- Budget & Spending
- Economic
- Health Care
- Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
Jon Hartley and Jay Bhattacharya discuss Jay Bhattacharya’s vision for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), running the NIH as an innovation accelerator, replication in the sciences, measuring scientist productivity, and the new NIH policy reducing animal testing.
Recorded on August 27, 2025.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., took the helm as 18th director of the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s medical research agency, on April 1, 2025. President Trump nominated Dr. Bhattacharya for the position on Nov. 26, 2024, and the U.S. Senate confirmed him on March 25, 2025.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a renowned doctor, researcher, health economist, previously held a tenured professorship in the medical school at Stanford University in California. His research focused on population aging and chronic disease, particularly on the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. He has published over 170 research papers in peer-reviewed journals in medicine, epidemiology, health policy, economics, statistics, science policy, and public health, as well as a leading textbook on health economics.
During the pandemic, Dr. Bhattacharya coauthored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for opening schools and lifting lockdowns while better protecting older populations who were most vulnerable to the disease.
Dr. Bhattacharya held numerous additional appointments at Stanford University, including courtesy appointments at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and the Economics department. Previously, he conducted research at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the SPHERE Institute, a policy research firm. Before joining Stanford, he was an economist at the RAND Corporation and worked as a visiting economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Bhattacharya is a longtime NIH grantee and has served as a standing member of multiple NIH review committees. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Stanford University. He then completed medical school and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.
Jon Hartley is currently a Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an economics PhD Candidate at Stanford University, a Research Fellow at the UT-Austin Civitas Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Jon also is the host of the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution, a member of the Canadian Group of Economists, and the chair of the Economic Club of Miami.
Jon has previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as a Fixed Income Portfolio Construction and Risk Management Associate and as a Quantitative Investment Strategies Client Portfolio Management Senior Analyst and in various policy/governmental roles at the World Bank, IMF, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Bank of Canada.
Jon has also been a regular economics contributor for National Review Online, Forbes and The Huffington Post and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Globe and Mail, National Post, and Toronto Star among other outlets. Jon has also appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, Fox News, Bloomberg, and NBC and was named to the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 Law & Policy list, the 2017 Wharton 40 Under 40 list and was previously a World Economic Forum Global Shaper.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
Each episode of Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century, a video podcast series and the official podcast of the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group, focuses on getting into the weeds of economics, finance, and public policy on important current topics through one-on-one interviews. Host Jon Hartley asks guests about their main ideas and contributions to academic research and policy. The podcast is titled after Milton Friedman‘s famous 1962 bestselling book Capitalism and Freedom, which after 60 years, remains prescient from its focus on various topics which are now at the forefront of economic debates, such as monetary policy and inflation, fiscal policy, occupational licensing, education vouchers, income share agreements, the distribution of income, and negative income taxes, among many other topics.
For more information, visit: capitalismandfreedom.substack.com/
