Today, Condoleezza Rice argues the US achieved tangible gains with its air war against Iran. Niall Ferguson says the global AI race needs a Kissinger-like figure to reach some form of détente. John Cochrane walks us through the first challenge that awaits Kevin Warsh as Fed chair. Steven Davis asks a pair of scholars why drug misuse deaths in the US have risen tenfold since 1979. And Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer examine how privacy concerns interact with the First Amendment, looking at recording the police, selling the rights to your life story, and Hulk Hogan suing Gawker.
Iran
In The Wall Street Journal, Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice argues the US-Israeli war has degraded Iran’s conventional capabilities, decimated its economy, smashed its remaining proxies and brought the Gulf States closer together. “Iran is far weaker today than it was in February,” Rice writes. “No amount of Iranian propaganda can mask this reality. America’s near-term goals should be to keep it in that weakened state, to strengthen the region’s political realignment, and to make certain that President Trump’s promise that Iran will never possess a nuclear weapon is fulfilled.” Now, the remaining goals of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and dealing with Iran’s nuclear material may take time, but Rice says “time is on the side of the US and its allies.”
Artificial Intelligence
Comparing today’s race to expand the scale and capacity of AI to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson argues for “a rapid transition to a new détente based on AI arms control,” to anticipate and perhaps mitigate negative employment and security impacts of unfettered AI development. Ferguson points out that apart from the obvious personality flaws of several of the heads of leading AI firms, plus a US president who seems largely uninterested in controlling AI’s development, there is basically no US regulatory mechanism examining AI at the moment. There is the “Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), with a budget of just $10 million, something less than the compensation of a senior AI researcher at a top lab,” he writes.
The Economy
In this week’s Grumpy Economist Weekly Rant, Senior Fellow John Cochrane examines the next major inflation challenge facing the Federal Reserve. With Kevin Warsh newly appointed as Fed chair, Cochrane argues that the central question is no longer simply whether the Fed should lower interest rates but how it should respond to competing forces: productivity gains from artificial intelligence, tariffs, oil price shocks, and renewed inflation pressure. Cochrane raises a deeper question about how the Fed should respond when prices move for very different reasons—from productivity gains that make goods cheaper to tariffs and oil shocks that push prices higher. As affordability concerns intensify, he asks whether the Fed should continue to “look through” temporary price-level shocks or reconsider how those shocks affect expectations, households, and the credibility of monetary policy.
On the latest episode of Economics, Applied, Steven J. Davis speaks with William Evans and Ethan Lieber, both of Notre Dame University, about the heartbreaking rise of deaths due to drug misuse in the United States. A major shift in prescription practices for pain management after 1995 drove higher levels of opiate use and misuse and contributed to an explosion of illicit opiates in this century. It’s a disturbing story of professional misjudgments, deceptive marketing, policy mistakes, and unintended consequences. Reforms in prescription practices, while overdue, will mitigate but not solve current-day problems of drug abuse and misuse.
Revitalizing American Institutions
Hosts Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer unpack the complicated and often uncomfortable relationship between free speech and privacy, exploring a range of issues, from anonymous political pamphlets and government surveillance to revenge porn, hidden cameras, autobiographies, celebrity likeness rights, wiretap laws, and the constitutional limits of “the right to be left alone.” Along the way, they dive into landmark Supreme Court cases, the origins of American privacy law, Hulk Hogan’s takedown of Gawker, the legality of recording police, and why seemingly simple questions like “Who owns your life story?” turn into some of the thorniest conflicts in First Amendment law.
Leading researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers convened at Hoover on May 1 to examine one of the defining questions of the modern era: how artificial intelligence will shape democracy, freedom, and public life in the decades ahead. The invitation-only event focused on how societies can govern increasingly powerful AI systems while preserving human agency and democratic accountability. Senior Fellow Andrew B. Hall characterized the challenge this way: AI technologies are evolving faster than traditional academic and policy processes can respond, creating an urgent need for new forms of research, governance experimentation, and institutional design.
K–12 Education
In a new episode of Factual Foundations of Policy, Hoover Fellow Michael T. Hartney and Melissa Arnold Lyon of University of Albany SUNY, join host and Policy Fellow Tom Church to examine the role of teachers’ unions in American education at a time of declining student achievement, post-COVID learning loss, and rapid technological change. Drawing on research about union membership, collective bargaining, and teacher strikes, the discussion explores how unions shape both education policy and working conditions. They also review evidence on unions’ effects on education spending, teacher compensation, and student outcomes.
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