Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), gave a talk on “Bringing America Back Together.” He started by arguing that the degree of polarization in America has reached unprecedented proportions. He suggested that institutions such as Hoover and AEI have an intellectual and moral responsibility to advocate the ideas on which they were formed. He believed that if such ideas were applied, the broad-based economic growth that would follow would take America away from the polarized situation it finds itself in right now. 

A series of devastating accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco, to name a few, have shaken the public's trust in the ethics and business practices of America's large corporations. What are the underlying factors behind this recent wave of scandals? Is deregulation the culprit? If so, do we need more regulation or merely better enforcement of existing regulations? Does the confluence of corporate lobbying and campaign contributions encourage corporate malfeasance? If so, what political reforms are necessary?