Today, the Stanford Report speaks with Amy Zegart about her career as a scholar of America’s spy agencies and national security; Paola Sapienza argues that America has benefited greatly from immigration and should not pursue policies that will undermine this advantage; and John Cochrane offers a glimpse into the real-world impact of current tariff policies on consumer prices.
National Security
A new story in the Stanford Report profiles Senior Fellow Amy Zegart, a distinguished scholar of national security, innovation, and America’s intelligence community. At Hoover, Zegart chairs the Technology Policy Accelerator and serves as cochair of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review. The profile highlights Zegart’s approach to teaching and leading Hoover’s Robert and Marion Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program. “I want students to understand that a life of public service—however they choose to define it—does not mean you have to be in government to contribute to your country,” Zegart says in the article. Referring to her Stanford students, she explains, “My goal is not to teach them what I think. It’s to teach them to challenge what they think.” Read more here.
Freedom Frequency
In a new essay at Freedom Frequency, Senior Fellow Paola Sapienza argues that the United States has benefited enormously from the talented and ambitious immigrants who have formed world-leading companies and hired hundreds of thousands of Americans. Immigration policy, drawing from that deep well, is a force multiplier for American prosperity. Now, Sapienza says, that advantage is potentially undermined by a proposed $100,000 fee for the H-1B visas that bring many foreign workers to the United States. Sapienza concludes that in the name of leveling the playing field, the nation risks pricing out the very qualities that drive innovation and economic growth. Read more here.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In a post to his Grumpy Economist Substack, Senior Fellow John H. Cochrane shares a bit of listener correspondence regarding the latest episode of GoodFellows, which featured a discussion on the economic impact of Trump administration tariffs. The CEO of a “fairly large retailer” wrote to Cochrane that their firm is “still selling goods that didn’t have the latest tariff burden.” But, like their competition, this firm is “raising prices slowly and carefully as the tariffed inventory gets sold,” in an effort “to hold prices through the key holiday.” The CEO suggests that “there is a major shock to retail and the economy coming” as consumers are hit with “raised prices everywhere.” Cochrane notes that this real-world example illustrates “one of the central puzzles of macroeconomics, how ‘sticky’ prices are, how quickly or slowly rising costs show up in prices, and why.” Read more here.
In an opinion column at the Financial Times, Senior Fellow Amit Seru argues that in the American banking sector, policymakers’ “regulatory reflex since 2008 has been to add complexity and discretion rather than fix the core design” of the banking system. “When the state cushions deposit flight, the marginal loan looks free,” Seru writes, adding that “no one should be surprised when these loans prove imprudent.” He suggests that these factors help to explain recent disclosures from regional banks in Arizona and Utah regarding “multimillion-dollar losses tied to alleged borrower fraud.” “Banking isn’t exempt from physics,” Seru concludes, so the “US can keep pretending complex regulation will make thinly capitalized banks safe, or it can fix the design — by requiring much higher common equity and resolving the weak.” Read more here. [Subscription required.]
Revitalizing American Institutions
In an opinion column published at the San Francisco Examiner, Visiting Fellow Markos Kounalakis and Research Fellow Dinsha Mistree argue that domestic and international political motivations best explain why the Trump administration has elected to impose a $100,000 fee on new H1-B visa applicants. “The new fee erects a tariff on human talent—and one aimed most squarely at India,” they write. Given that a majority of H1-B holders work in California’s high-technology industries, Kounalakis and Mistree write, the move also “hobbles” California Governor Gavin Newsom. The authors maintain that ultimately, the costs of this measure will “land squarely on Americans” and conclude, “By punishing India, Trump is fining America” and undermining the nation’s economic competitiveness. Read more here.
Writing at RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz responds to the arguments made in “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” an essay published this fall in Academe by Johns Hopkins comparative thought and literature professor Lisa Siraganian. Berkowitz critiques each of the seven theses Siraganian advances against efforts to promote “viewpoint diversity” in higher education. While Berkowitz himself joined other distinguished conservatives in objecting “on free-speech and limited-government grounds to the intrusive oversight that the Trump administration sought over the mix of opinions and perspectives at Harvard,” he notes that Siraganian offers a fundamentally different argument, “that viewpoint diversity is undesirable in higher education because it conflicts with the university’s mission.” After challenging this argument, Berkowitz concludes that those on both sides of the higher ed viewpoint-diversity debate would be wise to “consider views on the other side of the question,” to refine their own positions. Read more here.
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