s possible the technology could excel at ranking decisions “within a wisdom index.” Shore emphasizes that wisdom is not “a binary function, where we are either foolish or wise.” Instead, he finds, “we all make wise and foolish decisions throughout our lifetimes.” If we view wisdom “as a continuum,” we can aim “to make ever wiser judgments, knowing that we won’t achieve perfection.” Shore identifies three key ingredients of wise decisions across history and provides examples of nations, including Northern Ireland and Botswana, choosing “to reverse course” once they “realized they had taken a terribly wrong turn.”
Unpack why Shore maintains that our foolish decisions can help us learn to be wise.
Freedom Frequency
In a new piece for Freedom Frequency, Research Fellow Rowena He looks back on her time as a university professor in Hong Kong, where she taught Chinese history through the life of Lin Zhao, a onetime student journalist whose principled call for reform in Mao’s China led to her imprisonment and execution in 1968. He’s students would be among those at the barricades and marches during the Hong Kong protests of 2019–20. “When the students told me they were ready to die for democracy, I begged them to think of those young faces: Lin Zhao, as well as the Tiananmen students of 1989,” she writes. “We must live on for tomorrow.,” she told them. Banned from returning to China, He commemorates the life of Lin Zhao, whose collected writings in the Hoover Archives evince a steady faith that future generations will read and respond to her call for freedom. “It is not an ending after all, but another beginning,” He writes.
How Rowena He finds inspiration in the life of Lin Zhao to resist tyranny.
Environmental Policy & Economics
America, a land rich in growth and prosperity but also blessed with an abundance of natural beauty, faces a quandary: how to keep its economy flourishing while at the same time safeguarding its environment. This is the topic of the Hoover Institution’s upcoming Markets vs. Mandates Conference. Senior Fellow Terry Anderson, one of the founders of “free-market environmentalism,” joins Distinguished Policy Fellow Bill Whalen on Matters of Policy & Politics to discuss what’s on the agenda at the Hoover symposium (tariffs, AI, federal-to-state regulatory shifts) and why trade-offs are the key to America’s future. Anderson points to different regions of the US where markets and mandates butt heads, including his native Montana and nearby Wyoming. Whalen and Anderson also consider Virginia’s embrace of energy-guzzling data centers, as well as a potential lithium bonanza in the Carolinas and parts of New England.
Learn why Anderson thinks market-based solutions offer a compelling approach to conservation.
Financial System Stability
“Private credit has become a major source of financial anxiety,” notes Senior Fellow Amit Seru at Project Syndicate. But Seru thinks many observers of this corner of American finance are “focusing on the wrong issue.” In his view, the real concern “is not whether private credit is risky, but where that risk now lies, and whether it is visible.” Citing his recent research on private credit funds, Seru argues that “the central vulnerability in private credit is opacity, not traditional leverage.” The valuation of private credit funds, he says, tends to rely more on modeling and “periodic transactions” than on continuous pricing. Seru emphasizes the need for regulators, including incoming (if confirmed) Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh, to maintain visibility into private credit funds and to accurately trace risks throughout the financial system.
See why Seru says private credit funds deserve regulators’ attention. [Subscription required.]
Science and Technology
The Hoover Institution’s Bio-Strategies and Leadership (BSL) initiative convened more than 350 leaders from academia, government, nonprofits, and industry at Stanford University on April 14 for the inaugural Bio-Leadership Summit (BLISS). The one-day summit aimed to elevate biotechnology culturally and politically to the level of energy or AI and to pressure-test what leadership should look like in an increasingly biotic future. Biotechnology was integrated throughout the summit, including environmental biosensing technology from SafeTraces, whose real-time pathogen sampler ran throughout the event and ultimately returned an all-clear reading. Bioengineered food products such as purple tomatoes enriched with naturally occurring antioxidants were also featured. The summit program included panels, briefings, and remarks on biotechnology’s applications across health, security, and the economy.
Learn how Hoover is convening academic experts and industry practitioners in the field of biotechnology.
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