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The Iron Triangle of Family Policy

Population aging is proceeding apace across the world, but there is little agreement on what to do about it or even whether it is a bad thing at all. On the upside, older, smaller societies will have a correspondingly smaller climate impact, will be able to invest more per child, and will suffer less congestion…

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What’s the Matter with Chile?

On September 11, 2023, Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that toppled Socialist president Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet, who presided over nearly two decades marked by human rights abuses and radical econom­ic reforms, making the country a laboratory for neoliberal policies…

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The Stagnant Science: Mainstream Economics in America

To state the bias of the reviewer, I do not like the club profiled, with some detachment and flashes of insight and wit, by Angus Deaton in Economics in America, a book organized around economic policy issues and confected from commentaries originally penned over several decades. Deaton, a Scottish immigrant and winner of the Swedish Riks­bank’s prize “in memory of Alfred Nobel”…

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Textile Workers’ Forgotten Warning

When the Trump administration announced its first round of tariffs on China in 2018, few observers believed it would be the start of a new bipartisan consensus on industrial strategy. In each decade that protectionist sentiment rose following the end of the Second World War, calls to shield American industry and jobs were parried away by free trade politicians and appointed officials who…

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Drone Policy in the U.S. and Ukraine: Addressing Foreign Control of a Key Technology

The Russian-Ukrainian War has seen the rise of new tactics involving small commercial drones, including the use of drones as improvised anti-tank weapons, suicide weapons, and reconnaissance tools for artillery units. Ukraine goes through a staggering ten thousand drones a month—at a minimum. The United States has contributed drone technology to Ukraine in many forms…

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Technological Stagnation Is a Choice

Do we live in a world of “ever-increasing change” characterized by “disruptive innovation”? Is “technology moving faster than ever before”? Are these, in fact, “unprecedented times”? Contra the bromides of TED-talkers and Davos men, a growing chorus of contrarian scientists, scholars, and investors hold that the pace of innovation has slowed, not increased…

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How to Be a Policy Entrepreneur in the American Vetocracy

To paraphrase economist Robert Solow, once you start thinking about state capacity, it’s hard to think about anything else. Or, at least, that’s been the case for Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, a deputy CTO during the Obama administration, and the au­thor of Recoding America, a scintillating new book about how government services are actually implemented. Pahlka’s camp of policy wonks (of which I am a member) is broadly concerned with improving state capacity, the ability of the government to accomplish its policy goals. Pahlka is most interested in what happens when policies get implemented…

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It’s Not Just NEPA: Reforming Environmental Permitting

In recent years, pandemic-related supply chain failures, oil shocks, and China’s growing dominance over critical materials has forced policy­makers to reckon with the limits of free market orthodoxy. In 2018, President Trump bucked the Republican party line on trade by impos­ing tariffs on steel and aluminum. The Biden administration has made “Build Back Better” the…

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