Today, Chester E. Finn Jr. explains the significance of a new study on international education systems and their relationship to knowledge capital and the balance of power; Elizabeth Economy speaks with Michael McFaul about his time as the American ambassador to Russia and the current status of Russia-China relations; and Scott Atlas interviews Michael McConnell on constitutional issues surrounding executive power, free speech, and immigration.
Reforming K–12 Education
Writing at the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper column, Senior Fellow Chester E. Finn Jr. responds to the findings of a recent working paper by American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, “Knowledge, Skills, and the Global Balance of Power: What International Standardized Achievement Tests Tell Us about National Economic Potential and Prospects.” Finn deems the paper “a tour-de-force of analysis of education-related factors that are associated with the prosperity of many countries—and the other factors that play a role, particularly in explaining and augmenting the education factors.” He further notes that the study is “not looking at the inner workings of a country’s education system but rather at how much education a country’s people get, gauged both by years of it and test scores.” Finn suggests that Eberstadt’s findings are both fascinating and worrying, given the relationship between national knowledge capital and the future geopolitical balance of power. Read more here.
Confronting and Competing with China
For the latest episode of China Considered, Senior Fellows Elizabeth Economy and Michael McFaul sit down to discuss the complex relationships among the United States, China, and Russia. Economy and McFaul speak about the history of US engagement with Russia, McFaul’s experience as the US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, and the increasing cooperation between China and Russia. McFaul begins by discussing early engagement with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during the early Obama years, namely the signing of comprehensive multilateral sanctions on Iran, along with his role in crafting the Obama administration’s Russia policy. The two scholars then shift to a conversation about how Russia and China, under Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, are attempting to reshape the international order, how the war in Ukraine has already changed this relationship, and whether a “reverse Kissinger” is possible from the perspective of the United States. Watch or listen here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
On his podcast The Independent, Senior Fellow Scott W. Atlas speaks with Professor Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, McConnell served as circuit judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. Today he teaches courses on constitutional law, the First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in constitutional law, especially on matters of church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. Atlas and McConnell discuss some of today’s most controversial issues involving the Constitution and law in the context of presidential power and the separation of powers including immigration, censorship, and free speech in campus protests. This is the second part of a two-part conversation between Atlas and McConnell exploring the nature of executive power and its constitutional limits in the current political environment. Watch here.
Determining America’s Role in the World
At The Caravan, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Admiral James O. Ellis Jr. analyzes the current geopolitical significance of major “chokepoints” in critical maritime corridors. As Ellis writes, “These narrow straits, canals, and passages are often within reach of land-based area denial systems, making them attractive targets for adversaries seeking to disrupt global supply chains or exert geopolitical influence.” Such strategic locations include the Strait of Hormuz, “through which transits over 20 million barrels of oil per day”; the Strait of Malacca, “which sees approximately 100,000 vessels transit annually, carrying about 30% of global trade by volume”’ and the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal, “critical artificial waterways connecting major oceans [that] are the subject of recent geopolitical debate.” Ellis concludes that “the future of naval warfare will likely be defined not only by the ships that sail the seas but also by the missiles, sensors, and systems deployed on the shores that overlook them.” Read more here.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In a new paper, National Fellow Alexander K. Zentefis and coauthors examine the evolution of US narratives about inflation since 1923. They define an inflation narrative as “an explanation of the causes and/or effects of inflation.” The researchers employed natural language processing to parse 4.2 million sentences of text data, finding “significant shifts in narrative prevalence across economic eras” and geographic regions of the country. The paper presents evidence that newspapers differentiate their coverage of inflation from local competitors while sometimes echoing inflation narratives from more distant sources, providing a glimpse into complex narrative propagation dynamics across the media landscape. The authors also show that lower-income households demonstrated “greater sensitivity to narratives about the social/political consequences and cost-of-living effects of inflation.” The paper underscores the significance of not only inflation itself but also the ways in which narratives about inflation “may contribute to persistent gaps in inflation expectations across households.” Read more here.
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